Worldly Desires ***
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2005
Thailand
@ Anthology Film Archives

I saw this along with a few other shorts.

Worldly Desires takes the form of a meta–"making of" documentary for an imaginary film whose premise consists, so far as we are given to see, of little more than a line spoken by one of its actors: "Once upon a time a young couple fled into a jungle." This narrative is full of distress—moonlight scrambles through thick vegetation, anxious quests for a legendary tree—but the story of its making is pure Apichatpongian bliss: a breeze in the canopy, the delicate blip of moths against a fluorescent tube, a crew member relaxing on a stump, the sudden parting of a cloud.

The 40-minute piece opens with the nighttime shooting of a ridiculously infectious pop number, twice reprised before the end, which serves to bridge this jungle goodbye to the parental love song of Syndromes: "Love like my mother and father," the chanteuses sing, "will I be as lucky?" Other scraps of dialogue offer earthy ballast ("I forgot to bring the mosquito repellent"; "I don't like foreigners except for Keanu") or else send it all soaring to the ether ("Is the location very deep?" "As deep as you like" Indeed.).

See also: IMDb | Nathan Lee profile