Like all roads, this one promises redemption. Like most journeys, the destination is often where one starts off. Pop Aye, a road movie about a man and his elephant on a long trip to the Northeast, is a story of middle-class disillusionment (that's what the middle-class exists for) and the siren call of the rural -- the ambiguous call ringing in the ear of those who feel betrayed by the city.
Opening in a limited release this week, Pop Aye is directed by Singaporean director Kirsten Tan and starring an all-Thai cast, an all-Thailand setting, with nearly the entire crew being Thai. Is it a "Thai film" then? Well, does it matter? If not, fine. If so, how much does it matter? Singapore is understandably proud after the film's successful premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Thailand, for our part, can now appreciate the borderlessness of modern storytelling while observing our stories as told by the foreign eye.
Tan spent two years in Thailand in mid-2000s, where she made many friends and even ran a shop at Chatuchak Weekend Market. She made Pop Aye, her first feature-length film, in close collaboration with the Thai team, and she seems to be aware of the trap that often ensnares non-Thais who make movies about Thailand, especially one prominently featuring the elephant: the trap of symbolic pigeonholing, flamboyant Orientalism (a charge mostly suffered by non-Asian), and old-fashioned stereotyping (that some people in the West still think we ride elephants to school and office is not a joke). Cultural sensitivity (and authenticity) is not something we can blithely dismiss as irrelevant in our postmodern cool. But it's not something monolithic -- something that threatens to overshadow the entire film and the story it wants to tell, either. Tan, again, seems aware of all that.
Pop Aye stars Thaneth Warakulnukroh (a popular singer/songwriter from the 1990s) as Thana, an architect working on a shiny new mega-project in Bangkok. In what seems like a toxic mix of mid-life crisis, professional embitterment and personal woes, Thana feels shrunk, emptied, and sad. He finds a vibrator in his wife's wardrobe ("it was a joke from my friend," said the wife, played by Penpak Sirikul). When Thana runs into an elephant which he believes to be the same one he kept when he was a boy in the province, he finds himself a mission: he would bring the beast, named Pop Aye, from the capital back to their hometown in Loei, where peace and tranquility would return to their lives. For the most parts, Thana plans to walk.
Salvation, he believes, awaits him at the end. But it asserts itself along the way, too. The people he meets along the sun-scorched road include a madman, a transgender prostitute, a monk, a couple of police patrolmen, and villagers amused and perplexed by his journey. Man and beast, marginalised by the arrogance of the city, meet other marginalised characters in the outlying parts of Thailand (or of Southeast Asia).
Pop Aye is gentle and playful, and Tan engages us throughout. Save for some dialogue -- to Thai ears, some lines just sound laboured -- the film feels true to its inspiration, location and people. Thaneth, as Thana, has the hangdog appeal of a lost man on a lost highway, tired, kind, slightly naïve. He's perfect for a film that knows from the start what message it wants to impart at the end -- at the final shot even -- and if there's something that makes Pop Aye less than a revelation, it is exactly that: the film feels somewhat methodical. While it cruises past most exotic pitfalls that often come with the symbolic elephant (in fact, this is the film that has the best performance by an elephant in years), its parade of characters, from a lunatic with a heart of gold to a melancholic ladyboy haunting a roadside tavern, comes close to the image of "a colourful Thailand".
From Bangkok to the province and back, Pop Aye, however, is a drama about disenchantment, about how we're tricked by our own expectations once we've reached a certain stage in life. Tan has that in her grip. The urban-rural divide, a perennial social-economic hot button, was a subject of several Thai films in the 1980s -- and not so many since, and it's a shame for us to have to see it told now by a visitor. It's also refreshing to see a middle-aged protagonist in a story that deals with adult problems.
For all that matters about Thailand, this Singaporean-directed film also has the best visual pun that manages to put "the elephant in the room" -- but that's another story waiting to be told after all.
