Critics reviews

Not strictly a summer film, but a hymn to the joys of sweat, sex and reverie in a lush forest setting... Steamy in every sense, but also intensely strange and beautiful.

Between the obvious sexual acts, shots of hands and touch litter the second half with a less erotic yet equally profound meaning – Orn shown toying with her lover's belly button; Roong creating a sticky rice cluster to hand-feed to Min. These small gestures, moments of minute but tender tactility, convey how the characters' previous stresses are dissolved through simple touch. In the dialogue-sparse script, touch becomes the way in which desire, care, and bliss are expressed.

The cinematic pleasures here are not found in the story or the structure or even the performances, but in the concept and the attitude. The credit reads not "directed by" but "conceived by Apichatpong Weerasethakul". This is obviously very far from achieving "voidness". But it's manifestly a step in the right direction.

Following three characters from their daily routines in a midsize Thai city and then out to a romantic jungle picnic, the film builds its sense of drama and of the interrelations of the characters quietly and by slow accretion, rather than through incident or climax. The events of the story are deceptively simple, and the film relays each significant detail in the most offhand and underplayed manner possible.

This is some profoundly tactile, instinctively sensual moviemaking, never sniggery or doggedly fixated about sex... Peeling skin and aching hearts aside, what I retain of Blissfully Yours (the ecstasy of that title!) is those moments in which the actors shimmer with the joy of just having a body. It takes a sterner viewer than I not to share that pleasure.

Though little may happen in conventional narrative terms, at the level of sensual affect, the impact is all but overwhelming with the viewer drawn steadily and inexorably into the film's swirling emotional eddies and the characters' desperate attempts to find happiness in the interstices of everyday life and its alienating discontents.

This languorously paced and nearly plotless 2002 story, about a Burmese man living in Thailand suffering from a painful skin ailment and his young Thai lover, is a moving evocation of longing unfulfilled... The idyll practically unfolds in real time, and the way the characters periodically disconnect from each other—even while making love—creates an unusual atmosphere of rapture and alienation that's given a political edge by the man's illegal status.

Thai filmmaking continues its renaissance with this moody, offbeat drama... Atmosphere reigns supreme, and it's brilliantly evoked.

This uncompromising film can feel shapeless until you discover the simplicity of its form, obscure until you realize that a large part of its meaning is, quite literally, clear as day... The first hour is angular, urban, socio-political, gently oblique; the second is liquid, primal, sensual, strange. The movement from city to country, geometry to flux, politics to sex, is a kind of happy entropy. "Blissfully Yours" doesn't resolve a story, it deliquesces into states of feeling.

As the filmmaker freely indulges in the forest's voluptuousness and his own feel for composition, his characters -- freed from work, the city and everyday life -- shed their clothes and tentatively bump against one another with both pleasure and frustration. In this secret place, where even the smallest gesture becomes an epic of emotion, these three people finally find a moment of quiet by letting the earth swallow them whole.

What all this apparent "nothing"ness sets in motion is a particularly Thai antimony between science and superstition... that resonates throughout the entire film, not to mention most of Joe's work. And viewers who exhaust themselves waiting for something big to take place will probably miss the myriad little things that keep happening all the time, since-in Blissfully Yours, as in Mysterious Object-what one is meant to watch isn't so much the story itself, as the manner in which it unfolds.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's formally audacious, headily sensual and, yes, genuinely blissful movie is my favourite feature of the last two years. It might turn out to be yours, too.