How frustrating it is to get stuck in the middle _ limbo _ somewhere between the past that hasn't been forgotten and the future that hasn't yet arrived. How sad to think we're adults when we're just children who dream of advancement, of reason, of democracy, of being something else we're probably not ready to be (though we're trying hard to be), something we struggle to grasp the basics of, like a runner with one shoe, or a dancer clumsily scrambling to get into her first pose. What's worse, we realise, is that as we're fighting to move forward, deep-seated fears, doubts and mental weaknesses hold us back and convince us that our will alone, or our human power and ability alone, is never enough and we're condemned to forever rely on something invisible, something divine, something supernatural, something we're not sure we believe in yet have no choice but to keep believing.
Tang Wong
Starring Somphop Sitthiajarn, Siripat Kuhawichanatn, Nattasit Kotimanaswanich, Anawach Patanawanitkul, Natarat Lekha. Directed by Kongdej Jaturanrasmee. In Thai with English subtitles.
In short: Thailand _ a still-developing, or eternally-developing nation torn between the sweet fantasy of progress and a reality that's sour and pungent. In the ambitious, smart, good-humoured, symbolic, uneven, imperfect Thai film Tang Wong, director Kongdej Jaturanrasmee uses his small characters to expound on something colossal: what it is to be Thai at this moment in history. The movie, which opens this week, strives to connect many dots and to elevate the prosaic into the metaphorical as the microcosm of the characters gives way to the big picture _ so big that it includes, for the first time on the cinema screen, scenes of the convulsive red-shirt riots and a skilful reconstruction of the war zone that Bangkok briefly was in May 2010. Kongdej tackles the zeitgeist and the fossilised, the mind and the matter, the political and the personal, with the conclusion that they're all probably the same.
The film's strategy is uncanny, for it couches all of those serious themes under the casual guise of a teenage coming-of-age narrative, and thus the whole thing has a harmless, winking quality even when it strays close to provocation. Billed as a comedy drama, Tang Wong inspires the kind of bitter laugh that only gets more bitter when you realise you're laughing at yourself. In its various threads, the story principally concerns four high-school boys and their laborious effort to learn to tang wong _ to form the basic pose of traditional Thai dance _ in order to "fulfil the pledges" (a euphemism for "paying the bribe") they've made with a local deity who granted them their wishes. Housed in a gaudy shrine festooned with garlands, this home-made god presides over a community flat around which revolve the main characters and their earthly worries: a nerdy, chubby boy and his friend from a high-school science team, a peroxide-haired, punkish rascal who's a champion K-pop cover dancer, and a hot-tempered boy from a ping-pong team whose father is a die-hard red-shirt fan.
Each of them has asked for a favour from the deity, called Por Pu. Once they've got what they want _ the geeky boys won a trophy from a science tournament, for instance _ they fear Por Pu's holy retribution if they don't perform a dance before the shrine, and the boys asks a transgender Thai dancer who lives in the same working-class apartment block to teach them. Structured like a quest movie in which a group of youngsters fights to overcome obstacles to achieve something coveted (which is also something meaningless), Tang Wong slips its time bomb under the comical set-up of these gawky teenagers trying to bend their fingers and form an elegant posture that is just the initial step of the whole, complex dance. All of this even though they're not even sure if they've got their wishes because of their own hard work or because of Por Pu's power.
The kids, in short, are stuck at the first move _ and it's tempting to read that maybe we are all like them, that we're always "developing". If "Thainess" actually means something, the film seems to suggest, perhaps it means "not yet there". To win a science contest, the boys need supernatural assistance. The spiky-haired K-pop dancer, importing the moves from his Korean idols, is forced to wear a headdress and drift in the slow motion of ancient Thai steps. The transgender dancer is a man who's a woman _ there but not yet there. And the hot-headed ping-pong boy finds himself in the midst of a major national conflict that he doesn't understand and that's leading us nowhere.
The list of paradoxes (that's another attribute of Thainess) could have come across as programmatic, as too cleverly manufactured. And at times it is, since the many dots the director tries to connect don't always join. But Kongdej, with a lot of help from his young cast, glides through the conceits because the film doesn't force us to think about those heavy issues and because it doesn't merely use the characters as symbols. If Tang Wong is political, it's because it doesn't try to be. And if the film ends up as the feel-bad movie of the year, it's because along the way it persuades us to believe that it's a feel-good one. The ending, which of course I will not spell out here, presents one of the strangest images, maybe the most grotesque and poignant, in Thai cinema of late.
Kongdej has made passing references about Thailand's political agitation before, like the Black May incident in his first film Sayew (2003), or the weird national anthem scene in Kod (2009). But those felt like mischievous pranks from a smart boy at the back of the class, whereas in Tang Wong the politics is at once raw and organic, both the text and the meta-text.
It should also be noted that the film was partly funded by the Ministry of Culture under its campaign to promote Thai culture, and that means Kongdej has managed to pull the rug from under the authorities' feet, making the film political at another level.
The Thai dance _ the epitome of Thainess championed by the state _ is shown here as a bizarre manifestation of the halfway house that accommodate us and all our aborted dreams.
How frustrating is it to be stuck in limbo? Quite a lot, and it's good to be reminded of that through a film.
