Mangosteen (Tulapop Saenjaroen, 2023) (Patreon)

Although I have consistently found the work of Tulapop Saenjaroen interesting, I have yet to figure out quite what to do with it. The first film of his I saw, Room With a Coconut View, was the one I appreciated most since, despite its unusual aesthetics -- digital simulation, a robotic narrator, an overall prefabricated sheen -- its aims were fairly straightforward. The film was about a beach town in Thailand, Bangsaen, and how it had been formed into a tourist destination by selling a particular brand of Thai exoticism. 

Mangosteen is another matter. Tulapop makes some fundamental decisions that I cannot quite understand, in particular his choice to shoot in muddy Hi-8 video. Granted, this gives Mangosteen the dull, industrial look of a training video, which makes some sense in context. The action, such as it is, takes place in a rural processing plant where mangosteen fruits are pressed for bottled juice. The story is about a young man called Earth who is returning from Bangkok to work at the plant with his sister, Ink. But that's about as concrete as Mangosteen ever gets.

There is a narrator who explains that Earth is diverging from Ink's reality, writing himself into another narrative. In Earth's through-line, he wants to pull Ink's head off, assuring her that she will not die. But then, by the end of Ink's "story," she is always wearing a scarf, and this seems like a pretty clear allusion to "The Girl With the Green Ribbon," a folktale about a lover with a severed head.

As the narrator went on about the enfolding of different stories within each other, and the permeable fabric of reality, I couldn't help but think of Apichatpong, especially Mysterious Object at Noon. The thing is, Apichatpong shows rather than tells. The interlacing of adjacent realities is taken as axiomatic in his work, whereas Tulapop is making it his primary theme. Naturally, Borges is mentioned. The one thing that did strike me as original, if a bit offputting, about Mangosteen was its concern with viscosity. The slimy pulp of the crushed mangosteen, and the fruit's somewhat vaginal appearance, is a refrain, and maybe suggests where Tulapop's main interests lie. After all, the other work of his I've seen is his 2021 film about liquid mutability, called Squish!