The Darkest Hours

A psychosexual Thai gay film is a rare treat -- actually it's almost unprecedented. Anucha Boonyawatana's Onthakarn (The Blue Hour) arrives at SF cinemas this week with a strong tail wind after its premiere in Berlin in February. Nightmarish, oblique and deliberately disjointed, the film is in part ambient horror and in part a brooding drama about family violence centred around a gay teenager. We savour its chilly mood, its haunting wasteland of disaffected youth, though we sometimes wince at the stilted dialogue. What we see is also a confident switch between what's real and what's not, which is to say The Blue Hour is not something for the impatient and the literal-minded.

Anucha's treatment of homoeroticism is candid, raw and sometimes eccentric (his student film By The River freely mixes gay and Buddhist elements) and here he gives us two fair-skinned, poster-worthy boys in an unnamed small town. In the first scene, they have a tryst at a deserted swimming pool encrusted with sinister black marks and have sex in a toilet. Tam (Attapan Poolsawad) is a meek teenager bullied at school and mistreated by his strict parents -- his house is dimly lit, and we only see his mother -- while Phum (Obnithi Wiwatanawarang) is the brash, cocky one, a tough-talking boy who works in a garage and sleeps in a cheap rent room.

There's a toxic vibe running through the film, a sense that there is a sexual drive that clashes against an unknown force of oppression. The small-town setting has a smack of David Lynch's suburban phantasmagoria (Anucha admires the director) and when Phum takes Tam, for no clear reason, to a large, sulphurous, fly-infested garbage dump with secrets buried underneath, the film openly toys with our perception of conventional narrative as the physical landscape morphs into a psychological metaphor. Tam is chased by a man with a gun, who is killed minutes later -- or maybe he's not. In another frightening set up, the two boys go back to the swimming pool where a corpse turns up in the toilet -- before, again, reality slips out and something else slips in.

Tam's trouble is obviously not just the dead bodies, but also the alienation and the purplish bruises that mark his torso. Thailand may be a safe haven for gays, at least as our public image projects, but social stigma and family discrimination remain as running themes in many local movies with homosexual characters. The Blue Hour feels fresh because conceptually it has a full form and it smuggles the deeper issue inside the icy shell of psycho-thriller and lets the boys' dark desire becomes both liberating and destructive. Besides Lynch, the film may remind some of European directors such as Jessica Hausner and even Volker Schlondorff's Young Torless from 1966, a brutal coming-of-age drama set in a military cadet school.

The Blue Hour (the Thai title, Onthakarn, refers to darkness) is the third Thai gay-themed title to open in the span of one month -- beginning with Josh Kim's solid How To Win At Checkers (Every time), which is still showing at House RCA and Tanwarin Sukkapisit's homo-vampire Red Wine In The Dark Night, a trashy entertainment that has its fair share of fans. Anucha's The Blue Hour is perhaps the strangest of the lot: a low-budget film that has an attractive cast yet an obscure, almost art-house appeal. It has its faults -- the acting isn't as precise as the framing, for a start, and the note of calm at the end seems too convenient -- but this is an audacious film about adolescent pains, sexual forces and hidden brutality. It puts Anucha on the official map of young Thai filmmakers to watch as well.