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The tale of a hired gun who falls in love with the man he’s ordered to kill, Poj Arnon’s ‘Bangkok Love Story’ has been packaged in the West –where, to date, it has done surprisingly well - as an exotic story of forbidden love. The box art features the two leads shirtless on a leather sofa, one defiantly staring the viewer down as the other toys with a penile revolver. The b/b Bonnie and Clyde vibe is reinforced by strap lines that range from ‘love is dangerous’ to ‘do you need a reason to love someone?’ to ‘to be together they will break every law.’ Initially the film comes on like a post-‘City of God’ (2002) urban crime drama, all grainy footage of tower blocks and sodium lights glistening on sweat-soaked flesh and cold steel. The opening, which portrays hitman Mehk (Rattanballang Tohssawat) dispassionately stalking and offing his targets, gives the impression that we’re in for a hard-edged journey through Bangkok’s underworld. This impression is misleading however, and viewers who come to ‘Bangkok Love Story’ looking for a grittily realistic mafia saga or a post-modern lovers-on-the-run movie a la Stone’s ‘Natural Born Killers’ (1994) are likely to be sorely disappointed. For ‘Bangkok Love Story’, which scored a hat trick at Thailand’s national film awards, actually belongs to a genre that we don’t really produce in the West anymore, one we prefer to think we’ve outgrown. As the emotional flashpoints and bitterly ironic twists of fate stack up, it becomes apparent that this is nothing other than a good old-fashioned melodrama - a gay, Thai, underworld melodrama, but heir nevertheless to a noble lineage of Victorian potboilers and golden-era Hollywood weepies. As with all melodramas, the characters’ personalities are less important than their status as playthings of the malign and capricious fates, and the plot is less a narrative than a catalogue of afflictions. Suicide, disfigurement, disease, revenge and other such slings and arrows of outrageous fortune hit home in jaw-droppingly rapid succession, and each emotional wrench is accompanied – with sledgehammer-subtle pathetic fallacy – by the clouds opening and the stirring strains of the film’s theme striking up (the theme, incidentally, will be irremediably graven onto the wax cylinder of your mind by the time the film finishes). The downpours are not just intense and frequent, they are instructive too, hinting to viewers that they’re expected to respond to what they’re seeing by making like the sky and crying their damned eyes out.
The film’s adherence to these (to Western eyes) naff and outmoded generic conventions might best be contextualized by a comparison with Jim Jarmusch’s Eastern-influenced hitman movie 'Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai' (1999), a film shot-through with an awareness that when it comes to gangster movies, you can’t make ‘em like they used to. Ghost Dog’s desiccated mobster stereotypes and Wu-Tang soundtrack were suggestive of an America (and a cinematic genre) in transition between 'The Godfather' (1972) and 'The Wire' (2002), a state of affairs where honour, hierarchy, violence and money remain key but are undergoing radical recontextualization. Ghost Dog, a man out of his time, looks to the East for a sense of purity and purpose, immersing himself in samurai lore but ultimately succumbing to the contingencies of time and place. Arnon, unlike Jarmusch, refuses to entertain the possibility that honour and heroism could ever seem played-out or exotic or absurd, that a good vs. evil structure could be thought reductive or anachronistic, that audiences might be able to cope with political and economic contextualization. 'Bangkok Love Story' is as far removed from such mundane concerns as its heroes’ rooftop love nest is from street level. One benefit of this simplistic approach is that you do not alienate demographics who might be bored or alienated by such complexities – like, say, teenage girls. ‘Bangkok Love Story’ has more than a whiff of yaoi (the Japanese culture of girl-made or girl-targeted portrayals of gay male romance - often unofficial spin-offs from established books, films or videogames) about it. Mehk and Iht (Chaiwat Thongsaeng) sometimes feel like they have been transplanted from another fiction and made to couple in compliance with the wishes of a hormonally overheated fan. There’s sequences in the film that resemble nothing so much as those fan-made YouTube tribute videos where a montage of love scenes from something like ‘Twilight’ (2008) gets set to a top 40 ballad – not that this has deterred fans from piecing together their own homages, much to the delight of sundry commenters with Goth-y-sounding usernames, whose comments both testify to the film’s affective heft and prove that there are viewers out there to whom the idea that the film could be thought camp would never occur. It’s entirely in keeping with the film’s pop video vibe that Mehk, though initially presented an amoral gay murderer in the vein of Jean Genet’s Querelle, stalking victims through the nocturnal city, turns out to merely be a mixed-up, affection-starved and rather shy young man. Glaring sulkily from under his sable mane, with his emo attitude and his motorcycle, he’s a modern take on the old Brando/Jimmy Dean archetype of the bad boy biker with a heart of gold. As with the movie in general, Mehk only makes sense if you take him totally seriously - something that proves easier said than done.
But are we meant to take ‘Bangkok Love Story’ seriously? After all, director Poj Arnon’s last feature, 'Haunting Me' (2007), was a lighthearted farce about a transvestite ghost. A cross between 'Ju-On' (2000) and 'Hairspray' (1988), the movie featured a reputedly excruciating parody of 'Brokeback Mountain' (2005). There is also a 'Charlie’s Angels' (2000) pastiche on his C.V. How then, is one supposed to interpret Arnon’s decision to follow the film with a (so to speak) straight-faced portrayal of star-crossed gay love? One answer might be that Arnon is simply a very clever man. What would otherwise have been a run-of-the-mill action-heavy melodrama has, by virtue of its homosexual content, become a courageous and controversial film. While its anguished seriousness may appear over the top, in a Thai cinematic tradition where gays are often portrayed as flaming caricatures it is a departure from the norm and has won Arnon respect from activists. 'Brokeback Mountain' has repeatedly been invoked in descriptions of 'Bangkok Love Story', and, to the extent that both movies take genres that have always had a strong homoerotic subtext (the Western and the buddy/action movie) and use them as the basis for telling decade-spanning gay love stories, it’s a valid comparison. They’re very different movies though, and unlike the brooding and glacial 'Brokeback Moutain', Arnon’s movie is unashamedly flashy and exhilaratingly camp. While it takes pains to paint its heroes love as pure it’s also a highly body-centric movie: there’s plenty of shirtlessness and bathing and erotically fraught field surgery (bullet removal, ripped tees for tourniquets, sedulous wound dressing) and one of the leads is a former underwear model. TLA, the film’s US and UK distributor, has a portfolio that encompasses all aspects of queer cinema, from po-faced coming-of-age dramas to ultra-puerile gay gross-out movies. As such, it’s not inconceivable that they’re aware ‘Bangkok Love Story’ - as a film which can be taken either as a serious love story or as a seriously camp slice of Eastern esoterica (my liver’s spasming just thinking about the drinking games you could use this film as the basis for) – has formidable crossover potential. Susan Sontag noted in her controversial ‘Notes on Camp’ that ‘One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp... Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.’ But just how is one to distinguish? And who is to say that everyone in a cinema or on a film set has to agree as to whether the movie in question is a legitimate masterpiece or a camp classic? Tohssawat and Thongsaeng’s absolute conviction actually comes off as strangely moving, fitting their characters’ status as fate’s dupes. Socialist playwright Howard Brenton described as ‘sudden lights’ those moments in his work when stock characters become self-aware, realising that they are mere caricatures (‘It is’ he observed of the effect, ‘very cruel’). After everything 'Bangkok Love Story’s' heroes go through (from bereavement and maiming to having to wander around all the time in pants that are patently several sizes too small) you can only feel grateful they never attain self-reflexivity. Even Job would have crumpled at the news God was only being ironic.
Linda Williams argued in 'Hard Core' that it’s porn and horror movies’ focus on (and solicitation of) bodily fluids that is to blame for their marginality. The same could be said of melodrama, a genre meant to get the pulse pounding and the tears flowing. Whether it is tears of sorrow or of laughter that 'Bangkok Love Story' elicits will depend on your disposition, but either way the film’s credulity-testing twists make it, in its own way, kind of compelling. While it is hard to claim the film is on a par with the masterful melodramatics of Fassbinder or Sirk, it might at least cause you to wonder why a Western gay mob melodrama is so tricky to imagine.
Country: Thailand
Budget: £
Length: 90mins
Filmography
‘Brokeback Mountain’, 2005, Ang Lee, Alberta Film Entertainment
‘Charlie’s Angels’ 2000, McG, Columbia Pictures Entertainment
‘City of God’, 2002, O2 films, Fernando Meirelles,
‘Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai’, 1999, Jim Jarmusch, Artisan
‘The Godfather’, 1972, Francis Ford Coppola, Alfran productions
‘Hairspray’, 1988, John Waters, New Line Cinema
‘Haunting Me’, 2007, Poj Arnon, Five Star Productions
‘Ju-On’, 2000, Takashi Shimizu, Toei Video Company
'Natural Born Killers', 1994, Oliver Stone, Warner Bros. Pictures
‘Twilight’, 2008, Catherine Hardwicke, Summit Entertainment
Bibliography
Susan Sontag, 'Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Vintage, 2001
Libda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible, University of California Press, 1999
Pub/2009
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