I see at least one film everyday. It’s often a tall order and I have to plan in advance to have a supply of good films on hand. I am a member of two video rental shops, a big commercial one and one small art-house place. I also rent from the internet rental house which sends me 2 DVDs by the post, according to my wish list. I watch them and post them back to them and they send me two new ones. I also go to the cinemas as and when there are interesting films shown there. (rare)

Pimwalee THAMPANYASAN as Koi

I saw Soi Cowboy yesterday, a film that was in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section of the Cannes film festival this year. The film hasn’t been released yet but I was given a preview DVD by the producer Joseph Lang, who is my weekly beer buddy. We hook up mostly on Fridays at 6:00 pm at the local pub and chat about films and scripts for a few hours. We throw ideas at each other over a few pints of bitters and ales.

Soi Cowboy is written and directed by Thomas Clay, and the name is derived from homonym girlie bar district in Bangkok. The film is the story of an overweight European man called Tobias and his tiny pregnant Thai girlfriend, Koi. It is suggested that she worked at ‘Soi Cowboy’ and had been ‘saved’ by Toby.

The film begins in black and white with top angle shot over the couple lying in bed. Toby looks expectantly at the girl but she turns away, her back to him, her pregnant ‘bump’ away from him. The film slowly deconstructs the matinal life of the couple. She eats rice and fish while he showers his fat body in the background. He makes square bread toasts and eats them quietly. They don’t say much. We see mundane scenes from a strange marriage through very long and lingering slow shots. The camera travels slowly towards a toaster and we wait along with Tobias for the toast to pop up, but it does not. The slow pace of the film gives us the time to ponder upon the two people. We wonder how these two got together; Tobias, the corpulent ‘farang’ expat living a cushy life in Bangkok with the exchange rate and Koi, the tiny pretty ex-prostitute and bar girl, who sees this as a way out of her poverty stricken life.

There is a scene later in the film where a young Thai girl (who has a Swiss boyfriend) explains how she found it a difficult having sex at first with the white people but slowly one gets used to it, she says. She lists European nationalities and points out their good and bad points. Italians want sex all the time, dirty sex she says. An older woman sitting with them says that it’s alright for a girl to do that in order to help the rest of the family. The girl is waiting for her visa to go and visit her boyfriend in Switzerland. The others look at her in awe, jealous of her elevated status.

The relationship between the two portrays the neo-colonialist ‘north-south’ existence between the powerful and the desperate. Tobias, who would normally be shunned in his own hemisphere for his over weight body, lives in Thailand with a pretty woman in exchange of ‘a good life’. The deconstruction continues… together they visit a temple ruin.

The story suddenly ends and a new story begins, this time in accentuated colours, where the same characters play other roles. The film becomes a shady Thai gangster film… with Lynchian overtones. The pretty girl Koi’s brother is sent on a contract mission back to his village to assassinate his own brother.

The ‘climax’ shows us Tobias (in his new character as a white gangster) with his Thai counterparts waiting in a Lynchian version of ‘Soi Cowboy’ bar for Cha, the assassin brother to return. A male crooner sings on a velvet curtained stage. Koi sits with another prostitute on a sofa in a blue silk dress. The film does not end, it stops showing us any more. But we live with them, think about them.

Thomas Clay’s ‘Soi Cowboy’ dilutes and rejects the conventional narrative and straightforward realism. It does not delve in a simplistic causality and neither uses the term of ‘beginning’ or ‘end’. The protagonists and personages exist and act with complete uncertainty like they would do in real life. There are no simple explanations given to us or any formulae of logic. The ‘pseudo realism’ of commercial cinema is left aside for poetic interpretation and modern visual art. Soi Cowboy destroys the hegemony of the plot and the linear narrative structure.

A must-see for Indian cinephiles and cineastes, for cinema must be seen from a different light. It must be understood from a different light.

We must find a subversive viewpoint against the fascism of linearity and melodramatic boredom that invades our screens.

Or the Joker will become the only reference and parts of it ‘research’ – for all films to come.