Headshot (2011)

Headshot (Pen-ek Ratanaruang, 2011)

Thai Title: Fon Tok Kuen Fah

Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Headshot is a shape-shifter of a film. It opens like a traditional crime thriller. Draped in the ominous darkness of an obscure office kept awake by business best accomplished at night, a man prepares the files of an assassin’s next victim. A scar on the man’s weathered neck suggests a lifetime of violence. Tul, the assassin, distinguished by an assured posture made even more intimidating by his long hair deliberately worn unkempt, receives the target the next day. He brings the package to his home, a disorganized hovel with various sketches of faces posted on its walls, and prepares his next kill. He first reveals his dispassionate mug from the reflection of the mirror of his bathroom, where he ceremoniously cuts his hair.

The following sequence displays the assassin at work. Disguised as a monk making rounds for alms, Tul is welcomed to the mansion of his target. The target approaches him to give his food offering. He repays the generosity with several shots from his gun, ingeniously hidden in his food bowl and begins to escape. He ultimately gets shot in the head...

(Continue reading in Cinemas of Asia.)

The Coffin (2008)

The Coffin (Ekechai Uekrongtham, 2008)

Ekechai Uekrongtham's The Coffin starts with a reporter narrating from inside a coffin. The camera zooms out from the enclosed space where the reporter is lying to reveal an impressive visual: thousands of coffins, all occupied by men and women, surround a statue of Buddha. An overwhelming buzz of prayers accompanies the visual, adding an otherworldly flavor to the sequence. The reporter narrates that in Thailand, thousands of men and women would flock to Buddhist temples to take part in a bizarre ritual where they would lie inside coffins to get rid of bad luck and cleanse themselves of problems and ailments. The strange ritual, as it turns out, has gained momentous popularity in these hard times. The basic rationale of the ritual is to fool fate or bad spirits into thinking that the participant has died; thus, giving him a clean slate, without all the accumulated bad karma, in his new life.

Uekrongtham mines into this rationale for his film's central conflict. His two main characters undergo the ritual to rid themselves of their respective misfortunes: Chris (Ananda Everingham) wishes that her Japanese girlfriend (Aki Shibuya) wakes up from her coma; Su (Karen Mok), who takes refuge in Bangkok a few days before her wedding to her beloved boyfriend (Andrew Lin), wishes that her lungs are cleared of cancer. True to the testimonials of those who went through the ritual, their prayers are answered. Chris' girlfriend wakes up from her coma while Su is completely healed of her cancer. Unfortunately, their good fortune does not come without a hefty price tag. Su's fiance dies of a car accident while Chris and her boyfriend are continuously haunted by the ghost of a mysterious woman. Fate cannot be fooled. The ritual only disrupts it, displacing the bad karma of the ritual's participants to the people they love.

The Coffin purports to be a horror film. Thus, littered throughout the film are sequences that are designed to scare. Some work, as when Chris is trapped inside the coffin and within the cramped and dark space that he is occupying, appears the token spectre. Most don't, as when Su is haunted by her dead fiance from the mirrors of the several closets. The Coffin musters tired horror tropes and techniques as ancient as Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998) to satisfy the necessitated commercial aspirations of the film, making the effort a tad forced, if not totally inconsequential. For sure, Uekrongtham garners a few creepy moments here and there, but the overall effort is quite insignificant and redundant, especially considering that the faddish genre is currently in an extended stay in the cineplexes, sustained only by the few gems (like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's subversive Retribution (2006)) that appear every now and then.

Uekrongtham has mastered visualizing human emotions, considering the fact that his previous films Beautiful Boxer (2003), about a transexual boy forced by fate and circumstance into a manly sport and quite humorously, is good at it, and Pleasure Factory (2007), about the several denizens of the hidden red light district of Singapore, are all very human stories. You can somewhat observe his ease and comfort in emphasizing loss and guilt in The Coffin. There are several sublime moments that tend to release you from the unnecessary whittled tension that the several inserted horror sequences provide, as when Su wakes up to discover her fiance beside her, then discovering that her fiance has in fact died, and looks upon her fiance's ghost with an expression of discomforted pity and guilt. The film's denouement, where Chris reveals the mystery of the girl haunting him, is emotionally engaging, filmed with refreshing simplicity and restraint by Uekrongtham with just Chris and the ghost having an intimate conversation over a field of grass that was once the setting of a nightmare.

Had The Coffin been made as intended by Uekrongtham, an examination on death and loss, instead of the confused shapeshifter that it is now, it could have been something more memorable. Unfortunately, that's a prospect that we might never know. As it is, it is merely passable and harmless entertainment. The Coffin is something you momentarily enjoy before burying it the next day to be forgotten for the rest of your life.

Alone (2007)

Alone (Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2007)
Thai Title: Faet

With the strength of their first feature film Shutter (2004), directors Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom were able to momentarily deviate the attention of Asian horror film fans from Japan or Korea to Thailand, whose reinvigorated film industry remains to be one of the most promising. Shutter is just that kind of film, similar to Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998) or Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo (2001), that had all the elements traditional to Asian horror cinema (like the effective sound design, the long-haired ghosts with gait or posture problems, the subtle attack on contemporary philosophies, among others) and was able to mesh them all effectively not only for cheap and quick shocks but for prolonged disturbances. The twist in the end of Shutter is indeed clever, but unlike M. Night Shyamalan's famous twists in almost all of his films, the film never relied on it and existed independently of the devious machination.

Alone, Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom's follow-up to Shutter does not have the latter's pitch-perfect supernatural tone from beginning to end. Instead, the directing duo opts to take risks by making their audience believe they're in for a similarly-veined ghost story, when in fact, the film mines something more disturbing than vengeful spirits and murderous ghouls. Alone has for its center that unmistakable and supposedly indestructible bond between sisters, complicated further by the fact that these sisters have been conjoined since birth. Ploy, One of the sisters dies when they are separated and Pim (Masha Wattanapanich), the living twin, now peacefully living in South Korea with Vee (Vittaya Wasukraipaisan), her dedicated boyfriend, since their separation, has to deal with such guilt when she is forced to return to Thailand upon learning of her mother's dire medical condition.

Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom do not forgo the typical scares that pervade Asian horror. As the film progresses, Pim gets persisting visitations from her dead sister who with her unkempt long hair, bleeding eye sockets, and decomposing skin, seem to be a mere repeat of every other Asian horror wraith. However, the film attempts to lace the tiring trope with creativity and ingenuity. Thus, the ghost haunts from commonly used places like the empty spaces of Pim's bed, the mirror, curtains, to more ingeniously conceived places like from the slowly spinning blades of Pim's room's ceiling fan, where the immobile mangled corpse is hanging.

Alone does not match the persisting eeriness of Shutter, but the film, at the very least, manages to ease my horror-craving eyes. The film makes that significant risk to branch out from just being a ghost story in the typical post-Ringu vein, and despite being a bit far-fetched (even more so than ghouls revealing themselves in developed photographs), it actually works. It is what essentially differentiates the film from Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom's Shutter. The film, while it initially makes us believe that it relies on the supernatural, mutates, during its final ten minutes into a completely different film: mellow torture-porn (as compared to the optic nerve-cutting, fingernail-removing, and limb-slicing antics of Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005)) that is grounded on rather simplistic psychology, of violent sibling rivalries and unrequited love. Interesting enough to give the supposedly dying sub-genre a reviving nudge, I thought.

The Love of Siam (2007)

The Love of Siam (Chukiat Sakveerakul, 2007)
Thai Title: Rak haeng Siam

To label Chukiat Sakveerakul's The Love of Siam as simply a gay teen romance is to misjudge its power and intention. Within the two and a half hour running time (the director's cut is reportedly four hours long) of the film, Sakveerakul essays not only the two young leads' reunion and inevitable attraction but also a family's slow and painful road to accepting a long-delayed reality. I would like to think that The Love of Siam, above everything else, seeks to reaffirm the life-affirming values of loving and being loved without sacrificing the portrayal of the very palpable pain that usually accompanies the emotion.

The twenty-minute prologue tracks the histories of young Mew (Arthit Niyomkul) and Tong (Jirayu La-ongmanee), who are both schoolmates and neighbors. They form a very close friendship which was abruptly ended when Tong's family had to move out when Tang (Laila Boonyasuk), Tong's elder sister, went missing during a trip in Chiang Mai, causing the family tremendous and irreparable sorrow. Years later, Mew (Witwisit Hirunwongkul), lead singer and composer for an up and coming boy band, again crosses path with Tong (Mario Maurer), who is struggling at home with his domineering mother (Sinjai Plengpanich) and alcoholic father (Songsit Rungnopakunsri). The two reconnect and inevitably fall for each other, disrupting whatever peace they have grown accustomed to.

To make matters more complicated, Mew's Chinese neighbor Ying (Kanya Rattanapetch) is hopelessly in love with Mew, not knowing of his homosexual tendencies. On the other hand, Tong is currently dating Donut (Aticha Pongsilpipat), presumably not knowing of his own homosexual tendencies too. Tong's family, more specifically the father who's been spending days and nights drinking, is still suffering from the loss of Tang. June (also played by Boonyasuk), Mew's band manager who looks a lot like Tang, is then recruited to pose as the long lost daughter, momentarily easing the father of his staggered pains.

The Siam in the title refers to Siam Square, a shopping district in Bangkok where most teens hang out to shop, dine, meet, and have fun. Siam Square, in the eyes of the Bangkok youth, has become both the place for welcomes and farewells, of declarations of love and hurtful break-ups, of chance encounters and scheduled meetings. In the film, the popular venue is not only the setting for Mew and Tong's reunion and the numerous other events in the story but it also represents the unpredictability of the many facets of love which the film so intricately paints. While Siam Square or any other shopping mecca are ordinarily thought of as accessories to the bastardization of love and romance because it commonly equates blatant commercialism with the love's outward depictions like dating, gift-giving, and hanging out, The Love of Siam uses that very element to depict love's many wanderings and permutations. Underneath the glow of the traditionally amiable romance, The Love of Siam strives to say something more about the act of loving, whether romantically or familial: that it is more a nebulous network-like journey to maintain hope than a straight path to the assumed happy ending.

In fact, The Love of Siam ends without any of its characters fulfilling the traditional conclusions of a love story. There are no happily-ever-afters or expected closures. Instead, the film ends with a mere spark of hope. That hope that closes the film actually opens up million of possibilities for its characters, as numerous as the countless fortuitous encounters in Siam Square that initiate relationships between strangers or abruptly conclude long-standing affairs all within the fateful movement of time. Sakveerakul drafts a bittersweet ode to the complexities of loving, which commercial cinema has tended to avoid throughout the years. What he exclaims in The Love of Siam is that daringly traversing outside the common simplicities of love is far more gratifying than safely assuming formula.

Through the interconnected lives of two boys who are on the verge of self-awareness amidst their own individual conflicts and the people surrounding them, Sakveerakul notes that love survives notwithstanding the dilemmas that pervade the world. As Ying translates from a Chinese song, "as long as there is love, there is hope." Corny as it sounds, the Bangkok of The Love of Siam thrives on that noble aspiration, without knowing that it does so.

Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)

Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000)
Thai Title: Dokfa nai meuman

In Syndromes and a Century (2006), Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul inserts a scene of a tube sucking the mist that has covered the hospital which is so abrupt and compelling that it instantly reorients your senses and prepares you for what's to come, an epilogue that transports the film entirely from the hospital and its hushed affairs to an outdoor park of a possible future time where the populace are doing aerobics and a group of Buddhist monks are playing with a toy UFO in what feels like an atmosphere of tranquil celebration. It is abrupt in a way that the film's normally measured and sedative pace and its calming and earthy aesthetics composed of captivating greens and sunlit exteriors and interiors are suddenly replaced with something distinctly mechanical and perspectively jarring with its cold, blue and alien-looking visuals and the exhausting although gripping sound that accompanies it.

Weerasethakul's debut feature Mysterious Object at Noon has a similar sequence, although not as visually and aurally apparent. An elegant string of dolly shots of empty spaces accompanies the story of a school kid about a Witch Tiger before completely concluding the longer half of the film. "At noon," the subtitle declares as it opens once again to scenes of school children playing soccer or swimming at a nearby waterhole or playing with chickens and dogs. The sequence of dolly shots has the same reorienting effect as the metal pipe scene in Syndromes and a Century. The tendency of Mysterious Object at Noon is to completely humanize the storytelling process by putting human faces and experiences behind the evolution of a tale but suddenly at that instance, Weerasethakul withdraws as if to enjoy a restful breath from his gargantuan experiment, and allows his camera to just mechanically capture images of blank and normally insignificant space, through the predictably horizontal movement of the dolly before stopping at a view from the window, sunlit and rejuvinating. That is perhaps the most amazing part of Weerasethakul's mesmerizing debut, the part wherein he branches off from his cinematic experiment to just watch and become passive observer to the lives he has documented. It reinforces the punctuated malleability of his cinema as it transforms, transports and disappears without abandoning the themes and feelings it has consciously invested in.

The film starts with the camera resting inside a vendor truck, capturing the highways, the alleyways and the buildings being passed by as a radio melodrama plays in the background. The experiment officially begins when a teary-eyed interviewee, a fish sauce vendor, tells her heartbreaking story about how she was sold by her parents to her uncle. The interviewer interrupts her and asks her to tell another story whether real or not, and the story she initiates concerns a crippled boy and his teacher named Dogfahr. At once, Weerasethakul blurs fact from fiction as he favors imagined stories to those that are based from real life experiences. Moreover, he cuts to a dramatized version of the fictional tale, often incorporating real footages to forward the more traditionally directed narrative, as a helpful accessory to his narrative experiment, supposedly to accommodate his viewers with a visual and surreptitiously mystical representation of his subjects' manufactured tales. In another of Weerasethakul's curious yet mysteriously compelling decisions, he abandons this dramatization by including in the film a portion wherein these characters convert back into their real selves, paid actors who are having their lunch break. It's a hilarious turn, one that infinitely keeps the film tiptoeing from fiction to documentary, documentary to fiction, and so on.

The central story of the crippled kid and Dogfahr mutates every time it is continued by another interviewee and by film's end, the tale of the boy and his teacher becomes so outrageously ridiculous that it becomes irrelevant. Instead, what stays with you is an intriguing glimpse at a national state of mind, a communal psychology, from what has been minutely gleaned from their connected contributions to the fiction-making. Weerasethakul selects his subjects from a wide demographic from repentant sauce vendors, drunken grandmothers, traveling performers, mute and deaf children and rowdy school kids, all of which contribute little yet gleaming aspects of their lives and ways of living as they steer the narrative to surprising directions ranging from a ball turning into a lonely alien child (from a group of young men), a romantic conquest filled with pangs of jealousy and envy (as performed by the traveling performers), a hard tale of social and economic trials (from the mute and deaf ladies), to a juvenile conclusion that involves revenge, swords, and killer tigers (from the rowdy school kids).

Aside from the vast demographic of his subjects, Weerasethakul keeps the film in a continuous state of transit. The invented story itself takes place in both rural and urban Thailand and Weerasethakul seems obliged to insert footages of transit, from the introductory travelogue in urban Thailand to the scenes that happen within a passenger train. This is a subconscious concern that is dictated by the communal mind scape of a nation that is infatuated with the concept of progress, most commonly represented by migration from the rural areas to the urbanized city of Bangkok. It is both unsurprising yet very much revealing how this conceptual need to move makes itself apparent in the fiction created by the film's subjects since it has been a consistent preoccupation, at least by the masses of the countryside, to equate progress with urbanity. Such is a preoccupation shared by Thailand with most of its Southeast Asian neighbors which is perhaps a by-product of its indelible attraction with Western ideals and so-called virtues.

Weerasethakul has crafted what arguably is the most daring first film of any recent director. In a national cinema that has long survived churning out populist melodramas, horror pictures, trite comedic and action films, and its many derivatives, Weerasethakul defiantly branches out with a film that is drastically confident and unique in form, style, and substance. Draped as a low budget documentary, shot on 16mm in black and white, before morphing into a completely different creature, a fascinating shapeshifter of a film that peeks into a population's historically-induced psychological and possible spiritual landscape through one of humanity's most inherent qualities, the ability to make and tell a story.

Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
Thai Title: Sang sattawat

In Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), separating the pastoral beauty of a Russian estate and the steely cold interiors of a spacecraft is a lengthy sequence of Kris Kelvin traveling in a car through the highways of an unknown metropolis. The sequence feels obsolete nowadays, Tokyo during the time the film was shot can no longer hold that futuristic illusion Tarkovsky was aiming for.

Syndromes and a Century, part of the New Crowned Hope which celebrates Mozart's 250th Birth Anniversary by commissioning films (including Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Paz Encina's contemplative Paraguayan Hammock (2006)), I believe is Apichatpong Weerasethakul science fiction film, or at least a film wherein he touches on a vision of the future. It's not improbable, Weerasethakul is touching on the discourse between past and present (why limit the discourse between the two junctures of time, when it can be expanded to concern the future).

Nearing the film's end, we get a sequence similar both in use (transition of time) and practicality (the lack of budget or aesthetic considerations in envisioning a Utopian future) wherein hospital machinery and the surroundings are slowly being covered with mist; Weerasethakul's camera lingers and observes in painstaking clarity the seconds and minutes before settling with a shot of a metallic tube sucking the smoke from the room. That difficult puzzle piece segues to an outdoor sequence where people are doing calisthenics in the rhythm of a joyous tune, two Buddhist monks are playing with a remote control-powered UFO and everything is in a state of euphoria. Is this Weerasethakul's vision of the future, wherein hospitals have become obsolete (and diseases too) and the world takes the form of a public park (the same way Tokyo in the 70's is Tarkovsky's vision of the future in Solaris)?

At first glance, Syndromes and a Century feels like it lacks any shape. Absent the two-fold structure (or three-fold if you count the final sequence as one), it's a series of lovely images, conversations and human gestures tied within the bounds of the subject time and space Weerasethakul drafts. Several elements overlap in these shapeless structures of time and space such as the opening job interview between a male doctor discharged from a military base and a female doctor with the latter's insistent lover on standby, or the elderly monk and his offers of healing roots, or the dental appointment between the dentist and a younger monk, or the awkward courtship ritual between the lover and the lady doctor, or the woman who walks with a limp.

The identity feels like the skeleton key to the unsolvable lock of Weerasethakul's logic; but then we are charged with differences that deepens this beautiful puzzle to the point of keeping its viewers in a perpetual motion of admiring its mysteries from a distance. When the admirer confronts the female doctor and asks her to marry him, we are entreated to a tale about the orchid specialist she met and presumably fell in love with, until Weerasethakul abruptly ends the tale to give way to the dentist's blossoming friendship with the young monk, which mysteriously ends with a slight sense of rejection (the dentist follows the monk to his clinic but finds it empty).

These events doesn't seem to have any meaning when juxtaposed with the events of the second half of the film; the new doctor's discovery of the hospital's basement where the soldiers and their family are treated, and also provides secluded room for afternoons of idle chatter and cups of brandy from a half-filled bottle mischievously hidden in a polyester leg. The same doctor's conversation with his girlfriend who asks him to relocate to a seaside industrial site where she will be working in the future, before torridly kissing him and causing him an embarrassing erection (which I presume is the cause of this film's being banned in Thailand), ends that portion, again with a subtle feeling of rejection.

There are also little details that punctuate or enunciate the film's thematic elegance --- the way a group of nurses leaves one who has to tie her shoelaces is quaintly relates to a similar group of male hospital employees who also leaves a member forced to tie his shoelaces; or in that brandy-drinking session wherein Weerasethakul's camera floats to show the faces of the doctors and then settles with an awkward framing where one of the doctors curiously looks straight into the camera; or the casual shots of the perpetuated (by statues and photographs) personalities of the past.

Syndromes and a Century is a film that refuses to be caught or boxed in conventional terms. Despite that, the film conveys so much that it's never difficult to sit through it and taking whatever the film offers you. Even if viewed in a state of daydreaming stupor, you'll still be able to grasp the cleverly mysterious romantic beats of Weerasethakul's film.

Ploy (2007)

Ploy (Pen-ek Ratanaruang, 2007)

Pen-ek Ratanaruang's latest, Ploy, is quite a beautiful film. It's a marital thriller mostly set in a Phuket hotel where restaurant owner Wit (Pornwut Sarasin) adopts nineteen year old Ploy (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk) for a few hours. Ploy's invasion of the married couple's hotel room arouses feelings of suspicion and jealousy for Wit's wife Dang (Lalita Panyopas).

The film's mood is sleepy, wherein the characters are indefinitely in a state of being half-awake and half-asleep (there's a mighty big difference, I believe). The couple arrives in Phuket from a twenty hour flight. They're in that blurred zone of jet lags and lazy early mornings, forcing Wit to spend a moment in the hotel bar where he catches up with sleep-deprived Ploy, waiting for her Swedish mother while listening to quirky Thai reggae. They prolong that atmosphere of sleeplessness with idle chat and cups of coffee, before going up to their room; casually being greeted by a random hotel maid (Phorntip Papanai), who becomes the object of an erotic dream along with the bartender (Ananda Everingham).

Ratanaruang deftly pursues this atmosphere of half-consciousness wherein dreams have the palpable quality of reality, and reality has the surreal mood of dreams. There's a very thin filament that would separate sleep and consciousness; further marred by the gravity of emotions imputed to Ploy's invasion of that marital harmony. The difference between half-awake and half-asleep divides the film into two parts: pre and post marital quarrel (wherein Dang leaves the hotel and becomes victim to a crime). Ratanaruang gets the details right: the way light is an annoyance when one is half-awake, and the way light urges one to consciousness in a phase of half-asleep.

Ratanaruang plays the differences with utmost details and keeps the daydream fantasy as hypnotizing --- the little portion of uncovered window that allows the morning light to invade the sleep-deprived wife, the vodka-drowned coffee that Dang drinks in the hotel lobby, the haziness and laziness that accompanies the lack of mental, physical, moral and emotional alertness of the three characters. That way, he infects his audience with the same contemplative mood (well enough to make impatient viewers sleep), wherein lapses in logic and quick jumps to conclusions (which are the obvious criticisms to this slow yet perceptive Ratanaruang thriller) should be appropriate in ways that would be impossible in total consciousness.

It's gorgeously photographed (by Chankit Chamnivikaipong, Ratanaruang's cinematographer in his earlier works like Fun Bar Karaoke (1997), 6ixtynin9 (1999), and Mon-rak Transistor (2001); Ratanaruang previously worked with Christopher Doyle in Last Life in the Universe (2003), and Invisible Waves (2006)). It's not only gorgeous, but very intelligent. Ratanaruang has a gift for visual humor --- the way he would start a shot with the naked calves of Wit and Ploy (using such cliche to give the presumption of consummated infidelity) only to reveal that they are fully dressed; or the way we would see a man (Thaksakorn Pradapphongsa) observing Dang while out of focus, before we become aware that the man turns out to be a bigger part of the story than he was introduced to be.

Ploy is a film that is engineered with exhilarating precision. Its dreamy feel and rhythm which delightfully hopscotches from dream to life to nightmare and back (there's a lovely musical interlude that concludes the hotel-bound hallucination), keeps the relaxed pace bearable, if not totally engrossing. Ratanaruang is gearing up to become one of the most interesting filmmakers from the region.

The Overture (2004)

The Overture (Ittisoontorn Vichailak, 2004)
Thai Title: Hom rong

Thai filmmaker Ittisoontorn Vichailak's The Overture is inspired by the life of 18th century ranad-ek virtuoso player Luang Pradit. The events and characters presented in the film are entirely fictitious, giving Vichailak much liberality in creating a story so pleasant and admirable that I sometimes wonder why the film was even made at all. There's not a single ounce of authentic conflict or a granule of anything sincerely exciting that I wished for the impossible: that the main character start discovering the pleasures of opium and steer this overblown Thai film into its proper niche consisting of recent treacles Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004) and Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005).

The Overture is basically the life story of fictional Sorn (Anuchit Sapanpong), a naturally gifted musician who discovered his affinity with the traditional Thai musical instrument ranad-ek when a butterfly led him to the instrument. From then on, Sorn just keeps on improving and improving until he finally meets his match with the nearly invincible Bangkok-famous ranad-ek player Kun In (Narongrit Tosa-nga), who literally conjures mighty winds and strong rain when he plays the traditional instrument. Sorn is discovered by a local monarch and is recruited to the royal band, finally testing his playing prowess against Kun In, the local monarch's rival's champion player. Sorn's story as a young ranad-ek player is interweaved with the experiences of an older Sorn (Adul Dulyarat) with the Cultural Revolution of Thailand. Just before the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, the Thai government released an order forbidding the playing of any traditional music insisting that such is obsolete and is not in tune with the government policy of "civilizing" Thailand.

It's all very uninterestingly told. No narrative surprises, it's as if Vichailak was conjuring scenarios out of nowhere, the determinant of the scene's being screen-worthy is if it can compare to the cheesiness of the worst family fare Hollywood can come up with. The writing doesn't add anything to the whimsical quality of the plot. Most of the characters merely serve as instruments to further the emotional whoring Vichailak seems to be interested in: we have the trustful and intellectually sub par friend (both in the young and old Sorn's story lines), there's the indefatigable teacher, the stern yet ultimately humanist opponents (Kun In in the young Sorn's storyline, the military officer in the old Sorn's storyline).

Perhaps the only saving grace for the film (well, aside from the beautiful music which should be a requirement for any music-related film) is the gorgeous cinematography. The film is beautifully photographed, perhaps too beautifully photographed. There are certain scenes wherein the characters are so luminously shot that it no longer looks like a feature film, but probably a commercial for a shampoo or a beauty product. While the film is always easy on the eye, it adds to the level of implausibility for the film, which probably adds to the reasons why i disliked the film so much.

In the end, I must insist that despite all its faults, there is still a way to enjoy the film. If one doesn't take the film seriously, forget the fact that Vichailak actually made this as a historical drama, and regard this as a Shaolin Soccer-clone (only this time, wooden xylophones are the subject of deathly battles), it can actually be quite enjoyable.

Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters (1997)

Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters (Nonzee Nimibutr, 1997)
Thai Title: 2499 antapan krong muang

Nonzee Nimibutr's debut feature film Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters is probably the influential Thai director's best film. Nimibutr's usual faults, his haphazard style of storytelling, his overly emphasized sense of cultural mood and atmosphere, his incomprehensible editing style, are at an all-time low here. The film, while good, is not exactly a brilliant piece of filmmaking. It lacks subtlety, but it does effectively evoke the chaotic discord of 50's Bangkok where social and political unrest reflects in the city's youth's lack of direction.

Dang Bireley (Jesdaporn Pholdee) killed his first man when he was thirteen, while trying to defend his mother, a street prostitute. Growing up, he mixed with the wrong crowd and inevitably formed a gang with his friends, Lam (Noppachai Muttaweevong), mercurial Pu Bottlebomb (Supakorn Kitsuwon) and his trusty lapdog Dum. Dang's best pal is Piak (Attaporn Teemakorn), the son of a Buddhist monk. He tries his best to keep Piak from joining his gang, even to the point of lending him money for his schooling, but after Piak middled in a gang war between Pu and his college friends, he is expelled from college, and breaks up Dang's friendship with Pu, causing a lifelong rift between the two.

Dang Bireley is an actual gangster who lived in Bangkok in the 50's. The film is told from the point of view of an middle-aged Piak who narrates the tale while reminiscing his youthful days. Dang Bireley's idol is James Dean and his life basically mirrors that of the Hollywood bad boy. Dean died in a car accident, and Dang dies the same way, of course, after figuring himself in a couple of adventures, which is the bulk of Nimibutr's film. Nimibutr recreates 50's Bangkok with unassuming ease, using costumes, settings, props and music that effectively capture the decade.

The film is beautifully photographed, further emphasizing the colorfully exciting era. Nimibutr doesn't plunge the film within Thailand's political landscape and centers mainly on the lives of the young gangsters. Whatever notion of social unrest is told from Piak's remorseful narration, and from there, we get a sense of what's really happening in the grander scale. Nimibutr's intimate portrait of the Thai youth is actually quite engaging. Although Nimibutr tends to direct overbearingly, using different lens, or slow motion, in different levels of success, the film still comes off as surprisingly coherent, and the characters, although psychologically simple, don't make decisions based on karma or fate, which is usually my complaint over Nimibutr's film characters who tend to do things not out of logic, but out of principles that may be foreign to non-Buddhists.

Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters is violent. There's no constraint in depicting bloody battles, which range from alleyway rumbles consisting of student fighting it out with lead pipes and chains, to street wars where bullets fly and bottle bombs explode. Nimibutr's filmmaking reenacts the mindless wanton, the unrepressed angst that pervades Thailand's youth who take American pop culture much too seriously. It is as if these young gangsters do not really see the need to become gangsters, but out of trying to emulate their idols, gravitate towards the overhyped myths of these rock and roll and celluloid legends. I doubt James Dean and Elvis Presley will figure themselves in these youth wars that involve actual deaths and somewhat politically motivated attacks, but the tall tales surrounding their personalities provide inspiration for wrongly-placed notions of righteousness and blank bravery for the youth who circumstantially find themselves in a troubled era of political and social confusion.

Beautiful Boxer (2003)

Beautiful Boxer (Ekachai Uekrongtham, 2003)

Thailand is leaps and bounds ahead of most other nations when it comes to tolerance or acceptance of homosexuality. After all, cheap and quick sex change operations can be had in Thailand (the industry being one of the motivators for the Thai tourism board). The reasons for this may be due to the fact that the Buddhist nation rationalizes homosexuality as a result of karma. Religious or social norms as reasons, such tolerance is a beautiful thing and naturally, it will spread to the nation's culture, more significantly, its cinema. Thailand's cinematic output is mainly composed of the traditional dramas, the horror films, and the gender-sensitive films. Films like Iron Ladies (Youngyooth Thongkonthun, 2000), and its sequel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's mystic gay film Tropical Malady (2004), and his less appreciated James Bond clone The Adventures of Iron Pussy (2003) have made Thailand a rich source of quality gay cinema in Asia.

Ekechai Uekrongtham's Beautiful Boxer is one of Thailand's locally grown gay-themed films that got international accolades from different film festivals. Interestingly, Beautiful Boxer is purely conventional fare. The film, a biopic of real-life crossdressing and make-up waking Thai kickboxer Parinaya Charoemphol (Asanee Suwan), doesn't say anything new about the topic, nor does it portray its themes in any particularly new way. It's harmless, oftentimes cute, at times exciting, but morosely unsure of what it really wants itself to be.

The film plays around with the idea of being a film about contradictions. The title itself is a contradiction: a boxer can loosely be described as brave, brash, or strong, but never beautiful. The opening sequence features a boxer donning his gloves, wraps, and other paraphernalia, and is intercut by sequences of a beauty queen wearing make up. The film is dealt with the same kind of paradox, of luxuriously juxtaposed contradictions that never seem to conclude into a coherent conclusion. Parinaya (his male name is Nong Toom) has known he was a female spirit trapped in a male body since he was a kid.

He is oddly attracted to pretty things, and dislikes bloody fights. Yet in an effort to please his mother and raise his family out of poverty, he tries his luck at kickboxing, where he oddly, or fatefully excels. Uekrongtham never really explains how Parinaya survived in a male-dominated sport, through the rigorous training and much of the sweat and the air of machismo dominating the training grounds. Uekrongtham satisfies himself in meager hints, or letting go everything with the fact that Parinaya is lucky enough to be adopted by a tolerating trainer and family, or boisterously foregoing everything with Rocky-style spirit-lifting scenes of inspiration.

Oddly too, Beautiful Boxer is almost absent of any sexual connotations, or romantic interests for the titular character. It may be said that transvestites, or transgender individuals are rarely homosexuals, but why bother with hints? Uekrongtham is an able filmmaker. His storytelling techniques overcome the screenplay's weakness (notably the fact that it placed the story within a laughable interview between a clumsy foreigner and Parinaya, a month after her sex change operation --- the circumstances leading to the interview is even more laughable with Parinaya rescuing the interviewer from thugs like a mysterious superhero), and he has a definite visual style that complements the film's numerous kickboxing fights. Yet, Uekrongtham delights in Freudian psychology too much: with his staging of numerous dream sequences (some bordering or trespassing the thin line of schmaltz). It's all good: fine and watchable, but not entirely good enough.

Nang Nak (1999)

Nang Nak (Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999)

Nonzee Nimibutr's status in Thai cinema is somewhat that of a pillar: a stalwart overachiever whose merits is the fact that he can detect filmmaking talent rather than his inherent filmmaking talent itself. From the films he has directed which I have had an opportunity to see (the erotic no-brainer Jan Dara (2001), and his boisterous and confusing contribution to the horror tryptych Three (2002), overshadowed by Kim Ji-woon's tired and conventional ghost story, and Peter Chan's marvelous entry), he likens himself to a cultural provocateur. His scare techniques doesn't consist of shocks, but of xenophobic alienation, making use of his native land Thailand's more endemic cultural features as sources of terror. His eroticism consists of gimmickry, and provokes with tired notions of rape, abortion, and incest.

Nimibutr became internationally known when his ghost story Nang Nak won a few awards in several film festivals. I've been curious to see the film, but have always been prevented by my dislike of Nimibutr's filmmaking methods in his later films. I finally got the chance to see it, and while it is a few notches better than Nimibutr's later products, Nang Nak is still lacking, both as a horror film, and as a love story.

The film is based on a Thai folk story, which has reportedly been made into a film a few dozen times already. The plot, about a young man who returns to his wife and baby from the war, and discovers that his wife and baby are actually dead, and the folks he's been sharing his home with are ghosts, is also quite used. Japan has made a number of films depicting romantic (or at least seductive, and vengeful) relationships between the dead and the living, the most famous of which is Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953). Nimibutr however concentrates in juggling both horror and marital love. He's successful sometimes, but most of the time, he stumbles and never seems to get back on the right track. The film is drowned with a lot of wailing, a lot of crying, a lot of puppy-eyed longing from the married couple, that it offsets whatever attempt at horror Nimibutr has prepared. The attempts are exactly that, attempts. There's a huge reliance on mood and atmosphere, setting the ghost story in the middle of a Thai rainforest where flora and fauna consist of dark, looming trees, tarantulas, and large lizards. The atmosphere might have worked if Nimibutr's filmmaking wasn't clumsy and his visual sense wasn't stunted with his seemingly hyperactive tendencies. He edits too quickly, his camera moves too frequently, when the film requires tenderness in its romance, and stillness in its horror.

Nang Nak is written by Wisit Sasanatieng, who would later on direct the offbeat Thai Western Tears of the Black Tiger (2000) and the visually inventive urban fairy tale Citizen Dog (2004). Nimibutr will also be producing much of Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's works, including two of his best, Mon-Rak Transistor (2001) and Last Life in the Universe (2003). He would also be financing a few of the Pang Brothers' projects. To call Nimibutr a failed filmmaker may be brash and unjust. What he lacks in filmmaking prowess, he has converted into huge bucks to finance up and coming Thai artists who would later on make waves internationally. If I have to thank Nimibutr's internationally renowned Nang Nak for that, then by all means, I would. But that doesn't remove the fact that the romantic ghost story is an utter failure right from the start.