Recently, I’ve managed to binge through movies from all around the world. It basically starts from interest in a country to its film history to the actual ritual of watching through. Currently, an interest in Thai film stems from an interest in the political and traumatic history of the region. Below, I review 2 Thai films. Hopefully, if you have interest, the reviews will interest you in checking out films made by talent from all across the world, with insights personal and national, so the visual becomes an entry into cultural understanding.
Graceland (Thailand: dir. Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2006), Siang ngiab/ Silencio (Thailand: dir. Sivaroj Kongsakul, 2007). Please check out the directors. Suwichakornpong has a gentle and meditative exploration of gender and femininity in her films. Kongsakul is known for being a pioneer in slow-cinema, contemplative long takes are his auteurist distinction.
Both Graceland and Silencio are based in Thailand. The first is primarily shot at night and the other at daytime, one begins in the nation’s capital, and the other is set in its perimeters, a rural town along the coast.
In Graceland, an Elvis impersonator meets a mysterious woman. The two spend the night journeying away from Bangkok. The film begins at night, the city is bright but it fades quickly as they drive away. The highway is the liminal space between the city and their destination, where most of the plot transpires. Under the cover of darkness the two protagonists meet and maybe relate, there is a crisis, then they have sex but there is no resolution- she leaves before he wakes up. The mysterious woman disappears and Jon, the Elvis impersonator, travels on his own to his rural home- when he gets there it is dawn. In the final scenes it is suggested that Jon is gay; shedding context on the events of the strange night.
All of “Silencio” is set during the day, although, it is often bleak and overcast. It is the story of a soundman trying to record silence- at the end of which it seems he finds what he was looking for.
Both films draw on a temporal analogy- darkness conceals and light reveals. The night is for hiding, often from what the day reveals. Jon’s return to Graceland is an almost static scene, only the light seems to move. The final shot of his face is ambiguous- although he is clearly shaken from the events of the night, his return home is not followed by relief; he remains despondent and at what particularly is never clear.
Graceland ends with a montage where it is shown that Jon had been impersonating or at least was inspired by another imitator- he is shown to be enthralled by the exuded joy and attempts to capture it himself. His impersonation therefore might be regarded as an attempt to construct a simulacrum of happiness. The soundman in his paradoxical attempts is not unlike Jon. He does not try to record the soundlessness of a vacuum (silence in its pure insubstantial sense) but instead searches for it in places. Because silence in that perfect sense does not exist in the mundane normal world, silence, he seems to suggest, is intersubjective, relative. It cannot be heard, as there is nothing to hear- it can only be felt. It is an analogy, and it bears greatly in the mind of the protagonist from Silencio, his reasons too are unclear. The themes of silence, search and unrequited desire bind these films like existential pauses. These pauses strike me as commonality amongst several independent Thai films. As to why, one can perhaps think about the psychic reasons behind such narrative choices.
