Thai film–well, Thai director, ultrahip Japanese star (and cameo from Takashi Miike), played out in English, Thai, and Japanese. Shot beautifully by Christopher Doyle, which made me half-expect another Wong Kar Wai knock-off, but director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang has his own absurdist approach to narrative and imagery despite some nods toward WKW’s obsessions. Like so many films of the last few years (or narrative, always?), the movie plays around with issues of life & death, coincidence and meaning, romance, violence. Japanese expat protagonist Kenji (Asano Tadanobu) seeks to off himself at the beginning of the film–but, he takes pains to note, not for reasons most people commit suicide, although he never names the explicit reasons. Instead he gets mixed up with a local woman Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak) and… well, there’s a couple murders, an accident, a jealous boyfriend, Yakuza. But things never heat up, never boil over into plottedness.
Instead, the film seems willfully even derisively dismissive of explicit reasons. “Big” things occur offscreen, out of frame, or just out of the narrative; there’s a sly humor to the displacement of expectations, replacing our focus on the subtle interplay of the two lead characters. And they’re a joy to watch. The film’s enthralling.
This is a truly wonderful movie. The pacing is deliberate but never seems too slow. The flashbacks and disjointed sequences enhance the dreamy nature of the movie. A house cleans itself as if by magic. A grimy Thai beachfront community is made beautiful. Plenty of sexual tension but if it is consummated, we never know. The yakuza tattoo on Kenji’s back is only seen once, from a distance and out of focus, which is exactly how the wider storyline is used in the movie. Truly, truly marvellous. Damn, I enjoyed it.
Watched this director’s earlier (available in the U.S.) film, 6ixtynin9, or in the original Thai A funny story about six and nine. It’s nowhere near as ambitious or effective (or beautiful) as Last Life, but it’s a funny, oddly-sweet little movie with some similar themes. It has the elements of a dark crime comedy, with a large sum of misplaced-then-misappropriated money and corpse after corpse requiring disposal. Yet its protagonist, Tum (Lalita Panyopas), is a laid-off secretary who kind of sidles into starring, getting caught up in the misdeeds of bumbling baddies, but then getting kind of caught up–invested–in the outcomes.
I’d half-recommend it, for those interested. But I mostly wanted to bump L.L.I.T.U. back into your consciousness; it is the “truly wonderful movie” Chris says, and deserves some love.