GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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Bangkok
Love Story TLA Releasing, Director/Screenplay: Starring: Unrated, 90 minutes |
A
Taste of Thai
Ever watch a movie that began splendidly and then just disintegrated before your eyes? I truly wish that the subject of this column didn't fall into that category because I was spellbound by its first half hour. Bangkok Love Story from writer/director Poj Arnon was, according to Wikipedia.org, "the film that everyone was talking about" when it was released in its native Thailand during the summer of 2007. It was a milestone for its depiction of gay men on the Thai screen as previous portrayals consisted, for the most part, of stereotyped transvestites (or kathoey in their native tongue). Bangkok Love Story weaves the provocative tale of a police informant and an assassin who fall in love. |
 I
should use the characters' original Thai names but methinks it will
be easier for potential viewers if I stick with the Americanized ones used
in the subtitles. Cloud (Rattanaballang Tohssawat) is a young man "who does
a job that no one wants to do." His brother, Fog, and their mother, are
both destitute and suffer from AIDS complications. In order to acquire the
funds to care for them, he works as a hired assassin. But he is a hitman
with a conscience; he only kills "scumbags" and we observe him at close
hand as he stalks and then shoots his prey in the flashy opening montage.
Afterwards, he meets his brother and tells Fog that he is going to take
him and their mother away from the slums of Bangkok to the mountains of
Mae Hong Son Province as soon as he finishes one last job. |
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 Cloud
took a bullet in the shoulder and he clings to Stone as they drive away.
They hide out in an abandoned shack on a rooftop. Stone takes off his shirt
and binds Cloud's wound with it, removes the bullet, and then nurses him
back to health. The next scenes literally ooze with homo-eroticism as both
men, usually bare to the waist, (and in very close proximity), continually
check each other out when the other isn't looking, while hiding out until
the coast is clear. This part of the film is executed masterfully. |
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 The
sexual tension brews to a boiling point and then finally explodes when Stone
sponges Cloud's back as he bathes. They look at each other, kiss, and then
suddenly they are all over each other. The photography in the ensuing seduction
scene between these two very masculine men, (which was probably eye-popping
in Thailand cinemas), resembles a bleached Calvin Klein commercial; set
on the rooftop against the Bangkok skyline, it is steamy and sensual, underscored
with lush, romantic piano music. But when it's all over, Cloud freaks, throws
Stone out and pours water over himself to cleanse away what just happened.
The heartbroken Stone returns to his fiancee but things are no longer the
same between them. |
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 So
far, so good, but the rest of the film goes downhill from there. The famed
Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was once criticized by his countrymen because
his films were supposedly "too Western." This would be an apt critique of
the scenes that follow. Director Arnon succumbs here to all of the worst
cliches of a low budget Hollywood tearjerker with endless scenes of the
men sulking and pining for each other, watching from afar with tears running
down their cheeks - all scored to the most God-awful, banal and repetitive
New Age piano music you will ever be forced to listen to, making Yanni or
John Tesh sound like Rachmaninoff by comparison. |
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On the plus side, the colorful photography is terrific and makes excellent use of the locations and cityscapes of Bangkok. How many films have you seen where a shoot-out takes place in a Buddha statue warehouse? The film is steeped in Thai culture, making for a very exotic filmgoing experience. |
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 I
cannot completely dismiss Bangkok Love Story
because romantic gay movies are hardly the norm in Thailand and for that,
at least, the director should be commended for his courage. I didn't receive
any press with my screener and so I did a little research on imdb.com and
Wikipedia.org. Poj Arnon crafted another film, scandalous in its day, called
Go-Six (2000) which depicted a love triangle between a man and two women
(one of them sexually ambiguous) and in 2003 he directed Cheerleader
Queens which featured teen-aged transvestites who want to be cheerleaders.
He is currently filming Haunting Me, a horror comedy about three
aging queens who battle ghosts in their apartment building. |
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In closing, I wish I could say that Bangkok Love Story is Thailand's Brokeback Mountain, (I suppose that it is on a conceptual and cultural level, but not on an artistic one) but I would be dishonest if I did. Still, I highly recommend the film for its first half hour before it turns into an endurance test. Southeast Asian gay love stories, after all, are hardly a dime a dozen.
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His
target is a man named Stone (Chaiwat Thongsaeng). His orders, this time,
are to bring the man in alive and he abducts Stone in a crowded outdoor
cafe and brings him to the underworld boss who waits for them in a warehouse
filled with gold statues of the Buddha. Cloud discovers, to his dismay,
that Stone is a police informant. Killing a "good man" is contrary to
his code and, when he refuses to carry out his assingment, the boss threatens
to shoot them both. I'm not going to even try to explain what happens
next because the choreography of the shoot-out that follows (some of it
filmed in slow motion, some of it speeded up) is very confusing. Let's
just say that Stone takes advantage of Cloud's hesitation and the two
men, who are handcuffed together, manage to shoot their way out of the
warehouse, and escape on Cloud's motorcycle. 
And
then come the most contrived coincidences that you can imagine. Picture
one of those bad late night, low budget, action movies on Cable TV where
all of the principals inexplicably wind up at the same location for an
explosive finale and you'll get the idea. Now, I know there is an audience
for this sort of thing so I won't give away what happens in the third
act except to say that it does not live up to the beautifully crafted
initial 30 minutes that had commanded my attention. 
During
pre-production of Bangkok Love Story,
the Royal Thai Police objected to the original script where a cop
fell in love with an assassin and the Stone character's connection to
the police was made more vague in order to pass the Board of Censors.
And, you know, straight actors playing gay are the same in Thailand as
they are here in America. Rattanaballang Tohssawat, who played Cloud,
stated that it was "an honor" to play a gay man while Chaiwat Thongsaeng
(Stone) made it clear in interviews that he only wanted the challenge
and, mostly, he wanted to become famous (Oscar time!). He found
the kissing scenes to be disgusting and pretended that he was kissing
his girlfriend. (Remember the time, when Peter Finch was asked in 1971
how he could kiss a man in John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday,
and he replied that he "just closed his eyes and thought of England?")