Or is it Ai Fak?

It appears the previews for Ai Fak or I-Fak or The Judgement do a grave injustice to what is apparently a moving and emotional movie. The previews make the film look like another one of those overly broad Thai slapstick comedies that I have grown to find pretty annoying. Then a comment to an earlier post I made about it clued me in to something deeper going on.

Thai film critic Kong Rithdee, in his review for the Bangkok Post, has more:

Save the annoying, totally unoriginal turn of 19-year-old Bongkoj Kongmalai as a fashion-conscious nutcase, this populist interpretation of the SEA Write Award-winning novel is a moving, pungent romantic drama that deserves to be seen. Mainly this is because the film's - actually, the book's - depiction of human's moral hypocrisy and the persecution of the innocent exposes the weaknesses underneath the Thai myth of compassion and gentleness. Men are as gleeful to pass judgement on others out of their self-righteousness, or political advantages, today as they were in 1981 when the book was first published, or since countless centuries ago at the dawn of that thing called civilisation.

Ai Fak, adapted from Chart Kobjitti's Kham Pipaksa by Pantham Thongsang, begins with an erratic note of a romantic farce, before its sensitively-paced final hour pulls off an unlikely slapstick-tragedy that retains the novel's savage emotional blow. What's absent is the sharp-edged, black-comedy coolness of Chart's source prose, but the movie works eventually as a carefully-wrought melodrama. Reading the book you're likely to feel numbed, as if hit by a hammer; watch the film and the melodrama-maniac would want to cry.

Most credits should go to Pantham's direction, especially in the solid third act, and to newcomer Pidisak Yaovanaan, who plays the titular tragic-hero Fak: The actor is this year's major discovery. He seems to get better in successive scenes, his initial sparkling gaze getting increasingly moribund as we see Fak's spiralling down the grimmest path of existence from being the village's goody-two-shoes to becoming its filthy alcoholic in residence.

This represents the society's punishment for the crime the boy never commits. Fak's problem has its root in Somsong, a mentally unstable woman whom his father has taken to live at the house. When the father dies, Fak, a school janitor smitten by this loony chick who has the bold habit of taking her clothes off in public, continues to be her protector as hateful gossip circulates around this peaceable community that the man has shacked up his old man's wife. Fak endures the accusation, brutalisation, and finally the marginalisation that relegates him to the ranks of society's worst outcasts, as repugnant as a dog with rabies. This verdict is passed on by the villagers to Fak and Somsong during the period when fresh material development -- electricity and telephone -- reaches this remote outpost and promises its inhabitants a better life, setting a contrast between the physical improvement and climate of questionable conscience.

The love story between Fak and Somsong, which is not discussed in the book, has raised many purists' eyebrows, as well as the movie's (initially at least) groovy, love-is-all-around look that seems to contradict the story's pessimistic punch. I have no quibbles at all regarding this interpretation. But what I find troubling is Bongkoj's impersonation of a crazy woman. She's obviously an actress trying to act mad, when in fact we should be looking at a madwoman who believes, like most mad people do, that she's behaving perfectly normal. Her pretty, eye-arching red dress gives the film an interesting, part fairy-tale, part mythical context. But her nude scenes, which are mentioned in the novel, attain a visceral, erotic elaboration when we witness the actress' flesh and blood, especially when the camera seems to feast on Bongkoj's fertile hips and curves almost gratuitously on a few occasions.

Curiously yet admirably, the movie's shift towards the conclusive theme in the final hour is achieved with subtlety, and its Dostoyevskian, final conflict has a choking bitterness that outweighs the frisky, almost trifling first act.

It's Pidisak's display of Fak's bruised innocence that lends the climax its moving finality. But it's also the film's refusal to pass on an arbitrary judgement on the villager's ugly abuse -- had it done so it would be playing God and committing the same unjust act as those hypocrites -- that allows Ai Fak to derive its chilly, undeniable power.

(Via Bangkok Post Real Time, Page 7, Friday, March 26, 2004)