by Noy Thrupkaew Transgender camp, Buddhist ghost stories, tales of nationalist struggle, a dip into Thailand's porntastic underworld: Filmgoers at the second ThaiTakes film festival in New York watched a wild, puzzling brew of Thailand's latest cinema over the course of four days in April. As speakers at the festival noted, Thai film has entered a coltish adolescence -- the promise of greatness wobbling atop spindly legs. Put on by a nonprofit U.S. organization dedicated to furthering understanding of Thailand and its diasporic communities, ThaiTakes reflected both Thai cinema's enticing potential and its struggles with a rigid studio system, lack of funding, and an onslaught of Hollywood movies.
"For a long, long time, film in Thailand was only business, merchandise," said Chalida Uambumrungjit, the founder of the Thai Film Foundation, an organization centered on expanding Thailand's cinematic culture through screenings, film festivals, and publications.
Thai cinema's awkward growth spurt out of commercialism began in 2001, when Wisit Sansanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger became an unlikely hit at Cannes. A Technicolor homage to 1950s-era Thai film, traditional likay drama, and the works of Sergio Leone, Sasanatieng's pad-Thai western helped pave the way for other Thai directors, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose second Cannes-award-winning film will open in the States this summer.
The harbingers of the Thai new wave, the darlings of international critics, these experimental films were labeled the country's greatest cinematic successes -- and became commercial bombs at home. Controlled by an artistically conservative studio system, Thai mainstream cinema has largely consisted of showy epics like The Legend of Suriyothai, wildly melodramatic love stories, or horror films that are little but showcases for the acting talents of the country's blowflies, maggots, and carrion-eating vermin. Unaccustomed to the distinctly nonlinear charms of the so-called new wave, production companies had no idea how to market the movies, and despite their international acclaim, the films tanked in Thailand.
Thai films face external challenges as well -- audiences have become more attuned to Hollywood rhythms and story arcs than experimental ones, and cinemas often push even mainstream Thai films out of the way to make room for the latest Tinseltown Twinkie.
"Today's films have no creative signature," Weerasethakul told Asian cinema magazine Firecracker. "Thais tolerate so much that we absorb a lot of foreign styles: roman architecture, TV soap opera. So Thailand is increasingly a 'mixing bowl' and consequently I don't think Thai film has a clear identity."
Not surprisingly, the Thai cinema industry has yielded films that are inordinately interested in figuring out just what they are -- and often look backward to do it, drawing on old legends, history, and a pastiche of other media to create new narratives. ThaiTakes closer Nang Nak, for example, uses an oft-filmed ghost story to create a dark meditation on attachment, perception, and the destructive sadness of undying love. The Adventure of Iron Pussy, a more commercial venture by Weerasethakul, is a deliciously odd musical that features monstrous ruffled shirts, go-go boots, and a dynamite transgendered superwoman. Weerasethakul plays his heroine relatively straight, however, choosing to spoof old Thai films and tacky public-service announcements rather than the gender identity of Ms. Pussy. In one hilarious scene, Iron Pussy confronts a man literally foaming at the mouth and holding a woman hostage on a pier. "Don't do drugs!" Iron Pussy proclaims -- Nancy Reagan gone Thai drag queen.
Siam Renaissance takes a more serious look into the past, focusing on a turbulent time in Thai history, when colonial powers seemed to be closing in on the country. Thailand became the only country in Southeast Asia to escape colonization through dint of diplomatic maneuvering, sharp elbows, ceded land, and its convenient location as a buffer zone between the English and French empires in the region. Siam's heroine is a modern-day Thai woman who went to school in France; somehow, she has gained the ability to move back in time, to when Siam's leaders were busy furrowing their brows over how to maintain their independence. The film is a clumsy sprawl marred by shudderingly bad acting, but it provides a fascinating declamation on one brand of Thai nationalism today.
"We prefer anything the Westerners want," the heroine explains to her aghast ancestors. "We want to be them and refuse to accept ourselves . we accept all but ourselves." She herself is conflicted, a confused child of Thailand and the West (the actor herself is Thai and Caucasian, a tellingly popular combination for movie stars in Thailand), and ultimately finds refuge from Thailand's modern-day metaphoric colonization in its besieged past. Her flight from the present is a somewhat troubling and myopic prescriptive, only alleviated by the fact that she has used her Western education on things Thai to aid her ancestors.
The shorts that emerged out of the October Youth Film Project -- a collaboration between Thai and Thai-American historians and film activists -- focus on a more recent piece of history: the two rounds of student protests and the police crackdowns in October 1973 and October 1976. Rebelling against Thailand's harsh military government, the country's students faced brutal retaliation for their political beliefs, and some were gunned down in the streets. The project tapped Thai high-school and college students to make short films about the protests. Perhaps the most provocative is The Wall, in which passersby comment on the protests by spraying graffiti on a concrete edifice while a running voice-over provides some historical context on the October events. "If they weren't there then, you wouldn't be here now," writes one pedestrian. Another scrawls, "I don't care because I'm starving," before a monk writes, "Land of forgiveness."
Several of the films play on familiar genres, including Fan Chan, a charming, if slightly overlong, commercial coming-of-age story directed by a handful of young directors who are recent graduates of Chulalongkorn University. One-Night Husband is an intriguing neo-noir with a feminist slant; the film is more about the relationship between two women of different socioeconomic backgrounds than an investigation into the disappearance of the titular spouse.
But perhaps the most fascinating film at the festival was Sayew, an impossible-to-categorize and often quite funny offering focused on the trials and tribulations of Tao, a tomboyish virgin who writes smut for her uncle's dirty magazine. Sayew's characters include the nice older man who writes the sexy-lady-doctor column for the mag, the slimy young rogue who pens far more explicit stories than Tao could ever dream of, and a Buddhist monk who asks to be removed from his room next to a prostitute's love nest -- how can he finish his sutras with all the ruckus? The creation of sensual fantasy, the wallowing in it, the renunciation of it -- Sayew plays all these strategies out while undercutting them with radio and TV voice-overs announcing rising tensions between democracy activists and the Thai government in the early 1990s. In this tantalizingly elliptical fashion, the film seems to critique the ways in which we divorce ourselves from political events, need to create parallel realms that keep us from acting in our truly disturbing reality.
The film's end betrays its prior complexity somewhat, with Tao seeming to settle for a picture-perfect, unruffled life, before sticking us with a final quirk: What if even this conclusion is a comforting fabrication? The film hasn't laid quite enough groundwork for that final subversive moment to have lasting, retroactive resonance. But, in all, Sayew is one of the more intriguing films I've seen this year, the sort of genre-bending movie that is both entertaining and experimental. As Thai cinema finds its legs, hopefully this is the kind of work that will find support in Thailand's indigenous film culture -- a movie that flirts with commercial tropes and experimental inconclusiveness, that entertains multiple narratives of "Thai-ness" even as it transcends the local, that balances subtle social critique with ass jokes. Like the other Thai films at the festival, Sayew may not have a clear cinematic identity -- but it scarcely needs it, either.
Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.
