This essay is featured in Queer East’s Second Thoughts: Issue 0
For Trương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam (2024), nature is not the background against which humans exercise their claims to violence and desire. It is the web of existence that links all that is human and nonhuman—be it animal, plant or mineral. An intimate system of beings, whose roots meet at the bottom of the world. Việt and Nam is part of the pastoral wave that emerged in queer East and Southeast Asian cinema at the turn of the century. A subversive approach, considering pastoral storytelling is traditionally associated with heteronormative and colonialist visions. From John Ford’s westerns to the colourful MGM musicals of Donen and Minelli, nature on film is often a nationalist conception, one guarded by male heroes and preserved by happy families. From tranquil canyons to Technicolor creeks, these narratives present the ‘natural’ as pure, uncomplicated, and invariably uniform. But in the pastoral expressions of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004) and Anucha Boonyawatana’s Malila (2017), queerness becomes the vital figure of subjectivity. Towards the forgiving sea of Journey to the Shore (2020) and the forest of Going South (2012), the borders of self and nature melt into an ever-flowing stream. Because to be queer is to be liminal; both singular and communal, contemporary and historical, of art and nature.
Though gay protagonists on screen often belong to an urban setting—against and through which their identity is expressed—these films relocate their arc in a provincial environment. Here, queerness circumvents its stigma in ways that are inherently tied to nature, in the small and intimate gestures of rural life: like Shun picking turnips from his garden in His (2020), or Shane gathering jasmine flowers for his lover’s Bai Sri offerings in Malila. The land nourishes the lovers’ bond and is nourished back by their care and effort. Day by day, in small towns and villages, queer life becomes possible through this entanglement.
In these films, nature is neither an idyllic fantasy nor an exotic fetish. Park Kun-young’s A Distant Place (2020) opens with the death of an old sheep placed in its freshly-dug grave and gazed upon in meditation. ‘Our lungs must be jet-black,’ says the young miner in Việt and Nam, while, in another instant, a character narrates memories of bulbous frogs piled on bodies of dead soldiers in the jungle. The durian farm of The Paradise of Thorns (2024) rots and claims the life of its lovers. Ecological and post-colonial grief permeates these images.
These are stories that morph throughout their duration, slipping in and out of genre. Untethered from a straight timeline, they don’t have to abide by the arcs of their heteronormative counterparts. Popular cinema—led by protagonists self-assured in their purpose—has a clear beginning, middle and end. Queer storytelling usurps this kind of teleological thinking. Refractive and disorienting, it coils around itself, no longer aiming towards a definitive conclusion. In this liminal zone between dream and landscape, time comes undone. Characters are left to navigate queerness at a slower pace and with a gentle sadness; a vulnerability only the great expanse of nature could afford them. Incorporated like this, in the shifting constellations of natural life, their cinematic existence is one of ceaseless transformation.
In its final scene, Tropical Malady observes an ontological metamorphosis. Its two protagonists, Tong and Keng, whom we have witnessed meet, fall in love, and part, are now standing opposite each other. Only this time, one has assumed the form of a tiger, and the other the body of its hunter. Keng trembles; the tiger foretells their union: ‘Once I've devoured your soul, we are neither animal nor human. Stop breathing.’ The two bodies surrender, and as much as their end is violent, it is also the climax of their desire. ‘I give you my spirit, my flesh and my memories. Every drop of my blood sings our song.’ They come together and in their coupling it is impossible to articulate what is self and other, animal and human, mythology and truth.
Once everything is lost in the silence of the cave and the dark of the forest, all that is left is two lovers and the intimacy that binds them. Their bodies are ephemeral, vulnerable to the desire and violence they both carry. But the ephemeral does not expire—it merely transforms. This realisation is to be found in Malila’s closing meditation. After his partner passes away, Shane, the film’s protagonist, becomes a monk. As he observes a forest meditation near a graveyard, he stumbles upon a decomposing body. ‘The corpse is filthy and full of worms,’ he chants. What he acknowledges in his loss is a continuation; it is as if he is encountering his lover in a new form. In this instant, there is no rupture between life and death, only a continuous stream, flowing in both directions. The lovers’ intimacy has surpassed the constraints of human life and now survives in the wider web of nature, within which it has woven itself. Queer catharsis is delivered through a pastoral mode of storytelling. The monk bows down and cradles the stranger, now black with sun and decay. They hold one another and the warm earth rots and hums under their bodies, an ode to the absolute transience of all that was, is, and will be.