jürgen fauth’s muckworld

At a screening for Sunshine last month, Danny Boyle confessed that he felt directing romance was not his strength. After seeing his late-nineties bestseller adaptation The Beach, it’s easy to conclude that he’s on to something with that self-assessment. How else do you explain that when Leonardo DiCaprio and Virginie Ledoyen are having edenic sex on a remote Thai island, the most memorable thing about it is the Moby soundtrack?

In all fairness, Alex Garland’s tale of a utopian beach community run by an overprotective Tilda Swinton was hokum to begin with. At the time The Beach came out, I was living in my own tropical paradise of sorts, and like most things, it’s neither that good nor that bad. The Beach oversells its utopia at first, just to turn around and sell it out for the thriller finish, when sharks and evil pot farmers create trouble in paradise. But what kind of utopia doesn’t have a library or a movie theater, anyway?

The Beach. Danny Boyle, 2000. **

The films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul occupy a fertile space between narrative and art object, where simple interactions accumulate and gain weight in a web of meaning that is held together as much by space and mood as it is by character and story. Like Tropical Malady, his new film consists of two parts, both involving a love story between doctors. The press notes explain that what can just barely called the plot is loosely based on the memories of Weerasethakul’s parents.

Both halves of the film are set in hospitals, one in the past and the other in the present, and Syndromes and a Century is probably the strangest hospital drama since Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom: Buddhist monks come to tell their nightmares and finagle pills for their entire temple, dentists sing cowboy songs, and boozing chakra healers hide their liqour in prosthetic legs. One doctor tells a lengthy tale about wild orchids, another supposes that DDT stands for “Destroy Dirty Things.” Presents are exchanged, reincarnation is discussed, hearts are — perhaps — broken.

Among recent films, the surrealist pull of Syndromes and a Century doesn’t resemble anything as much as David Lynch’s Inland Empire, bathed in sunlight and freed from violent threats. Both films have a fragmented, time-bending structure in which themes and motifs return and form strange connections. Both directors are fond of dreamlike sequences in which the camera prowls hallways to a brooding score, and both culminate in bizarre, catchy musical numbers. But here the similarities end. While Lynch dregs shocking epiphanies from the gunk of the subconscious, Weerasethakul’s mysteries lie right on the surface, in the obvious, seemingly trivial moments that are riddle and answer at once. Opens in April.

Sang sattawat. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006. ****

• Rotten Tomatoes
• At the 2006 New York Film Festival
• Official Site
• More Inland Empire, Links
• After the jump, the trailer

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It sounded like a good idea: a retro Thai western, a pastiche of long-forgotten styles that’s part melodrama, part over-the-top gunslinging, all bathed in madly oversaturated colors. The tears of a waiting lover blur the inscription on a photograph; sad cowboys play forlorn melodies on their harmonicas; villains with pencil-thin mustaches laugh hearty belly laughs. Duels begin with Sergio Leone super close-ups, and then the gun barrels flare in staccato edits. Body parts go flying, and the heartthrob hero can shoot around corners. Even if you’ve never seen a Thai western in your life, most of this will seem mighty familiar from somewhere. (John Woo, Douglas Sirk, George A. Romero, and Lash La Rue have all been rightfully fingered as influences.)

But good looks and a wealth of allusions only get you so far. The pleasures of Tears of the Black Tiger lie exclusively in its winking, high-camp evocation of older movies and styles; there’s not much worthwhile beneath the ironic postmodern attitude. No matter how many lotus-decorated flashbacks and Bangkok beach walks the lovers take, their woes aren’t gripping enough, and scenes without emotional connection stretch out long past their welcome. The shootouts amuse but don’t thrill, and the few attempts at low humor fail–probably because everything is a meta-joke already. Opens Friday.

Fah talai jone. Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000. **

Rotten Tomatoes
[tags]wisit sasanatieng, film, thailand, western, pastiche, postmodern, 2 stars, melodrama, sergio leone, douglas sirk, george romero, lash la rue, john woo[/tags]