WATCHING A MOVIE can sometimes feel like swimming backstroke. You spend minutes suspended between boredom and curiosity—Why won’t the sky move?—until you stop thinking and become something else, a rhythm. It’s curious how the best films can make us feel out of breath, out of shape. You can’t go looking for this particular feeling, a kind of soreness. You know it only when you walk out of the theater; your perceptions feel like they’ve been taken apart, and the world rings like a migraine.
Being out of shape, my grandmother tells me, is a young person’s feeling. It stops when you no longer expect yourself to be in shape. This, coming from an eighty-five-year-old woman who regularly trounces the sixty-year-olds at her local Ping-Pong championship is, frankly, a little rich. But I repeat her words to myself sometimes, after I’ve left a treadmill or a person, and the ache won’t go away. Perhaps time does sculpt our relation to tenderness, which, for such a fleeting, dull feeling, tells us so much about our expectations. Whether in the tear and repair of muscle fibers, or an affair of the heart, an ache is proof that our attachments are ambivalent, that we believe in the enduring shape of things, but also in their ability to change.
APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL’S begins with a shot of a man who we learn later is in a desperate kind of love. He is
