A Thai tiger leaps
IF HE WHO laughs last, laughs loudest, then Thai film director Wisit Sasanatieng could be forgiven for sucking down a good lungful and howling until his sides split. His loving resurrection of and homage to the 'pad thai western', Fah Talai Jone - literally 'The Heavens Strike The Thieves', but titled in English as The Tears Of The Black Tiger - has been chosen as the first Thai film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, which opens today - despite the fact it was shunned by Thai audiences.
Wisit isn't the type for big belly laughs, however. Even by the soft-spoken standard of the Thais, he is quiet. You can be eyeballing him and it is still a struggle to decipher the susurrus that passes as his voice. Indeed, he might just be the director with the vision and talent to turn the tired, mired Thai film world on its head - but with Wisit, you know it is going to be a revolution that sounds like a whisper.
If the elfin first-time director is the silent type, however, his film shows no such restraint. It is a lurid carnival of squint-inducing neon hues; a celluloid efflorescence of magenta and puce and ochre and emerald, which makes fare like Ma Vie En Rose and Diesel jeans advertisements seem wan by comparison.
It has been described variously as 'the daffiest, most kaleidoscopic movie', 'bringing the Technicolor Easter egg tints of Pierre et Gilles home to roost in a provincial Thai setting' and 'Zorro and Shane meet the Coen brothers in the Khorat Plateau'.
New York's famed journal The Village Voice enthused over its rapturous reception at the Vancouver International Film Festival last year, swept away by 'tempera sunsets bursting on a backdrop 10 feet [three metres] behind a lonesome cowboy, moustaches and guns seemingly made of licorice, lavender mud, gunfight blood textured after magenta cottage cheese and a fatal bullet ricochet in instant replay'. The film snared a Dragons and Tigers award in Vancouver against competition from hundreds of East Asian movies.
In his homeland, however, Wisit is a prophet without honour - and it rankles. 'I'm so happy that it has been chosen to be screened at Cannes,' he says, 'but I'm also very upset. I wanted the general audience in Thailand to enjoy my film, but here it was only popular among a small group of critics, while the Thai audience doesn't like it. I was heartbroken, really.'