For the scenery of Myanmar, this is pleasant enough. For a story of love lost and found, not really. From Bangkok To Mandalay, a Thai-Myanmar co-production opening this week after hitting cinemas around Myanmar on Nov 4, is a tired road-movie romance that switches between two periods in the present and the 1960s. Like most romantic stories, this one exists in a bubble and whether you'll be lulled into its cross-country voyage with four attractive leads of both nationalities depends on how much you enjoy drifting in this 120-minute bubble.
The Thai principal is Pilaiporn Supinchompu, the weakest performer here. She plays Pin, a young Thai woman who, after the death of her grandmother, sets out to Yangon where she begins a journey around Myanmar guided by a stack of love letters found in the stash of her late gran. A majority of the film takes place in various cities in Myanmar as Pin hits the road and the most enjoyable thing in this overlong film is the three Myanmar stars: Sai Sai Kham Leng, playing a young man who drives Pin around; Wutt Hmone Shwe Yi, playing Pin's young grandmother in a parallel flashback; and Nay Toe in the role of a Maynmar aristocrat and the grandmother's suitor.
These three are Myanmar's most popular faces who command a huge following and they seem at ease in this material and rely on their spontaneous charm that enlivens the film.
The narrative goes back and forth between the present day, as Pin visits various tourist attractions and learns about her grandmother's secret life as a Myanmar teacher (I'm not clear about this plot, is the grandma Thai or a Myanmar national, or both?), while in the 1960s, we watch the grandmother as a young woman working on some kind of thesis and courted by a man whose family is unhappy with his belle's poor background.
By miles, the episode set in the past is more entertaining because of the magnetism of the two stars -- despite the prosaic development of their romance, the familiar trajectory of a melodrama old and new. The present-day setting, however, would have benefited from a more rigorous cutting and Pin's feisty manner, her stupid guitar and her very short shorts grow to be a distraction, especially since her motivation is never clear from the start.
What keeps me with the film -- and this is purely a tourist point -- is Myanmar: the old colonial buildings in Yangon, the Sea of Pagodas in Bagan, the terraced temples of Sagar and the Anisakan waterfall. I guess it's also a culture thing: the visual representation of Myanmar over the past few decades is only through news, bad news until recently, and here it's different. Yes, the film wilfully excludes all political references -- the 1960s scenes, for instance, are likely set a year or two after the 1962 military coup that set the path of authoritarianism in then-Burma -- but that's not a quibble since the film, a bubble, is so firm on its romantic course that it doesn't have time for any context.
For all its shortcomings, From Bangkok To Mandalay opens an interesting chapter in cross-cultural entertainment; the film, because of the three Myanmar stars, is likely to be a hit among a few million Myanmar workers in Thailand. For Thai viewers who've seen the Burmese cast as historical enemies in countless war movies, this is a nice enough change.
