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.

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.