Chocolate

Muay Thai (kick boxing) martial arts movies, akin to Hong Kong's kung fu spectacles, gained wider international attention in 2003 through Ong-Bak, The Thai Warrior, co-written and directed by Prachya Pinkaew, starring Tony Jaa. The two men went to Australia for The Protector (2005), whose lead writer was the single-named Napalee. A sequel of it is in production by them, after Jaa had worked with Panna Rittikrai on two Ong-Bak sequels. Panna, who'd also co-written the original story, and is an experienced stuntman, became Jaa's co-director.

In the meantime, Prachya groomed a young female taekwondo fighter to learn kick-boxing moves for the lead role in a 2008 feature, Chocolate. It was co-written by Napalee and director Chukiat (The Love of Siam) Sakveerakul. Their ingenue lead actress, Yanin Vismitananda (now aka JeeJa), was made to look good by the film's action choreographer - who was Panna, not too surprisingly in the close-knit world of Thai action movies.

JeeJa is certainly prettier to look at than Jacky Chan, but the movie's stunts are not as complex as his, nor as much gory fun as Kill Bill's. In order, probably, to minimise novice JeeJa's acting weaknesses, her character is the autistic daughter of a Thai gangster's moll, who left him to marry a Bangkok-based Yakusa chieftain (workaholic ex-model Hiroshi Abe). Faced with death threats from the mobster, she tells the Japanese to leave the country for ever and later discovers she's pregnant.

Several years later, a bullied chubby young boy is given a home by the moll, who works as a cashier for a Japanese restaurant. That key plot development takes only a few seconds of unexplained screen time, whose meaning is left to a movie-goer's instinctive understanding that such a character must emerge in the genre. So must the gangster's bevy of lady-boy hitmen, inspirational kick-boxers on B&W TV and an adjacent school, and an epileptic be-spectacled spindly teenage boy who must eventually challenge the autistic girl. And let's not ignore a gaggle of female boxers and gang of sword-wielding hoodlums who appear from nowhere in the final multi-sequenced battle. It pitches the girl and her terminally ill mum and badly-wounded Japanese dad against the minions of a mortally-wounded Thai villain who takes a very long time, and lots of falls, before dying.

Scores of stuntmen also appear in order to be foot-kicked, tossed and tumbled into cringing submission or grisly death in neatly-choreographed set-pieces fought single-handedly by the girl, abetted meekly by her chubby pal. They had decided to collect money owed to the mother from her gangster days, in order to pay for her worsening cancer's treatment, leading them to wage martial justice in the photogenic settings of an ice factory, candy depot, Japanese-style mansion, and, most memorably, on the wall and neon signs of a four-storey building facing a sky-train elevated railway in the finale. Yep, there's not much time for character development in this genre.

Where's the "Chocolate"? My instincts led me to guess that the girl's passion for Smartie-like chocolate-coated candy balls is somehow fundamental to the story, but there was no clear, or even sly, sign that the sweets gave the supergirl the necessary sugar rush or brain buzz to overcome her autism and standard stilted movements. I suspected instead that there were various deleted scenes that provided a fuller chocolate-filled narrative, and they were cut so that audiences could be rushed through the childhood period and into the action scenes.

Uncle Boonmee

Any film with a long title asks for troubled reactions: it's demanding that its audience do not expect standard cinema experiences. In the same way that Terry Gilliam probably decimated the potential audience for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the critically well-respected director Apichatpong Weerasetha didn't ensure public eagerness for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Maybe it sounds snappier in Thai.

Movie-lovers who sat through any of his previous highly-rated features knew what to expect, and only a sense of duty and masochistic curiosity prompted me to see if Apichatpong (aka "Joe") had developed film-making talent since his low-budget, technically-maladroit and muddled Tropical Malady. That won a jury prize at Cannes in 2004, following a path of glory started at Cannes in 2002 with a top award for Blissfully Yours, leaving few surprised that Boonmee won the Palme D'Or in 2010. Cannes has a special place in the hearts of cinephiles, and often provides warning signs for less sensitive movie buffs.

A grand total of 17 European sources of production funds, plus the Thai government, financed the film, which indicates that Joe and/or his agents have a lot of friends in useful places. They can be commended for enabling Joe to create a technically adroit film this time.

His camera placings may be mostly static, turning scenes into barely moving photographs, but they are in focus and steady. Although he still has a tiring obsession with night filming, using available light in forests or caves, it is now possible to get a vague idea what might be happening or, most of the time, not happening, in non-action slow pans.

Dialogue is sparse, and occasionally risible, as when the red-eyed large monkey ghost of a lost son is asked by his aunt why he grew his hair so long. Plot advances are few and far between, and feature such deliberately bizarre blends of Thai myths and nonsense as an ugly princess transforming herself into a waterfall's beautiful talking catfish.

The nature-loving director's sympathy for the Isaan people of his home province around Khon Kaen is clearly stated again, and a non-Thai might guess that ethnic-Chinese Joe identifies with both the locally distrusted Lao-speaking borderland people and previous communist-inspired uprisings in the area that were crushed by the Thai military (again used as a screenplay motif). This time, though, there's no evident homosexual reference point.

As for Uncle Boonmee, he's a Thai widower farmer dying of a kidney complaint, visited by his living sister-in-law and her children, and the ghosts of his wife and son. The elderly man shares a few memories, is treated by a Lao male nurse, and has a nicely-photographed funeral. That's it, for close to two hours.

The film's most interesting aspect is its nomination as the official Thai entry for the 2010 Oscars: will it be chosen for the long list and short list. Instinct tells me there must be at least six other non-English-language that were better than this one. [It missed the first cut of 9 selections.]

Tropical malady

I got round to seeing the gay Thai Cannes-award-winner, Tropical Malady. Did it waste my time? I'm not sure. Anyone who has patient Thai-speaking friends could ask them to listen to the director's soundtrack commentary on the Thai dvd version and find clues as to what you should be seeing/thinking.

I could only watch the subtitled 10-minute to-camera comments Apichatpong Weerasethakul grudgingly made for the international dvd. I gained few insights. The bespectacled auteur appeared to think that "Film" needed to find new ways to express truths or it would become redundant. And that centrifugal "Thailand" was wiping out minority cultures. And that his films blend his and his actors' "memories". I wondered how he persuaded a clutch of European producers (Swiss-French names, mainly) to back him and provide various other European-named production and technical advisers. And why they let his final edit keep so many non-dramatic blackouts and long long-shots.

Other scenes were illogical, puzzling, maybe deliberate mysteries. At the film's beginning, a Thai border patrol team find an unidentified male corpse, naked and later not naked. There is a pseudo-climactic end to the movie's first half (a tale of a soldier's thwarted day-lit homosexual love somewhere in the mountainous north), when the viewer cannot be sure what a couple of quickly masked snapshots reveal. Throughout much of the wholly different second half (a ghost story with a tiger and a tattooed man trailing the soldier figure in jungle at night), the collage of shots is frustratingly non-linear/logical.

The movie begins as a tantalising, sensitive and semi-credible Thai-language counterpart of Brokeback Mountain. Much of that's worth watching. But it is hard to sense why the handsome soldier is gay and why he'd fallen in love with a somewhat gormless peasant lad who likes to be looked at by girls. A Thai Heath Ledger, he definitely is not

The director says he found one of his two lead actors (the somewhat gormless one, I guess) by handing out fliers in Silom to disco-goers, and the other one used to be a video cameraman he knew. He made them share a bedroom so they'd develop appropriate feelings in their acting. That may well explain the thwarted plotlines.