|
Soi Cowboy review
:. Director: Thomas Clay
:. Starring: Nicolas Bro, Somluk Kuamsing
:. Script: Thomas Clay
:. Running Time: 1:57
:. Year: 2008
:. Country: Thailand, UK
:. Official Site: Soi Cowboy
|
One recalls The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael as a UFO whose final rape scene shook the Croisette in Cannes in 2005. Since then, Thomas Clay has made a name for himself. He returns with a film about a farang (a term well known to tourists and expats in Thailand which means foreigner) and a young Thai woman about to be married. What does this film, which sounds like a dive into the world of sex tourism, have in store?
Entirely filmed in Thailand, Soi Cowboy takes its title from a red light district of Bangkok. Anyone who has backpacked in this country will recognize the tiny details that punctuate the contemplative shots in which the camera moves, like the old lady moving at a snail's pace with her walker in the shot's ridiculously interminable sequence.
From the opening of the film, Clay poses the shot. He films a country with a thousand colors in black and white to better emphasize the surface of fleeting relationships that foreigners weave with locals who appear so welcoming. The long segment that opens the film presents an American whose obesity makes him the archetype of the West taking his revenge on the complex mysteries that govern relations between men and women. Here, the women come to you. The Thai woman has the power, with your financing, to multiply your sex appeal enough for you to compete with a Brad Pitt or Jude Law. From the first shots, Clay plays on the extremely quiet cohabitation of two antipodal bodies: a tiny Thai and an obese farang. Not a glance, no words exchanged. It's understood that the only loving thing about this relationship is its weigh in cash, contrary to the message of happiness vehiculed by the photo of a couple, on a wall in the backgrounde for happiness.
Clay shows the successive details of a dreary everyday life, shopping at the corner 7 Eleven or in the shopping malls of Siam Square, buying pirated DVDs (a wink to the director when the American asks if the seller has The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael and purchasing Viagra at the pharmacy. The film serves as a pretext for the evocation of a country fantasized about from a Western point of view: getaways to the temples in Ayutthaya by train, tuk-tuk, haggling for the purchase of a jewel whose price will still be out of proportion to its real value, disapproving looks of other foreigners, tears and silence after sex experienced as a chore when the magic of the meeting no longer works… The film manages to draw a rather precise portrait of the illusion of happiness that foreigners buy in Thailand.
Has Clay badly digested the films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul? While the couple is buried in the darkness of Ayutthaya, here he abandons the careful camera movements for a switch in treatment: color, which is more documentary-like, to the rural region of Isan where most Thai sex workers come from. From the emptiness of a romantic relationship, the film moves through the world of the Mafia, where a young man beheads his brother on behalf of a gangster, who wastes no time in getting rid of him by putting a bullet in his head. This eruption of violence in the surreal setting of a tacky dancing studio suddenly turns the movie into a failure. Clay misses his marriage between Eros and Thanatos. Too bad.
Moland Fengkov
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
|
MAILING LIST
Get our reviews by e-mail
We'll never Spam you
|
|
|
