Puzzling, with missing pieces like torn pages from a script, the new Thai film by Kongdej Jaturanrasmee is also a moving ode about the authenticity, or a lack thereof, of life. And perhaps of movies, or art, or history.
Parinya Ngamwongwan in P-047.
Tae Peang Pu Diew (or P-047) is a rare happening in Thai cinema: a placid, patient drama that doesn't shy away from raising abstract questions. Let's be a cheerleader for once. This is one of the most memorable Thai films of the past few years.
Kongdej's script has a conceptual ambition that doesn't kill off the foundation of good movies, namely characters and emotion. With great help of his new lead, indie-rocker Apichai Tragoolpadetgrai _ his eyes like unexplored caves, or like someone who's never read Nietzsche but understands exactly what Nietzsche wrote _ P-047 transcends its cinematic intelligence into moments of sadness and mystery. That will perplex some, but then, isn't healthy perplexity a forgotten joy of today's movie-going experience?
The premise concerns two friends, a locksmith and an aspiring writer. Together Lek (Apichai) and Kong (Parinya Ngamwongwan) have a strange habit of breaking into other people's homes while they're at work.
Their purpose is not to steal, but to imagine the lives that are not theirs own. The two men wear the homeowners' clothes, drink their wine, listen to their music, read their diaries, and relish the escapist high that eventually sticks with them.
To remark that the basic plot is similar to Kim Ki-duk's Bin-jip (3 Iron), in which a man also breaks into someone else's home while the owner is on vacation, is to miss the point, for Kongdej is after something else totally. The Korean film is a melodramatic fantasy; Kondej's film is about identity and the nightmare of realising that the life you think you know best _ your own life _ is not that simple, or that original.
P-047, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last September, has a meta-quality of a Charlie Kaufman script (Adaptation, Synecdoche New York).
Kongdej's not as adventurous though, and his attempt to wrestle cosmic epiphanies from movie-reality is not as sharp, not as magical as the great Kaufman. But when P-047 works, it is lucid, just like when Lek encounters a woman who likes to sniff antique tin boxes, claiming that the mouldy fragrance reminds her of the beautiful past.
When the woman relates her memory of visiting a hotel room and seeing the indelible remnants of previous stays of other guests, a small sorrow of life becomes a universal experience.
The film treats life as space, and the space we inhabit, the woman seems to say, is always shared by someone else, regardless of whether we know it or not.
It's best to see P-047 without knowing much. It's a film that demands you to progress along with its characters, and while we bemoan the weakness of Thai scriptwriters in failing to create people we believe in and seriously think about, Kongdej serves up not just one, but two, or even three.
This is a film about the dilemma of originality, about life as a Xerox copy, and in the process, it becomes somewhat an original in itself.
P-047 is showing only at Lido and Esplanade Cineplex, with a Chiang Mai release following in a few weeks.
