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has been a long established two-way street between Hollywood and Asian cinema.
The venerable Akira Kurosawa took the inspiration for many of his films from the
epic features of John Ford, and Hollywood filmmakers from Clint Eastwood to
George Lucas have studied hard at the school of Kurosawa. The Thai film
"Tears of the Black Tiger" takes this artistic transaction and
expresses it with a severely fractured view. Basically a send up of Spaghetti
Westerns and '50s Thai and Bollywood cinema, "Tears" pokes fun at the
various genres by presenting their well-worn conventions at face value.
The story is as old as film itself. As children,
Dum (Chartchai Ngamsan), a peasant, and Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi, last
seen in "Angulimala"),
whose rich family Dum's family works for, fell in love. Times being what
they were, their parents kept them apart and Rumpoey is eventually
betrothed to the clean-cut police chief. Of course, Rumpoey still loves
Dum and Dum, now a bandit, is intent on crashing the wedding.
Shakespeare would be proud.
Sure, the premise sounds hackneyed, but one look at
the movie and it becomes abundantly clear that this is exactly the
point. Everything about the film is done for effect. The incongruous
costumes look like they came from the reject bins at the Universal back
lot where they were colored by Andy Warhol. The main villain has a
painted on moustache complimented by an Elvis pompadour and a faux
sinister laugh. The effect is capped off by the purposely distorted
music, which sounds like a Victrola playing a badly warped platter.
Even the little details are sent ups of other
movies. Each time a group of men are killed during one of the film's
many gun battles, they are not shot in the middle of active combat, but
rather lined up and mowed down in order from left to right. Also,
six-shooters are fired repeatedly without ever needing to be reloaded.
Stylistically, director Wisit Sasanatieng is
channeling the Sergio Leone school of westerns, but it's all done with a
knowing wink and surrealist flair. Many of Leone's signature touches
(extreme close ups, one-on-one stand offs, off kilter camera angles) are
in evidence. Sasanatieng even brazenly lifts several sequences and
soundtrack snippets directly from "Once Upon a Time in The
West" and "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", and even his
main characters are more or less direct transplants from those Leone
films. The garish Day-Glo pastel color schemes, '50s Bollywood style
music, outlandish characters and shocking violence will also remind
viewers of Alejandro Jodorowsky's notoriously freakish western "El
Topo."
Unfortunately it's difficult to sustain a movie on
style alone, and it's doubly hard to sustain parody. "Tears of the
Black Tiger" is thus pulling double duty and quickly buckles under
the weight of the tasks. The characters, wacky as they may be, generate
no sympathy and don't provide a focal point for the viewer. The acting
style calls for the actors to pose rather than inhabit the screen, so
everything feels stilted and artificial. The film's story is woefully
undeveloped, existing solely to provide dialogue.
The middle
section in particular, which explores the vintage melodrama theme via
flashbacks, drags the film down as Dum and Rumpoey's lifelong courtship
is rolled out with deliberate tedium. On top of that, the cartoonish and
over the top violence doesn't completely fit within the established
demeanor of the film. We're not just talking about a high body count,
but also fountains of blood that spurt forth from bullet wounds and
heads exploding when shot, sending gibs and gore everywhere. The overall
lighthearted nature of the film doesn't jive with such mean spirited
carnage.
Mixing the Leone style with Peckinpah-esque violence
and Mehboob Khan levels of epic melodrama, "Tears of the Black
Tiger" is ultimately a film that's all dressed up with nowhere to
go. It's certainly a looker thanks to the LSD inspired color scheme and
humorously phony backdrop, but the film exists solely to be a kitschy
pastiche, the novelty of which wears off long before the final credits
roll.
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