Bangkok Asean Film Festival review: Manila in the Claws of Light, Bitcoins Heist

The titan of Filipino cinema, Lino Brocka, always focused on the unfairly exploited working class. His gripping 1975 picture, Manila in the Claws of the Light (Maynila: Sa mga kuko ng liwanag) is the pulpy story of a young man from a fishing village, who comes to the cruel metropolis to track down his ex-girlfriend Ligaya. She was lured away by a pig-woman, with promises of working in a factory and furthering her education. Yeah, right. We all know how that goes.

In rough-and-tumble Manila, he's zeroed in, locating her likely whereabouts to a certain shophouse on Misericordia Street, which he watches like a hawk.

To support his stalking efforts, Julio takes jobs in construction, and, um, other fields.

Much of the film deals with the hardships of big-city construction work, where laborers push wheelbarrows, shovel gravel, haul on ropes and die. They are building the flashy concrete high-rises that inundate the metropolitan skyline. Later, he's laid off from the construction job, and drifts into the sex trade, which Brocka depicts with flamboyantly entertaining flair.

More than a few folks in the classic film's one-off screening at the Bangkok Asean Film Festival were murmuring about how Julio, played by still-steady-working actor Bembol Roco, looked just like Thai action star Tony Jaa. So it turned into an exercise of folks imagining what it would be like if Tony mostly ditched the flying double-knee-drops and just did dramatic acting. Where, indeed, is my elephant?

Anyway, Manila in the Claws of Light is a marvel. And Martin Scorsese was well aware of the film's power. He supported efforts to have a 4K digital restoration done. One of the cinematographers, Mike de Leon, cast his eyes on the laborious wet-scanning process, and shepherded through the color-grading effort, making sure all the grit, grime and blood clearly and vividly pop off the screen with no muss and no fuss. It is Taxi Driver. It is Mean Streets. And it kicks the butts of both those films. (5/5)

Speaking of kicking butts, there's Vietnamese action cinema, which has rapidly grown and matured since the early 2000s arrival of many U.S.-schooled Vietnamese returnees who grew up watching Spielberg movies and working in Hollywood. They jump-started Vietnam's commercial film industry and make solidly mainstream box-office hits in all the crowd-pleasing genres.

Among them is Ham Tran, who made his breakthrough in 2007 with the post-American War drama Journey from the Fall. Since then, he's become solidly involved in the Ho Chi Minh City film industry, racking up a dozen or so credits as editor, including the action films The Rebel and Clash.

Adding writer and director to his name, his latest effort is Bitcoins Heist (Siêu Trộm), an action-comedy-romance that is basically the Vietnamese Ocean's Eleven, with perhaps a bit of Now You See Me tossed in.

So darn slick, I kept sliding out of my seat, Bitcoins Heist enjoyably hits the usual and expected beats of the heist flick, with team assembly, double crosses, triple crosses and sleight of hand.

The attractive and colorful cast is toplined by actresses, chiefly Kate Nhung from Tran's Hollow as Dada, Vietnam's top cyber-crime cop. She is in pursuit of Ghost, a cyber-criminal who remotely takes over people's laptops and demands ransom in bitcoins or else the device will be bricked.

An early attempt at capturing Ghost's accountant Phuc (Thanh Pham) does not go well, and Dada has to turn in her badge and gun. Ngô Thanh Vân, the action heroine from The Rebel and Clash is featured in early scenes as a sexy, tough-as-nails bodyguard to the accountant.

Now working an undercover, off-the-books operation, Dada assembles a team of con-artists, starting with a former boyfriend, the pickpocketing sleight-of-hand specialist Magic Jack (no, it's Jack Magique, he insists), played by the irrepressible Petey Majik, whose acting credits include Tran's How to Fight in Six Inch Heels.

There's a veteran jewel thief and career criminal, played by long-time Ham Tran hand Jayvee Mai The Hiep. He is assisted in thievery by his precocious acrobatic pre-teen daughter (Lam Thanh My).

And, of course, they need a hacker, a plucky young woman whose tech-savvy brother was severely wounded in the film's opening sequence, when the action tumbled into a mobile-phone repair shop. She's Vi, played by freestyling rapper Suboi, who has cyberpunk attitude to spare.

Bitcoins Heist is a welcome genre diversion from the preponderance of Southeast Asian arthouse-focused indie dramas that tend to be programmed at film festivals. It was the Vietnamese entry in the Bangkok Asean Film Festival, running April 22 to 26 at CentralWorld, with movies from all 10 countries of the Asean bloc. Even Brunei was there with the unusual female-focused martial-arts drama Yasmine. Add in the "Asean Classic" selection of three films that included Manila in the Claws of Light, there was something for everyone, and Bitcoins Heist was one for me. (4/5)

See also:

• Bangkok Cinema Scene special: Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2016

Review: Take Me Home

• Directed by Kongkiat Komesiri
• Starring Mario Maurer, Wannarote Sonthichai, Noppachai Jayanama
• Released in Thai cinemas on April 13, 2016; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5 

The weird culture of Thai high society – entitled families whose perfect, luxurious existences are insulated from the ordinary working-class world – have long been the subject of the often off-putting and alienating films of ML Bhandevanov Devakula, the blue-blooded director of stage and screen who is better known as "Mom Noi" and is revered in the industry as the acting coach to most of Thailand's movie and TV stars.

With the new horror Take Me Home (สุขสันต์วันกลับบ้าน, Suksan Wan Klab Baan), Mom Noi's painterly, stagebound hi-so sensibilities are merged with indie grit, and the combination is surprisingly potent and enjoyable.

Mom Noi, who directed a string of lavish romantic dramas in the 1980s and '90s and then had a resurgence in recent years with a series of new adaptations of classic Thai novels that had been made into movies long before, is billed as a consultant on Take Me Home.

The thriller notably stars big-name talent Mario Maurer, who came under Mom Noi's tutelage in the dramatist's unique Thai take on Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, U mong pa meung, which was titled for the U.S. market as At the Gate of the Ghost. Mario then took the lead in Mom Noi's insanely epic two-part reworking of the erotic tale Jan Dara, which was all about bizarrely flawed rich folks and their oh-so-problematic lives.

But the driving force of Take Me Home is Kongkiat Komesiri, a writer-director who has helmed three very fine films, all slick-but-scuzzy crime dramas, 2007's Muay Thai Chaiya, 2009's Slice and 2012's Antapal.

Take Me Home is being touted as Kongkiat's "first horror", though his previous films, Slice especially, had horror elements, and he did take part in the "Ronin Team" collective effort behind the Five Star Production torture thrillers Art of the Devil.

Kongkiat came up with the story for Take Me Home and got help on the screenplay from Piyaluck Mahatanasab and the industry's go-to script surgeon Kongdej Jaturanrasmee. Piyaluck is also the producer, whose indie shingle North Star was among the imprints on Kongdej's critically hailed post-coup drama Snap, last year.

Mario portrays a young man who was in a coma around 10 years ago. He woke up with no recollection of his life except his name was Tan. While working as an orderly in the hospital's morgue, he's spookily led to clues about his family, and decides to investigate further. "Once you leave here, you can never return," is the administrator's prophetic warning he should've heeded.

The family estate is a modern architectural masterpiece. And he is warmly greeted at the gate by the family's doting maid Waew (Napapha Sukrit), who immediately recognizes him. Singing a soothingly unsettling Thai song, she gives him a lift in a golf cart to the main building, a stunning structure ripped from the pages of Architectural Digest. Inside, the welcome is as cold as all the tile, glass and stainless steel. A pair of horseplaying small children take no heed of Tan. The man of the house is the upright, sweater-clad snob Cheewin (Noppachai Jayanama), who has no clue who Tan is. Cheewin's wife, it turns out, is Tan's beautiful twin sister (Wannarote Sonthichai) Tubtim, whom Tan seems to barely recognize. And Cheewin states flatly that Tubtim never mentioned she had a twin brother.

So right away, nothing is adding up. And therein lies the suspense, as the reality of the house, Tan's family and their tortured history are gradually revealed. Seems Tan's and Tubtim's father was a respected architect who committed suicide. He had bought the house for a song years before, but the former owner felt betrayed. So there's much bad karma in the structure, along with all the right angles and spiral staircases. Tan is trapped, and has to live what appears to be a hellish, Groundhog Day-type existence, repeating fruitless escape attempts over and over.

Mario, the boyish Thai-Chinese-German actor whose career was launched with 2007's Love of Siam, gives what is perhaps his strongest (and sweatiest) performance yet. Noppachai is sure and steady in a supporting role. TV star Wannarote chews up her scenes as the increasingly unstable Tubtim.

With Mom's Noi's hidebound art-museum tendencies kept at arm's length, Kongkiat heads a production that vividly transforms the gleaming white modern home into a moldering, creaking haunted house. It's a welcome, worthy effort from one of the industry's more distinctive writer-directors.

In the meantime, Kongkiat has another feature in the works, the big-budget historical action epic Khun Phan, which stars Ananda Everingham as a policeman in the 1930s who is in pursuit of a roving bandit played by Krissada Sukosol Terrence. The picture, long since in the can, has been on Sahamongkol's release calendar for the past couple of years or so but has remained mysteriously in the vaults. Reportedly, Kongkiat is in the midst of reworking Khun Phan and updating the visual effects.



See also:

• The man who time forgot [The Nation]

Review: Halfworlds

• Directed by Joko Anwar
• Starring Salvita Decorte, Nathan Hartono, Bront Palarae, Aimee Saras, Tara Basro, Ario Bayu, Arifin Putra, Reza Rahadian, Adinia Wirasti
• Series premiere November 29, 2015 on HBO Asia. Season 1 finale January 10, 2016

Southeast Asia's monster mythology and ancient spiritual beliefs are vividly drawn upon in the HBO Asia Original Production Halfworlds, which began airing its first season on HBO in Asia last month.

With all eight half-hour episodes directed by Indonesia’s leading filmmaker Joko Anwar, Halfworlds is set in the shadowy back alleys of Jakarta, where there exists a parallel world of ancient blade-wielding tattooed demons. Known as demits, they pose as humans, live alongside us and feed on our blood. Just as our own world appears on the brink of uncertainty, the realm of the demits is also at a crossroads, with a supernatural event known as “the Gift” fast approaching, and causing much anxiety.

It’s the most ambitious production for Singapore-based HBO Asia and its partner studio facilities just across the Strait, on Indonesia’s Batam Island. There, in a complex of soundstages carved out of a malarial mangrove, is where they made the adventure movie Dead Mine in 2012, the Australian-co-produced series Serangoon Road in 2012 and last year’s supernatural family drama Grace.

Halfworlds is their best yet, judging from the first two episodes HBO Asia provided for reviews.

And that’s thanks to Anwar, who co-wrote the series with Collin Chang. The director of a cult-hit, critically acclaimed string of film-noir-inspired thrillers, such as Dead Time: Kala (2007) and The Forbidden Door (2009), Anwar has an uncanny knack for combining moody lighting, highly saturated colors, comic-book-style framing and richly imagined characters in compelling ways.

At the center of the story is a young street artist named Sarah (newcomer Salvita Decorte). Like young Bruce Wayne in the Batman comics, Sarah’s destiny started when her parents were murdered. Unlike Wayne, Sarah is not rich. She has no butler nor a mansion. She squats in a flat but has a wealth of friends, including her tattoo-artist best pal Pinung (Aimee Saras) and young indie rocker boyfriend Coki (Nathan Hartono). They gather in a watering hole known as The Moth.

Sarah has been understandably haunted by her parents’ deaths, as reflected by the disturbing and graphic images that are alongside the tourist sketches in her portfolio. Like any other crime procedural, she has a “murder wall” of her drawings. Among the monsters she’s illustrated is the palasik, a female demon consisting of a floating head and entrails, similar to a well-known Thai ghoul, the krasue. There are also various figures lurking in the shadows, keeping an eye on Sarah, who they believe to be the “chosen one”, and this gives her a feeling of unease.

It’s those darker figures who make Halfworlds utterly watchable, and it helps that HBO Asia has tapped into Indonesia’s most-trusted film export, the smash-hit martial-arts franchise The Raid, to help complete that world. Among them are The Raid 2 alums Arifin Putra as a mysteriously handsome fellow in a hood who is dogging Sarah, and Alex Abbad as another troublemaking demit figure.

Other characters include veteran Malaysian actor Bronte Paralae as Detective Gusti, a weary lawman who has made the demits his personal beat. His intentions are unclear, as he appears to be under the thumb of demit head honcho Juragan (Anwar film vet Ario Bayu). There’s a killer female demon (Adinia Wirasti) with a cool bloody scene every episode. And Reza Rahadian and Tara Basro are a colorful demit couple.

Rahadian in particular has a stand-out sequence when he and his ladyfriend find a victim in a bar. He puts their mark at ease by posing as a nerd, with shaky voice, glasses, a turtleneck and scruffy beard to complete the look. As he lets the other guy steal his woman, Rahadian slowly sheds his quietly unassuming persona and plunges his blade into the guy. Soon, shots of blood are served up all around.

The action is among the highlights, even though it’s not on the scale of The Raid (after all, this is HBO Asia, not Game of Thrones). Among the stand-out scenes is a guy getting sliced in half. And there’s a cool fight in a men’s room, where the electric hand dryer blows a demon’s shirt, revealing his family tattoo. A knock-down-drag-out results in smashed bathroom fixtures and a load of red painting the walls.

Further eye candy is provided by a graphic-novel opening sequence, which is different each episode and furthers illustrates the mythical world of the demits.

While Halfworlds is a cult hit waiting to happen, just how this HBO Asia series will translate in other territories is unclear. Director Anwar offers one view, with a funny scene of a foreigner hipster getting a tattoo in Pinung’s parlor. Seems he made unwanted advances on the pretty tattoo artist and she decided to teach him a lesson in Bahasa Indonesia.

“I can’t wait to show my friends back home,” he says as he checks out the newly inked script between his shoulderblades.

“Nasi goreng,” the tattoo reads. “Fried rice,” reads the subtitle.

See also:

• No half measures [The Nation]

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Review: Snap

• Written and directed by Kongdej Jaturanrasmee
• Starring Waruntorn Paonil, Toni Rakkaen
• Sneak preview run in Thai cinemas December 24-30, 2015; wider release December 31, 2015; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

Millennials wake up and smell life – unfiltered – in Snap (แค่..ได้คิดถึง, Kae .. Dai Kit Tung), a sharply observed romantic comedy-drama from writer-director Kongdej Jaturanrasmee.

Laden with the hashtags and color-saturated photos of social-media posts, Snap has young Thais reflecting wistfully on the not-so-distant past as pessimism emerges about their impending adulthood, and, possibly, about the future of Thailand itself.

Set just as the military declared martial law last year, Snap is the story of Pueng (delicate singer-actress Waruntorn Paonil in her feature debut), the daughter of an army colonel who is set to marry a junior officer. She is one of those people whose only joy is derived from photographing everything with her phone – the coffee she’s about to drink, the food she’s about to eat, the nature vista she’s just seen – and post the snapshot to Facebook and Instagram, all heavy with descriptive nonsense hashtags.

Before her own big day, Pueng accepts an invitation from high-school friends to attend their wedding in her former hometown of Chanthaburi. There, she’s reunited with her old classmates, including her ex-boyfriend Boy (the quietly intense Toni Rakkaen), a local photographer who happens to also be shooting the wedding.

Melancholy wells up as Pueng revisits her old high school and goes looking for the bench where she and Boy spent their days. The dusty old wooden seat, still with the graffiti markings on it, has been relegated to the school’s rooftop, and no longer holds any significance to the current crop of kids.

Turns out there is little of Pueng left for Chanthaburi locals to remember either, as she left rather abruptly some years before, thanks to a sudden transfer of her military father. As a consequence, Pueng’s picture has been left out of her high-school yearbook, but her presence is still felt by the inclusion of dotted-line-bordered blank spaces in group photos. A second dotted-line figure also appears in many photos, that of Boy, who as the yearbook photographer was behind the lens and not in the frame. They are ghosts in the photos, and those blank spaces represent holes in their souls. Pueng and Boy wonder if those holes can still be filled.

Here, Kongdej is also trafficking in nostalgia for the old film-photography days, and the tactile feeling of developing the rolls of negatives and making the prints. It’s a subject previously referenced in fellow Thai director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s abstract 36. There is also comment on the ridiculously epic proportions wedding-photo shoots have taken on in recent years, something Nawapol observed earlier this year in his Freelance (Heart Attack). Seems there is something on the minds of Thailand’s great movie makers.

The wedding couple are the a-dork-able bespectacled nerds Poo (Soifa Saenkhamkon) and her man Aey (Chakphet Goontong), who met on an online dating site. Poo tells the hair-curling story of their sex-filled first meeting, and rather than flash back to it, Kongdej lets the impact of their coupling register on the faces of Pueng and others.

Pueng, meanwhile, tells the group how she met her husband-to-be, the army officer Mann (Grisana Punpeng), who was her teacher at university, and they didn’t exactly hit it off at first. But Mann kept turning up, and really, he’s a sweet guy even if he's a bit clueless. He goes so far as to ask Boy to photograph his and Pueng’s wedding. Which probably isn’t the best idea. I mean, just look at Pueng and Boy, who seem drawn together like characters out of a manga novel. The connection between Pueng and Mann, on the other hand, appears strained.

Later on, Pueng wants to test the waters of her past relationship with Boy, and the two meet for a late-night reunion at Chanthaburi’s Kung Kraben Aquarium, where the swirls of ocean life and the bubbling water provide a dramatic backdrop for reminiscing.

“How come nothing is as good as it used to be?” That’s the utterance of the frustrated and profoundly depressed Pueng when the gravity of her situation – her own marriage, the junta, the pointlessness of sharing so many darn photos – hits her.

I can’t recall a Kongdej film, especially those of his late “indie” period, that’s looked better, thanks to director of photography MR Umpornpol Yugala, production designer Rasiguet Sookkarn and art director Manop Chaengsawang. In contrast to the movie’s sad, beautiful heroine, the look of Snap is cheery, colorful and pops right off the screen.

Snap is also possibly the most poignant and also the most ordinary film yet from Kongdej. His usual stock-in-trade has been unusual characters, such as a young woman running a smut magazine in Sayew, a taxi driver in love with a massage-parlour girl in Midnight My Love and the three-armed man on a road trip with a large-breasted woman in Handle Me With Care. The writer-director turned away from studio-driven projects to make smaller independent films with his 2011 feature P-047, which was perhaps his most unusual film to date, with an abstract story of a locksmith who loses the key to his identity. But he’s since become more grounded, covering Bangkok boys on the fringes in the drama Tang Wong and boys in Buddhist temples in his documentary So Be It. Fatherhood has had an effect (he made a short documentary, Udon, featuring his brilliant twin daughters) and Kongdej is viewing the world in ways that aren’t the same as before.

See also:

• 'Snap' judgement [The Nation]

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Kyushu the Movie, Snap sneaks in
• Festival festival! Masters and Newcomers in Busan, premieres in Tokyo and Taipei, an award in Rio

 (Cross-published in The Nation)

LPFF 2015 review: Spotlight on Cambodia

The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock 'n' Roll

Cambodia's constant struggle to reconcile its bloody Khmer Rouge past with the ancient legacy of Angkor and the push for modernity in the 21st century were common threads running through five movies at the sixth Luang Prabang Film Festival, which made Cambodia the subject of its first “Spotlight”. It showed there is more to Cambodian cinema than the works of its multi-award-winning veteran leading director Rithy Panh.

Curated in part by Sok Visal, Cambodia’s “Motion Picture Ambassador” to the Luang Prabang fest, the Spotlight devoted a full day to the country’s re-emerging cinema movement, with a diverse selection of four films. The line-up included the documentaries The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll and Still I Strive, martial-arts action in Hanuman and melodrama in The Last Reel. Shown on another day was a fifth Cambodian entry, the cult crime-comedy Gems on the Run, co-directed by Visal.

Cambodia’s “code of women’s conduct”, masked killers and arranged marriages were among the common themes linking the films.

Still I Strive

Referenced in at least three of the entries, that book that holds that Cambodian women should be polite, quiet and dutiful, is promptly tossed out by domineering female protagonists. In Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll, a Phnom Penh bargirl undergoes a transformation from a mouse-like figure afraid of her own voice to a tigress-like diva rocker who could teach a thing or two to Cookie Lyon of TV’s Empire. In The Last Reel, a teenage girl jumps off the back of her gangster boyfriend’s motorbike to take up the mantle of movie producer and actress as she tries to reconstruct the missing reel of a 1970s historical epic. And in Gems on the Run, a plucky gun moll chooses love, and falls for the movie’s unlikely hero, a portly police officer who wants to be a singer.

A masked vigilante is out for revenge in Hanuman, which brings Cambodia’s ancient Bokator “pounding a lion” martial art out of the shadows. And it’s masked men who rob an armored car in Gems on the Run. Meanwhile, both the heroine in The Last Reel and the plus-sized leading man of Gems on the Run are seeking to escape from pending marriages arranged by social-climbing parents.

More martial arts are on display in the jawdropping and surprising documentary Still I Strive, which covers the orphan schoolchildren of the National Action Culture Association, an organization run by veteran actress Peng Phan. Having lost her own family during the Khmer Rouge years, she and her husband devote their lives to teaching arts to the orphans. With heartbreaking individual profiles of students, showing the hardships they faced in broken homes to a life of love and learning at the orphanage, the film follows their efforts to perform for the country’s arts-and-culture patron, Princess Bopha Devi.

Hanuman

Directed by Adam Pfleghaar and A. Todd Smith, Still I Strive has these remarkable youngsters acting in full-fledged dramatic segments, following a parallel quest in ancient times, in which their skills in music, dance, storytelling and stage combat are used to full effect. It's amazing.

The gritty Hanuman, meanwhile, is set in contemporary Phnom Penh, where a masked vigilante rises up to challenge the country’s culture of impunity and take revenge on criminals who killed his father. The masked man is also reunited with his estranged brother, a police officer who has been secretly trying to bring his father’s killers to justice himself. Directed by Italian filmmaker Jimmy Henderson, Hanuman is clearly inspired by The Raid, which vividly brought Indonesia’s pencak silat martial arts to world screens. Along with nods to Thailand’s Tony Jaa and Ong-Bak, Hanuman also revels in the lurid images of Italy’s spaghetti westerns and giallo slashers. It's not going to do for Cambodian action cinema what the The Raid did for its stars (who turn up in the new Star Wars), but it is the start of something, and I hope the Hanuman gang will regroup to make more of these types of films.

The Cambodian Space Project and The Last Reel both dealt with the vibrant Cambodian pop culture of the 1970s. Under the patronage of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, himself a multi-hyphenate musician, producer, director and star of his own movies, Cambodia’s cinematic golden age was paralleled by a rollicking music scene, which emulated American rock ’n’ roll. Both scenes were brought to an abrupt end in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over, emptied the cities and put the populace to work making the country into an agrarian utopia. Intellectuals and artists didn’t fit into that scheme, and were targets for persecution and death.

The Last Reel

The forces of music and film combined in The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll, which surveys the resurgence of Cambodian rock and its revival under an unusual band, the Cambodian Space Project, which began in 2009 when Australian pop-artist and musician Julien Poulson heard the extraordinary voice of bargirl Srey Thy performing karaoke. The two had little in common but music, but it was enough.

The band is similar to another outfit, the U.S.-based Dengue Fever, which were featured on the soundtrack to Matt Dillon’s 2002 made-in-Cambodia drama City of Ghosts and have been the subject of their own documentary. But while that band’s frontwoman Chhom Nimol was influenced by the slain 1970s Cambodian singer Ros Sereysothea, the Cambodian Space Project’s Thy has taken the more earthy and grounded vocalist Pan Ron has her major influence.

Directed by German Mark Eberle, The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll follows the band’s journey from the bars to Phnom Penh to music clubs in Sydney, Paris and Hong Kong. Clips include the band’s landmark performance at the Cambodia International Film Festival, providing live musical accompaniment to Georges Melies’ 1902 science-fiction epic A Trip to the Moon, the style of which was emulated by Cambodian filmmakers in the 1970s and by Eberle in fantastic animation sequences that imagined the photogenic Thy as an actress in an Angkorian sci-fi epic. Making the film turned out to be an epic undertaking for Eberle, who at one point was drafted to play bass in the band in order to keep both the band and his film project going.

It was a hit with viewers at the Luang Prabang Film Festival's daytime venue, who gave it the festival’s first Audience Choice Award.

Cambodia’s lost cinematic golden age, artfully covered in French-Cambodian director Davy Chou’s Golden Slumbers, unspools further in The Last Reel, a handsomely mounted melodrama that was the country’s official submission to next year’s Academy Awards. Directed by Kulikar Sotho, who rose to prominence as a location supervisor on Angelina Jolie’s made-in-Cambodia action romp Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Last Reel follows a young woman who discovers old film reels in a dilapidated Phnom Penh movie palace and realizes that the beautiful actress in the movie is her mother. Secrets of her family’s Khmer Rouge past surface as the young women sets out to recreate the movie’s missing final reel, with help from a motley crew of her biker boyfriend, the theater's elderly projectionist and film students.

Gems on the Run

The Last Reel strained my brain with its soap-opera leanings and a time-travelling story that omitted an entire generation between the Khmer Rouge era and the teenagers of today, whose grandparents, not parents, would have been Khmer Rouge cadre and captives. But for reasons of sentimentality, nostalgia and, I suppose, vanity, there was a compression in time that took away from the weight of the film's dramatic heft.

I liked Gems on the Run better, and I told Sok Visal so at one point during the fest. He thought I was kidding, but then he doesn't know me very well. Directed by Visal and his French friend Quentin Clausin, Gems on the Runs is exactly the type of film I actually enjoy, with its sprawling, shaggy-dog tale of a portly police officer who wants to be a singer getting mixed up with an estranged childhood friend, his ladyfriend and stolen diamonds. It is, essentially, a Coen Bros farce made in Cambodia. Visal, whose family made their escape to Thailand and then France during the Khmer Rouge era and made his return to Cambodia in 1993 to produce music, is a first-time filmmaker with Gems. The film was something of a flop on commercial release, though the soundtrack did well. It's got a cult following, of which I'm now a member. Visal, for his part, wants to do a horror film next, and I can't wait to see it.

The rotund leading man, Cheky Athiporn, was a photographer before he got put in front the camera for his eye-popping star turn in Gems on the Run.

Other actors provided more connections between the films in Luang Prabang's Spolight. Among them was actress Ma Rynet, star of The Last Reel who also appears in Hanuman. And the girl’s mother (or should it be her grandmother?) is portrayed by Dy Saveth, a Golden Age star. Saveth, who famously survived the Khmer Rouge era because she missed a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh in 1975, also appears in Cambodian Space Project, imparting advice to the budding diva Thy.

Further talent ties are cemented by the appearance of hard-working actor Rous Mony, who plays the sneering villain in Hanuman, The Last Reel and Gems. I liked to think he was also lurking the background in Space Project and Still I Strive.

Here's Wise Kwai's ratings, for those keeping score:

The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock 'n' Roll: 4/5
Hanuman: 3/5
Still I Strive: 5/5
The Last Reel: 2/5
Gems on the Run: 4/5

Sok Visal talks about Cambodian cinema with Cambodian Space Project director Mark Eberle. Wise Kwai photo

(Adapted from an article in The Nation)

Review: Sway

• Written and directed by Rooth Tang
• Starring Matt Wu, Lu Huang, Kris Wood Bell, Kazohiko Nishimura, Ananda Everingham, Sajee Apiwong
• Limited release in Thailand on December 10, 2015; rated 18+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

Fragments from around the globe form a story in Sway, the ambitious debut feature from Thai-American director Rooth Tang.

In three cities, there are couples going through the motions, but are somehow stuck:

• In Paris, Chinese-American drifter Arthur (Matt Wu) has just landed at the airport. While trying to figure out his next move, he tentatively reconnects with his girlfriend Vivian (Lu Huang), a former TV star from China who is trying to make it as a serious journalist. Arthur then gets news from home that his parents might get a divorce.
• In Los Angeles, Amanda (Kris Wood Bell), the Caucasian second wife of widowed Japanese businessman Eric (Kazohiko Nishimura) feels she is on shaky ground with her husband's teenage daughter Grace (Miki Ishikawa). She is giving her young stepmum the silent treatment.
• And in Bangkok, well-travelled Thai hipster Palm (Ananda Everingham) romances less-worldly office girl June (Sajee Apiwong) and fills her head with dreams about future destinations. She also has a belly full of Palm's baby, and is afraid of what will happen if she tells him he's a father.

It's the first feature from Rooth, a graduate in film studies from the University of California, Irvine. He was raised in America by Thai parents, and took inspiration from his mum and dad, who had participated in the pro-democracy movement at Thammasat University in the 1970s, but then moved to the US. In short, he wondered, what was that like?

Filming started in Bangkok in August 2010, just months after the red-shirt anti-government demonstrations. At the time, Rooth was unsure whether his project would be a short film or develop into something longer. Thanks to a windfall and financial help from his parents, who are among the producers, the Los Angeles segment was added, and then to Paris, where filming wrapped up in 2013. After a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, Sway has swung around the globe, with appearances in Taipei's Golden Horse fest and the Singapore International last year and this year's Shanghai fest.

Sway draws its influences from the expressionist palette of Wong Kar-wai's films, the globalized existentialist angst of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel and the quietly simmering family dysfunction of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata.

Sway will also seem particularly familiar to fans of independent Thai cinema, thanks to its coincidental connections to two recent Thai indie movies that also dealt with brooding Asians who are adrift in the world - Aditya Assarat's Hi-So and Lee Chatametikool's Concrete Clouds. Both featured Ananda in similar roles of a rootless vagabond of sorts, and Hi-So actually featured both Ananda and Sajee. Both films were also by directors whose backgrounds are similar to Rooth's - they are all foreign-schooled Thai filmmakers seeking to express feelings of being caught between Eastern and Western cultures but not really sure which side to pick.

Those connections were further solidified in post-production, which was completed in Bangkok at White Light studio, under supervision of Lee.

Rooth is seeking to develop a style that is distinct from those he's influenced by, coincidental or not. With Sway, he drops you into people's lives mid-stream, but you don't need to paddle to keep up. Instead, it's best to just float along and watch the stories unfold.

The intended result is that the audience has the same ill-at-ease feeling as the characters, who themselves aren't really sure who they are or what they should be doing. Romantic chemistry is palpable, especially with the Paris and Bangkok couples. Dialogue is clipped and spare, with smoldering sidelong glances, angry grimaces or worried frowns doing most of the narrative heavy lifting.

It's left to minor supporting characters to finally and fully explain what motivates the main ones, with June's pragmatic Thai mother putting her at ease, and the Japanese-American teenager to explain why she's been so awful to her stepmother. In Paris, Arthur's mother turns up to reflect on her life as an immigrant and help point her son in a definite direction.

Real-world events place the three segments in different times and help ground them, with the political crisis of 2008 to 2010 providing the backdrop of the Bangkok story, while Barack Obama's re-election as U.S. president in 2012 is referenced in L.A. France's intervention in Mali is mentioned in the Paris segments.

Symbolism and metaphors crop up frequently, mostly noticeably in the Bangkok segments, where the small composite-plastic figure of a bird represents the ambitions of Palm, who thinks he can get rich making widgets from the hi-tech hybrid material. The bird is later found shattered on the floor, along with the possibility of broken dreams. But then another stork-like symbol emerges on the Bangkok skyline - a construction crane - representing hopes for the future.

See also:

• Sway on Facebook

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Sway

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Review: Runpee (Senior)

• Written and directed by Wisit Sasanatieng
• Starring Jannine Wiegel, Phongsakon Tosuwan, Sa-ad Piampongsan
• Released in Thai cinemas on December 3, 2015; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

After a five-year hiatus from commercial filmmaking, Wisit Sasanatieng has been coaxed back to the director's chair by the studio M-Thirtynine with Runpee (รุ่นพี่, a.k.a. Senior), an artfully directed ghost comedy that successfully merges old-fashioned horror thrills with contemporary teen romance.

Penned by Wisit, the story is about an outcast weirdo at a Catholic girls' boarding school. She has a special nose. Unlike the kid in The Sixth Sense, the olfactorily gifted girl Mon (Ploychompoo Jannine Weigel) can't see dead people, she smells them. More specifically, she can sniff out the troubled spirits who are still lurking in our realm.

Her unique talent leads her to develop a connection with a boy ghost (Bom Phongsakon Tosuwan) who was a student when the place was a business school in the 1980s, before it was a church convent. Together, they investigate a murder that occurred there some 50 years before, when the school was the palace home of a princess, who was found beaten, bloodied and very much dead in her swimming pool. Her gardener took the fall for the death, but there was more to the case than met the eye.

It's an old-timey Thai setting right out of Wisit's 2000 debut feature, Fah Talai Jone (Tears of the Black Tiger), and that western's trademark raspberry-jelly blood splatter is evident in key scenes. Runpee also has echoes of Wisit's 2006 Gothic horror Pen Choo Kub Pee (The Unseeable), plus the wry observational humour of his satiric Mah Nakorn (Citizen Dog).

With false scares and other cinematic sleight-of-hand tricks, Wisit keeps the audience guessing as he suspensefully strings along the story of Mon and her ghost friend Runpee, whose name means simply "senior".

Mon's abilities to sense ghosts has made her an outcast among her school's other girls. Everyone already thought she was a bit weird, but since Runpee came on the scene, she's especially bizarre, since she's given to carrying on conversations with her ghost pal, who almost no one except the audience can see. So it appears she's walking along, talking to herself. There are even street scenes, which I'm not certain were filmed on a closed set, in which passersby naturally react with perplexity to the odd girl who is flailing her arms and talking gibberish to an invisible friend.

At one point, Mon is talking and flailing during her French lessons, and the stern nun teacher punishes Mon by having her wear a sign and stand with her arms outstretched. Even then, she continues her conversation with Runpee.

The laws of physics are different in the ghost world, Runpee explains as they sleuth around the school property, searching for clues to the 50-year-old murder. For example, ghosts can't walk walls if the walls were built after they died. Industrial-like animated diagrams help illustrate. And, there are exceptions, of course. It's not quite Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, but then thank goodness it isn't.

Aside from the main story of the old murder case, there are other issues to pad out the tale and give weight to the characters. There's an annoyingly cheerful young doctor friend of Mon's (DJ We Raweeroj) whom Mon strings along long enough for him to be helpful to the murder case. Another subplot has Mon developing a selfie-fueled friendship with the school's other outcast, Ant (Kaykai Nutticha Namwong), who is shunned by the popular clique because she's been seen getting close to the male chemistry teacher – way too close in fact. He's a jerk, and gets what's coming to him in a vividly memorable scene that has him haunted by millions of eyeball-like CGI spirits.

Ant's story has parallels to the 50-year-old murder, which is intertwined with the school's history and the mysterious figure of "Baby Daeng", the heir to the princess' estate and the cause of conflict. What happened to Baby Daeng? That's the question that keeps coming back to haunt Mon and Runpee as they circle ever closer to a truth that was right in front of their eyes to begin with.

Figures from the past include an elderly doctor, portrayed by stage and screen veteran Sa-ad Piampongsan, who is a hoot to watch as he chews up scenes that grow meatier and meatier with each appearance.

Onward and upward, the action reaches its heights with Mon atop a bell tower, rescued by her personal Jesus Runpee.

It's a mix of actors from a bygone era of classic Thai genre films and fresh-faced youngsters making their debuts, which is something of a trademark for Wisit, who has a knack for plucking up fresh talents and dropping them in as the leads of his films.

Here, singer-actress Ploychompoo is an endearing heroine, rebellious and strong, placing her in good company with another superpowered young actress, Punpun Sutatta Udomsilp from another Thai movie this year, May Nai (May Who?), about a high-school girl who releases a strong electrical charge if her heart gets racing. Maybe one day Mon and May could team up to solve more crimes.

See also:

• Spirits and the soul [The Nation]

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Keetarajanipon, Khun Thong Daeng, Runpee

Review: Vanishing Point

• Directed by Jakrawal Nilthamrong
• Starring Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul, Drunphob Suriyawong, Chalee Choueyai, Suweeraya Thongmee
• Reviewed at premiere screening on October 16, 2015 at the Laem Thong Theatre, Bangkok; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

What is the point of Vanishing Point (วานิชชิ่ง พอยท์)? That’s a question that has vexed me since I saw the film in a rundown porn cinema in Bangkok.

Directed by Jakrawal nilthamrong, Vanishing Point is the culmination of everything the artist-filmmaker has done up to now. It won the Hivos Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and has been selected for many other fests. Like another prominent Thai artist-filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jakrawal is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he’s much-respected in the art and indie filmmaking community. In his art installations and short films, Jakrawal explores strict Buddhist themes, reflecting on the dangers of greed and materialism.

An unapologetic art-house film, Vanishing Point is a cavalcade of experimental techniques and abstractions. The story, as nearly as I can make out, has two central characters, a journalist and a family man, whose lives run in parallel trajectories until they converge at that “vanishing point” on the horizon.

The film is also autobiographical in nature, since it opens with an image of a car twisted horrifically in half. The picture is from a 1983 newspaper report on a car being struck by a train, which left Jakrawal’s own parents with severe physical and emotional scars.

The wrecked car is something this Vanishing Point shares with the 1971 Hollywood counterculture film of the same title. Both movies are about existential crises, with the earlier film’s Kowalski at first having a purpose for driving his Dodge Challenger at flat-out speeds across the desert, but as that story goes on, he just drives for the sake of driving.

In Jakrawal’s Vanishing Point, the two central characters’ reasons for living are murkier. They are headed for the same destination as Kowalski – just far more slowly.

There’s also a sleazy 1970s vibe about the new Vanishing Point, an aesthetic that Jakrawal highlighted in choosing a cinema from that era as the venue for its debut in Bangkok. This business of life can be a dirty thing, and amid the mould and grime of Klong Toey’s Laem Thong Theatre, he wanted his audience to revel in it.

In the Thai universe of Vanishing Point, the fractured timeline shifts to the forest, where a reporter (played by Drunphob Suriyawong) is covering a police crime re-enactment. They have a suspected rapist acting out his deeds with a giant teddy bear. It’s a scene that will probably seem routine to Thais who see such things in the newspapers every day, but to foreigners it’s a bizarre situation. I too wonder just what these re-enactments really prove.

The reporter, who thinks the same, departs the scene to follow the police. He eventually turns up at a short-time motel, where he spends time with a senior hooker (Suweeraya Thongmee).

His visit is recorded on video by the movie’s other major character, a businessman (Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul) who is in the midst of an existential crisis. He’s got a large stack of videotapes of hotel guests having sex, but appears to get no joy from watching them. At home he shares a meal in total silence with his wife and daughter. It seems there is no joy there either.

The guy, who runs a condom factory in addition to his sideline as the maker of amateur porn films, eventually turns up at a Buddhist temple, where a monk is meditatively sweeping the grounds. Played by the charmingly impish Chalee Choueyai, the saffron-wrapped clergyman launches into a long monologue that’s right up there with Robert Shaw’s USS Indianapolis story in Jaws.

In short, the monk’s lesson – and the movie’s – is that there are no easy answers. Not for the journalist, nor the businessman, nor me.

The ones who seem to fare best in Vanishing Point are the sketchiest characters – that monologuing monk and the senior hooker. They are at least honest about who they are and what they do, while the journalist and the factory owner seem only to be seeking merit or approval.

And perhaps that monk might not be a monk after all. Or perhaps Jakrawal is musing on what makes a monk. Is a monk still a monk once out of his robes? In this way, Vanishing Point offers more potent commentary on the state of contemporary Thai Buddhism that is potentially more controversial than the briefly banned Arbat, with its scenes of a misbehaving novice monk. That picture had to be toned down to get unbanned and was released as Arpat, but it didn’t really have much to say about Buddhism at all.

Dazzling cinematography by up-and-coming filmmaker Phuttiphong Aroonpheng is a highlight of Vanishing Point, and his work includes a bravura tracking shot that follows the businessman’s teenage daughter roller-skating through her small town, with the cameraman seemingly towed from behind and the girl’s knees framing the shot.

More technical prowess is displayed by score composer Pakorn Musikboonlert and sound designer Chalermrat Kaweewattana, who come up with an ominously hypnotic series of pulsating burbles and bloops to give the film a sickening heartbeat.

See also:

• Official website

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Vanishing Point, Hor Taew Taek 5, Water Boyys the Movie
• Festival festival! Young Man in Venice, Vanishing Point in Sao Paulo
• Vanishing Point takes top prize at Rotterdam
• Vanishing Point – no, not that Vanishing Point – appears in Rotterdam's Tiger competition

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Review: The Blue Hour

• Directed by Anucha Boonyawatana
• Starring Atthaphan Poonsawas, Oabnithi Wiwattanawarang
• Released in Thai cinemas on August 6, 2015; rated 18+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

In his song “This Land is Your Land”, American folksinger Woody Guthrie had a verse that only he usually ever performed, about a “no trespassing” sign: “But on the other side it didn’t say nothin’. That side was made for you and me.”

The verse came to mind while watching The Blue Hour (Onthakan, อนธการ), in which a young man sneaks through a fence to the other side of a sign that says “do not enter”. Inside the cordoned-off property is a filthy swimming pool. Everything about the place must have audiences thinking “don’t go in there!” but the kid goes in anyway. And there’s no turning back.

Blue Hour, the feature debut for respected short-film maker and indie-industry figure Anucha Boonyawatana, takes its title from that magic time twice a day, in the morning and evening, when it’s neither dark nor completely light. But the tone of the film is pitch-black.

Atthaphan Poonsawas stars as the meek schoolboy Tam, a slim bundle of vulnerabilities. Bullied at school and unloved and isolated at home because he’s gay, Tam is coming into his own. He’s arranged to meet another boy at the abandoned pool, a masculine youngster named Phum (Oabnithi Wiwattanawarang). It’s an ugly place for romance, and their first coupling is rough, more resembling the vice lock of a mixed-martial-arts match than intimacy.

The boys also strip down to their briefs for a dip in the dirty pool, and they talk of people who have been taken by spirits and only reappear after they’re dead. The atmosphere is eerie, with mildew stains on the walls of the pool resembling human shadows.

Things get more surreal when the lads visit a garbage dump that Phum says his family used to own but was taken away from them in a land grab. I swear I could smell the putrid stink of the place as the mounds of trash wriggled to life.

A handgun enters the picture, and it’s the trigger for confusion, as writer-director Anucha and co-writer Waasuthep Ketpetch (and film editors Chonlasit Upanigkit and Anuphap Autta) aim to keep the audience as mixed up as possible while the suspense builds and the chronology of the story is shattered.

The overall foreboding mood is also thanks to the blue-tinged cinematography of Chaiyapreuk Chalermpornpanit and Kamolpan Ngiwtong, and the ghostly mildew shadows dreamed up by production designer Phairot Siriwat.

The Blue Hour has a similar vibe to the movies of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose influence looms large over all Thai indie films. Additionally, Blue Hour is part of a trio of strong gay-themed Thai indie films being released this year. It debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival, alongside another Thai queer entry, director Josh Kim’s How to Win at Checkers (Every Time), also known as P’Chai My Hero. The pair of films, which both had local premieres at the inaugural Bangkok Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, have been joined by a third gay romance, Tanwarin Sukkhapisit’s widely released Red Wine in the Dark Night, which explores similar themes of gays as outsiders thrown on the trash heap of society, but with a slightly lighter, fantasy-based tone.

Tam’s transformation is complete, and he’s crossed over to the other side. But what’s on that other side, and who is it for?

The Blue Hour might not be a movie for everyone, but fans of gay cinema and Thai art-house films will find something there.

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: The Blue Hour, Joe Hua Tangmo

Review: P'Chai My Hero (How to Win at Checkers (Every Time))

• Directed by Josh Kim
• Starring Ingkarat Damrongsakkul, Thira Chutikul, Arthur Navarat, Natarat Lakha
• Released in Thai cinemas on July 16, 2015; reviewed at Bangkok Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; rated 18+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

A much-needed fresh perspective in Thai cinema emerges in the indie drama P’Chai My Hero (พี่ชาย My Hero), a.k.a. How to Win at Checkers (Every Time).

It’s the unique view of outsiders – Chicago-born, Thai-raised writer Rattawut Lapcharoensap and Josh Kim, a Korean-American filmmaker from Texas. To tell the heart-warming, bittersweet tale of orphaned brothers growing up, writer-director Kim added flourishes of his own to two stories from Rattawut’s Sightseeing anthology, “Draft Day” and “At the Cafe Lovely”.

Checkers, which premiered to much acclaim at the Berlin film fest and is re-titled for Thailand as P’Chai My Hero, centers on the tender bond between insecure 11-year-old Oat and his openly gay older brother Ek. Orphaned at an early age, the working-class boys live with their aunt and her pest of a young daughter. They also have a tight-knit group of friends, including Ek’s higher-class boyfriend Jai and transgender pal Kitty.

The gay characters are naturally drawn, avoiding the tendency to turn such figures into shrieking, flailing comic relief. Ek is positively masculine as he tinkers with the motorbike his father left him. And it’s this ordinary treatment of queer folk that makes P’Chai My Hero so refreshing.

They are also quirky characters that seem plucked from the New Thai Cinema Movement of the late ’90s and early aughts, when the now-snoozeworthy Thai film industry was awakened by such figures as writer-directors Wisit Sasanatieng, Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Kongdej Jaturanrasamee and writer Prabda Yoon.

The aunt (Vatanya Thamdee) is superstitious to a fault, and spends her hard-earned dough buying eels to release in daily merit-making rituals. Her urchin of a daughter always seems to come out of nowhere, catching the boys at inopportune moments, and her forthcoming appearance is forever mystically presaged by a clucking red hen.

The boys hang out at a swimming pool with their ladyboy friend Kitty (Natarat Lakha), who is the embodiment of confidence as she struts past admirers in her red one-piece bathing suit, which shows off her prominent bulging groin. No one seems to care that she is a he, and Kitty points out that plenty of the guys at the pool are actually “into that”, albeit secretly.

So being gay is not really the issue. The real conflict of P’Chai My Hero is one that has always dogged Thai society – class differences. And those differences are highlighted by the approaching annual military draft lottery, which is unique to Thailand and thus compelling for the rest of the world. Ek pessimistically believes he is fated to pick a red card, be drafted into the army and sent to the restive South. It’s a subject Kim previously covered in his 2013 short documentary Draft Day, which covered transgenders taking part in the drawing.

Jai (Arthur Navarat) believes he can buy his way to picking a black card, and thus dodging military service. Yes, it’s our old friend corruption. This gives Oat an idea, but following through on his plan will have dire, life-shaping consequences for all.

Oat, portrayed remarkably by Ingkarat Damrongsakkul, begins to come out of his shell. Along with scheming for ways to keep his brother from being drafted, he also wants desperately to beat Ek at checkers. It’s a deal the brothers have, and if Oat wins, he’ll get anything he wants. Looking for a winning strategy, Oat scrapes together a few coins to buy one of those self-help books from a newsstand. The title is "How to Win at Checkers (Every Time)", but he’s too young to realise that that’s merely metaphorical and the only person being helped is the book’s shyster author. But, with his new win-at-any-cost ethos, Oat is finally granted his wish – to go with Ek for a night out in Bangkok.

And here’s where the extremely dark “At the Cafe Lovely” story kicks in. It takes the boys to the gay bar where Ek works for explosive events in a night that will haunt Oat forever. It’s this segment where the actor portraying Ek, Thira Chutikul, is particularly potent.

Having previously portrayed the young Chavoret Jaruboon in The Last Executioner, he’s one to keep an eye on.

Oh, and Michael Shaowanasai, a pioneering New Thai Cinema filmmaker known for his crossing-dressing Iron Pussy character, turns up as a bar patron who takes a creepy interest in Oat.

The tumultuous tale is bookended by segments that show Oat all grown up and portrayed by brooding singer-actor Tony Rakkaen. He’s haunted by nightmares and bad memories, but somehow has escaped the cycle of poverty and death that claims so many young Thai men. That might be another tale for Kim to tell.

Not only is this Thai film cobbled together from the English literature of a Thai-American writer by a Korean-American director, the producers hail from all over – Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand and the US. They are Edward Gunawan, Chris Lee, Andrew Thomas Tiernan and Anocha Suwichakornpong. This spirit of multinational collaboration could well signal a direction to follow in the Asean Economic Community as Southeast Asia’s filmmakers look for ways to tell stories that resonate with home audiences as well as those abroad.

(Cross-published in The Nation)




Related posts:

• How to Win at Checkers, Blue Hour and So Be It at Berlinale
• Checkers, Blue Hour to make Thai debut at Bangkok Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

Review: Y/our Music

• Directed by David Reeve and Waraluck Hiransrettawat Every
• Starring Wiboon Tangyernyong, Bun Suwannochin, Worranuj Kanakakorn, Nadda Srithongdee, Thaweesak Srithongdee, Boonchai Apintanaphong, Jarinee Liwarewitaya, Captain Prasert Keawpukdee, Nattapol Seangsukon, Chaweewan Phanthu, Chalardnoi Songserm, Thongsai Thabthanon, Sombat Simlhar
• Reviewed at Salaya Doc 2015; release at Lido cinemas, Bangkok, July 9-22, 2015; rated G
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

It's happened both times I’ve seen Y/our Music – there’s a magical moment when what’s happening on the screen is so overwhelmingly powerful and joyously incredible that the audience breaks out into applause, as if it were a live concert.

I imagine that same scene will be repeated many more times as the documentary by co-directors David Reeve and Waraluck Hiransrettawat Every comes to Bangkok cinemas next week.

A picture of contrasting music tableaux – from precious indie musicians in the city to veteran National Artists in the rural Northeast – Y/our Music toggles back and forth between the traffic-clogged streets of the capital and the sleepy villages of Isaan. Almost imperceptibly, the hum of the urban machine is replaced by the buzzing of insects in the rice fields.

Yet there’s a divide between the two scenes, which is acknowledged by that curious oblique slash in the movie’s title. But, rather than wringing worried hands over our nation’s political divisions, Y/our Music seems to embrace and accept the differences, and be content with just letting the city folk and their country counterparts do their own thing.

Made by a small crew using often-borrowed equipment, Y/our Music has an easy-going style, keeping out of the way so the musicians can tell their own stories. And, despite its low-budget roots, the film has polished production values, with the highlight being a top-notch sound design that’s best appreciated in a proper cinema.

Bangkok is represented by an oddball array of performers, while the Isaan artists are more obviously talented.

Among the Bangkok bunch is Wiboon Tangyernyong, an optician who fell in love with the sound of the saxophone and decided to make one himself out of bamboo. Very much an amateur, it took Wiboon much trial and error and many years to perfect his construction process. But, adapting his lens-grinding expertise to fashioning bamboo sax parts, he’s now made more than 800 of the warm-sounding woodwinds, which he sells along Khao San Road and to clients around the world.

There’s more do-it-yourself spirit with Bun Suwannochin and his mother-in-law Worranuj Kanakakorn, who form the cute indie-pop duo Sweet Nuj. With Bun strumming a ukulele and his mum-in-law singing, they release their music through their own Baichasong record label, and have attracted a niche following.

Even quirkier is Happy Band, a rock group put together as a pop-art project. Despite having only one member who could actually play an instrument – famed graphic designer Nadda “Lolay” Srithongdee on guitar – the band became sought after. The other members, Thaweesak Srithongdee on bass, Boonchai Apintanaphong on guitar and Jarinee Liwarewitaya on drums, improved over time, and Happy Band went from being merely art objects to a real band. They even performed at Bangkok’s Fat Festival back when it was still a thing.

The spirit of Suntharaporn Big Band leader Eua Sunthornsanan and his violin is recalled in segments devoted to Captain Prasert Keawpukdee, a gentleman who should be well known to shoppers at Chatuchak Market. It’s there where Prasert, 75, sells used violins, other instruments and Buddhist amulets. Weekends usually bring together fiddlers and other amateur musicians who go through the classic old tunes. At one point in the film, a farang customer grabs her male companion and the two start waltzing around the crowded market.

Merging the city and country scenes is Nattapol Seangsukon. Better known as DJ Maft Sai, his Paradise Bangkok nightclub parties sparked a hipster revival in mor lam and other music from Isaan. With a cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips, he’s shown sorting through vinyl LPs and 45s at Zudrangma, his vintage record store, and creating dance mixes of mor lam and retro Thai funk.

The talents from the countryside are more formidable and awe-inspiring. Among them are two National Artists, singers Chaweewan Phanthu (nee Damnern) and Chalardnoi Songserm, along with pin master Thongsai Thabthanon and the blind khaen virtuoso Sombat Simlhar.

Among the segments is a concert featuring Chaweewan and Chalardnoi backed by a handful of younger musicians, which offers reassurance that traditional Isaan folk music remains vital. What’s troubling, though, is that the only attendees at the concert are middle-aged and elderly women and a few children – all the men are away working in Bangkok.

A die-hard professional, Chaweewan is an especially domineering performer, neatly composed with her grey hair in a tight bun, despite the humid conditions and a quickly approaching monsoon storm that signals the end of the gig.

Thongsai, a master of the two-string pin or Isaan banjo, recalls developing his style during his military service in the 1960s, when he was among the first to add wiring to the ornately filagreed instrument. He plugged in and played alongside Western-style rock bands. He makes it look easy as he shows youngsters how to rock out Isaan style. Later, while holding court at his Ubon Rachathani home, he adds a dozen or so drummers for a scene that’s particularly memorable.

Finally there’s Isaan reed-pipe player Sombat, who became blind as a child and took up the khaen to earn a living. He’s recorded with most of the well-known mor lam and luk thung singers and often turns up on TV variety shows. Still based in the Northeast, where he’s shown sitting by a rice field as he teaches a young woman how to play the finicky instrument. He remains much in demand as a performer, and, after awhile, a crucial phone call from Bangkok brings Y/our Music full circle.

Related posts:

• Y/our Music sets Bangkok release, Vietnam dates
• Y/our Music sets North American premiere at SXSW
• Y/our Music is coming to Bangkok
• World premieres set for So Be It, W at Busan

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Review: Phi Ha Ayodhaya (The Black Death)

• Directed by MR Chalermchatri Yukol
• Starring Phongsakon Mettarikanon, Sonya Singha, Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit, Arpa Bhivalai, Tonpon Mahaton, Wiri Ladaphan, Chalad Na Songkhla
• Released in Thai cinemas on May 14, 2015; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

Where do zombies come from? Director MR Chalermchatri "Adam" Yukol offers one possible scenario with Phi Ha Ayodhaya (ผีห่าอโยธยา, a.k.a. The Black Death), which mixes zombie-horror gore with the stately pageantry of the Suriyothai and Naresuan historical epics.

The origin dates to 1565, during the reign of Maha Chakkraphat (husband of courageous elephant-battling Queen Suriyothai), when there was a plague in the old royal capital. The tropical malady was blamed on seafaring Portuguese and Persian traders, who sailed with the sickness upriver to the old capital. As far as public-health crises go, it was much worse, and way weirder, than is reported in the history books.

The phenomenon is first encountered on the battlefield, where the clanging of swords place Phi Ha Ayodhaya comfortably within the realm of Thai historical epics like Bang Rajan and the recently completed six-part saga The Legend of King Naresuan.

But then the piles of bodies of the recently slain begin squirming. They crawl to the merely injured and start chowing down. Flesh and sinew are torn apart, and one weary soldier, furtively witnesses it all. Wisely, he gets the heck out of Dodge.

Meanwhile there's more of the traditional set-up for a zombie/slasher/horror flick, with an amorous young couple, their traditional wrap-around garb unwrapped, ambushed during a make-out session along a babbling brook.

In swift order, the main characters are introduced. There's a young star-crossed couple - a nobleman's wilful daughter (played by Sonya Singha) and a bare-chested servant boy (teenybopper magnet Phongsakon "Toei" Mettarikanon). There's also a brothel owner (regular sneering baddie Chalad Na Songkhla), who is in conflict with a fiery hammer-wielding lady blacksmith (Wiri Ladaphan). He also pimps out a mute prostitute (wide-eyed starlet Arpa Bhivalai) who is favoured by a golden-hearted opium addict (Tonpon Mahaton), the husky-framed best pal of the hero.

Folks start stumbling upon chewed-up dead bodies in the jungle and aren't sure what to make of them. Maybe it's a tiger attack. But the temple's abbot suggests it's the plague and villagers start fleeing.

The zombie rules start out a bit vague. How long do the dead stay dead? But eventually the mouldering and munched-upon do wake back up with blank grey eyes and an everlasting hunger for living human flesh. It's a fact of undeath.

With the city overrun by zedheads, it's up to a disparate band of the still-living to hold on and hopefully survive the night. Barricading themselves in the brothel, the core characters are joined by that weary bearded soldier who knows exactly what he's up against. Portrayed by Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit, he's a swift swordsman who doesn't hesitate to lop off zombie heads. It's the only way to kill them. Today we all know that, but this was 450 years ago and nobody had a clue. This warrior was on the cutting edge.

Filmed in Kanchanaburi, on the massive period sets where Adam assisted his father, director MC Chatrichalerm Yukol, on the Naresuan epics, Phi Ha Ayothaya has the feel of a low-budget B-movie, with multi-hyphenate Adam taking credits for the bulk of the chores behind the lens. Though, as noted in the credits, it was still a big deal, creating some 3,000 jobs for extras, film crew, caterers, transport, etc.

The action is a bit off-kilter and comic-book like. For example, the lady blacksmith decides to ditch her swords and use heavy hammers, one in each hand, and bust zombie skulls. She earlier speared a tree with a molten-hot sword.

Meanwhile, the brothel owner has a muscle-bound, bare-chested bodyguard. He trades action-movie banter about duty and honour with the grizzled battlefield veteran, and somehow grabs up a huge cannon, which probably weighs a ton, and actually fires the thing and remains standing. Later he uses it like a baseball bat to swat zombie flies.

There are plenty of zombie-gore effects, but they are mostly confined to tightly framed segments. So there's a close-up of a head being split here and a zombie's forehead bisected there. The better parts are when zombies fill the frame and surround their victims, like ants swarming over a sugar cube.

The sound design contributes greatly to the feeling of dread. There's an aural sense of rubbery skin being stretched and bones snapped, but the overall audio cue is the zombies' terrifying roar, which sounds like a mix of a tiger and the dragons from Game of Thrones.

Adam probably deserves credit for making the first honest-to-goodness Thai zombie movie. Thai cinema has always been about Thai ghosts, of which there are many. Zombies, which are cinematically traced to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), are a relatively new genre. They've staggered in a couple times before, in Taweewat Wantha's ridiculously fun SARS Wars from 2004 and 2011's Gancore Gud by rapper Joey Boy. But while those films had various forms of shuffling dead-eye ghouls, I'm not sure they actually said they were zombies.

Adam's film does use the Z-word. It crops up in the subtitles whenever someone says phi ha.

Anyway, the plot is definitely inspired by Living Dead, which had bickering characters trapped in a farmhouse. Romero's follow-up, "Dawn of the Dead", was set in a shopping mall, and Edgar Wright's comedy tribute Shaun of the Dead had its heroes hanging out in a pub. Phi Ha Ayodhaya manages to channel those films, and for a moment I thought I heard a Queen song playing on the soundtrack.

The Thai spin on the zombie tale adds a bit of Buddhist spirituality, in which only those who survive let go of their sentimental, mortal attachments to friends, family and other loved ones. For those who linger in the embrace of the dearly departed for too long are surely doomed to be bitten themselves. It's best to chop off those heads before they turn.

(Cross-published in The Nation)

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