Filming Locally, Thinking Globally: The Search for Roots in Contemporary Thai Cinema

by Kong Rithdee

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Palme d'or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives

It was an odyssey, a long, seafaring voyage through international oceans, islands of worries, local uncertainty, the lure of sirens, nostalgic soul-searching, Technicolored dreams, infernal nationalism, fists and elbows—through fears and doubts and hopes and optimism. In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, Thai cinema traveled the Earth in search of itself. It has found, in a sense, what it once lost, and yet, with the wobbly march of a rural ingénue set free in the global showground, the search blissfully continues.

When Apichatpong Weerasethakul defied the Croisette odds, thanked all the ghosts, and teased Tim Burton on that May night he rose like the darkest horse to win the Palme d’Or, the decade of insecurity seemed vindicated. The history of cinema now embraced Thailand. Welcome to the club, says the world, or at least the Western world. Fittingly, it was on the same stage, Cannes, nine years prior, at the dawn of the new millennium, that a barnyard Siamese cowboy, half-drunk on eighty-proof moonshine and manic possibilities, surged from obscurity to grab the world by its balls. In 2001, Fah Talai Jone (Tears of the Black Tiger) announced the arrival of contemporary Thai cinema and ambushed unsuspecting observers with its mad cocktail of nostalgia and anachronism. That film by Wisit Sasanatieng set up one half of the parentheses that was completed by Apichatpong’s Loong Boonmee Raluek Chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) in 2010. A lot happened between them, and then beyond.

On the surface, the two films hardly share a trait, let alone a cinematic ideology—one is a gleefully lurid pastiche, the other a metaphysical pondering in sober hues. On a closer look, however, both films are grounded in something shared by a number of Thai filmmakers of the past decade: a collective subconscious, which attempted to retrieve and redefine the identity of Siamese cinema through both the lenses of local film history and newfound influences of the globalized epoch, through the legacy of our hazy past and the pressing, tangible present. Shot to fame at an international arena like Cannes, both films were actually an attempt to find and bring Thai cinema home.

Take a recent exhibit. The film series “Blissfully Thai,”1 put together by the Asia Society in New York this past May-June, in which eight films made after 2000 were screened, including Uncle Boonmee and Tears of the Black Tiger, captured that spirit and hinted at the running threads shared by directors who are seemingly disparate in purpose and temperament. Also showing in that program were Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Monrak Transistor (2001) and Ploy (2007), Mingmongkol Sonakul’s Isan Special (2002), Yongyoot Thongkongtoon’s The Iron Ladies (2000), Aditya Assarat’s Hi-so (2010), and Apichatpong’s 2002 film Blissfully Yours. Not that these titles by mavericks and young auteurs represent the vast ovum of contemporary Thai cinema that has also spawned trashy horror flicks, arm-flapping transsexual curios, repetitive action sagas, and chest-thumping nationalist epics—we’ll get to them later. But for those eight films (and many more) that began traveling the world since the last year of the 1990s, they put forth the image of “Thai cinema” as international observers perceive us. In the process, they also represent the effort to locate Thai cinema as part of a shifting global esthetic, as part of Asian film culture, and, most importantly, as a fixture in the domestic consciousness that has been groomed to regard movies as mere amusement that merits no cultural scrutiny.

Yongyoot Thongkongtoon's The Iron Ladies

Rerooting

Before directing Tears of the Black Tiger, Wisit Sasanatieng wrote the scripts for two films that resuscitated the near flatline of his homegrown cinema. For his friend Nonzee Nimibutr, in 1997 Wisit wrote the retro-fitted Daeng Bireley and Young Gangsters, a hoodlum escapade set in 1956; then in 1999 he rerooted the oldest Thai ghost yarn from the mid-century and gave Nang Nak a nostalgic push that endeared contemporary viewers. It worked beyond their expectations—Daeng Bireley was a major hit, and Nang Nak shot to all-time-high box-office earnings (to be broken later) and spent years touring the festival circuit. The two films succeeded in reconnecting the audience—among them the new middle class who had for a while displayed a deep-seated mistrust for inane local productions—to the visual adaptation of familiar narratives and made cinema matter again among Thais.

But while Nonzee’s image of vintage Thailand is a straightforward re-creation of lulling canals, lovelorn banshees, and the elegantly lost past, Wisit’s own plan of rerooting went far beyond postcard realism and into metacinematic exploits. Channeling his fetishistic passion for old Technicolored films, he went prepop and posteverything in his directorial debut that rocked Cannes yet tanked disastrously at home. Tears of the Black Tiger reaches back into the treasure trove of Siamese-cinema antics and flaunts its artificiality like a badge of honor. It’s not an exhibition of nostalgia; it is a cosmology of Thai film history rebooted and retooled with a good mix of love, care, and lunacy. When that dementedly colorful film flopped at home yet thrilled (or bewildered) critics worldwide, earning selective releases in many territories—this was the early 2000s when Asian films were making an onslaught on the world stage—the long and giddy search for the identity, or identities, of contemporary Thai cinema, kick-started by the two Nonzee films Wisit previously wrote, became the silent discourse among upcoming Thai directors at the turn of the century.

Apichatpong made his Mysterious Object At Noon in 2000, followed by Blissfully Yours in 2002. Both movies, especially the first, drew on the reservoir of old-fashioned storytelling tradition unique to Thai melodrama—radio plays, rural performances, oral tales—as well as the formalism of Western experimental filmmaking. The filmmaker’s fusion of Third-World surrealism, Siamese candor, and sci-fi/spiritual contemplation would later launch an ongoing debate on the meaning of “Thainess” in the globalized period when those themes reincarnated in different forms in his subsequent Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century, and Uncle Boonmee. At around the same time, Pen-ek Ratanaruang surveyed the wreckage of Thai genre films left smoldering after the gloom of the 1990s, and cooked up the cheerfully cynical Fun Bar Karaoke (1997) and 6ixtynin9 (1999). But it was Monrak Transistor, which was screened at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2002 and partly inspired by an old Thai musical film from the 1960s, that contributed to the collective search for our lost Eden.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe

The New York-educated Pen-ek half-joked on several occasions that with Monrak Transistor he was remaking Woody Allen’s Radio Days in upcountry Thailand. Sure, we got the joke: here’s a very Thai narrative told with Thai wit (and beautiful Thai songs), yet it has this dash of style that’s not quite culture-specific. The most startling thing about the film, which recounts the misfortune of a poor country singer, is that we can’t pinpoint in which period the story is set; it looks like now, but it might just as well be twenty or fifty years ago. This timelessness, this casual defiance of being detained by the exactness of history and moment, makes the film a precious memento of the past—like the transistor radio in the title—and also a shining relic of the present. Later on, Pen-ek would take his local wit and Thai in-jokes on an international expedition in Last Life In the Universe (2004) and Invisible Waves (2006), both starring Japanese characters lost in the Thai labyrinths, before the filmmaker found the home-court advantage again in Ploy (2007) and Nymph (2009). He had branched out, but it’s the root that he has always been looking for.

This search for roots is not a conscious labor to return to the established, or “official,” culture—such effort belongs to the Thai Culture Ministry, a reliable source of laughter and bewilderment. Rather, it’s an expedition of young men and women who’ve rummaged through the old boxes in the corner of the attic to find what’s still useful for their new ventures. And these boxes have yielded a disparate content. Aditya Assarat, a Thai who grew up in the U.S., is well known for his post-tsunami ode Wonderful Town (and his new, semiautobiographical Hi-So), but it was his two short films in the early 2000s that represented his homecoming rite. Motorcycle (2000) is set in a poor rural village—an environment very remote from the director’s city life—and the mournful narrative involves a farmer who receives the news of the death of his son. In Waiting (2003), Aditya tells the story of a country man who travels to the village of his old lover. This near-literal attempt to reconnect with “Thailand”—and not just “Bangkok”—is also manifest in Isan Special, a 2002 film about an eventful bus trip to the poor Northeast by Mingmongkol Sonakul, who also spent years studying filmmaking in the U.S.

Uruphong Raksasat's Agrarian Utopia

Yet some filmmakers have never left home. Without having to make a detour across the continents, Uruphong Raksasat seems to have carried his roots around in his pocket, and his brand of pastoral cinema is a synthesis of family history and neoclassical penchant. Uruphong’s series of short films in the mid-2000s all took place in the bucolic farmland of his northern hometown, culminating in the startling Agrarian Utopia (2009), a nonfiction feature that distils the fifty years of our failed economic development into two hours of the bliss and agony of the farming existence. Told through two families of rice growers—rice, Uruphong reminds us, is the ancient monument of Southeast Asian glory much taken for granted by Southeast Asians themselves—the film is bracketed by noisy political protests that offer a bitter critique of the society without appearing supercilious. Movies about farmers basically disappeared from Thai screens around the late 1970s; what Uruphong did, and is still doing, is fighting for a fair share of screen time for the country’s most important profession. His farmers aren’t the stuff of nostalgia, and he dusted them off from the attic not because they’re old, but because it’s almost a crime for contemporary Thai cinema to have forgotten them for so long.

Love Thy Nation

While the films mentioned above went around the world, the narrative at home carried the whiff of a parallel universe. With the international acknowledgement of Thai filmmakers such as Apichatpong, Pen-ek, Wisit, and Uruphong came another discourse, one that continues not so silently today. Following the flop of Tears of the Black Tiger and other auteur films of that period, the complaint was that new Thai filmmakers were making movies for foreign audiences and bypassing the taste and preferences of the locals. If we look at the eight films shown at the Asia Society, for instance, only The Iron Ladies made serious money. Even Pen-ek’s Monrak Transistor, which carried a commercial flavor, was a disappointment at the Bangkok box office. Uruphong’s Agrarian Utopia, despite support from the local cultural agency, had to wait over a year to get a release on one screen. Likewise with Aditya’s Wonderful Town and Hi-So, all of Apitchatpong’s films, as well as Anocha Suwichakornpong’s multiple award-winning Mundane History—they exist on the periphery of the mainstream money-making machine.

Trying to find the long road home, those films found the home padlocked (granted, the decade-long ignorance was slightly improved after Apichatpong’s big win at Cannes last year). In general, the mainstream Thai film scene was enlivened by the popularity of Nonzee’s Nang Nak, which proved that a Thai film could still court Thai audiences, and also by Yongyoot’s The Iron Ladies, which proved that a blatantly commercial endeavor could pay off handsomely. While the mavericks were busy rerooting, the skillful workmen of the multiplex venues found their own way to bring Thai films into the local consciousness and to spin the wheel of the industry. In the past decade, Thai movies have exploited recurring formulas in slapstick comedy starring TV comedians, ghost stories that rode on the wave of Asian horror, and, with the arrival of Ong-Bak and Tony Jaa in 2001, a series of fist-and-elbow action showcases that rely on the sweaty exoticism of Third-World hard men. Of the more notable names, directors such as Yuthlert Sippapak wired those elements with a touch of cynicism; Pakpoom Wongpoom and Banjong Pisanthanakul made Thai horror films like Shutter that became global hits; Prachaya Pinkaew transformed cheap kick-boxing flicks into lucrative exports; and Poj Anont, unheard of elsewhere, has built a cultlike following around his brand of gay comedy, trashy ghost yarns, and gay/ghost camp hybridity that’s as uniquely Thai as Apichatpong’s reincarnated monkey ghost.

National and historical epic The Legend of Suriyothai by Chatrichalerm Yukol

Sitting above all of this merry-go-round is something else entirely. The rerooting took on a literal approach and the reconnection with the (imagined?) glorious past received a nationalistic treatment in a series of historical epics. At times they seemed more than just movies; they were like national projects, funded largely by tax money. As of last year, the three highest-grossing Thai films of all time are historical epics made by Prince Chatrichalerm Yukol—Suriyothai in 2001, Legend of King Naresuan Part 1 and Part 2 in 2007, and, after a long delay, Part 3, which was released this April (Part 4 and 5 are coming soon!).

Suriyothai came out the same year as Monrak Transistor and Tears of the Black Tiger, and a year after Mysterious Object at Noon. And while Pen-ek, Wisit, and Apichatpong seemed to be searching for the home of Thai cinema at a metaphysical or contextual level, Prince Chatrichalerm, a respected figure, straightened that idea out, mobilized a troop of war elephants around it, and plastered it with the gold leaves of sixteenth-century palaces while the Burmese army, our perennial cinematic villain, stood watching (or smirking). While Uruphong sang the song of rice in Agrarian Utopia, the royal director erected a monument of official history populated by a kingly presence and dashing court warriors. Upon its release, Suriyothai was a phenomenon unseen before by Thai cinemagoers: it was huge in every respect, and, seriously, its record $17-million gross is unlikely to be broken in my lifetime.

In the covert contest to define “Thainess,” this traditional interpretation easily won. Interestingly, however, while there was a clear attempt by the authorities to promote this image of Thai cinema at the international level, Suriyothai and the King Naresuan films were hardly seen outside the country. In 2001, after the film was released, Francis Ford Coppola, an old friend of Prince Chatricharlerm from their college years, came to Bangkok and reedited Suriyothai for a U.S. release. Still, these historical monuments seem understudied by critics in their discussion of New Thai Cinema, despite the fact that these expensively-made quasipropaganda and “official” cultural artifacts occupy a prominent place in the local consciousness and reflect, to an extent, the political climate in Thailand during the past decade. Pairing Suriyothai with Monrak Transistor, or King Naresuan 1 and 2 with Agrarian Utopia or Ong-Bak, we can glimpse the inner dialog that courses through contemporary Siamese cinema, probably the same way that Tears of the Black Tiger and Uncle Boonmee constituted the parentheses and outlined the scope of Thai movies of the past ten years.

Like the study of other national cinemas, the topography of Thailand and its cinematic representation—esthetically, anthropologically, and politically—doesn’t yield a neatly-wrapped conclusion. The question of “Thainess” is as intriguing as it is futile, and as tempting as it is unnecessary, especially when filmmakers like Apichatpong, Pen-ek, and Uruphong are testing so many real and imaginary borders of cinema that transcend nationality, when they’re not making films just for Thai people, but for anybody who still cares about the possibility of cinema. Uncle Boonmee didn’t mark the end of the odyssey, because the sirens are still calling, because more Naresuan movies are coming out, and because Tony Jaa is shooting a new ass-kicking blockbuster with the aim to conquer the world. Is the rerooting finished? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it never will be.

1 For further information on the Asia Society “Blissfully Thai” film series, including videos of talks with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mingmongkol Sonakul, and Pen-ek Ratanaruang, visit the Asia Society Website at http://asiasociety.org/blissfullythai.

Distribution Sources:

Wonderful Town and Nang Nak are distributed by Kino International, www.kino.com. Ong-Bak, Tears of the Black Tiger and The Legend of King Naresuan, Parts 1 and 2 (retitled Kingdom of War, Parts 1 and 2) are distributed by Magnolia Pictures, www.magpictures.com. Isan Special is available from www.objectifsfilms.com. Last Life in the Universe and 6ixty9 are distributed by Palm Pictures, www.palmpictures.com. Mysterious Object at Noon is distributed by Plexifilm, www.plexifilm.com. Blissfully Yours, The Iron Ladies, Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, and Uncle Boonmee are distributed by Strand Releasing, www.strandreleasing.com. An abbreviated version of Suriyothai (retitled The Legend of Surioythai) is distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, www.sonypictures.com.

Kong Rithdee writes for The Bangkok Post, Thailand's leading English-language newspaper, and also directs documentary films.

Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXVI No.4 2011

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