Tears of the Black Tiger
Studio: Magnolia
WorkNameSort: Tears of the Black Tiger
Gay cowboys are so passé. What the world needs now is Thai cowboys, rootin’-tootin’ desperadoes with pencil-thin mustaches who pledge their blood oaths to Buddha in Technicolor so saturated the hues threaten to bleed off the edge of the screen. Tears of the Black Tiger is a bizarre mash-up of a movie, equal parts retro melodrama, Peckinpah splatterpunk and Sergio Leone epic. (What’s the Southeast Asian equivalent of a spaghetti western? A pad Thai western?) If you’ve lost sleep wondering what a horse opera directed by Douglas Sirk in Bangkok would look like, you can put away the chamomile tea.
Dum, aka the notorious Black Tiger (Chartchai Ngamsan, as stoically handsome as Gary Cooper in his prime) travels with a band of outlaw cowboys, but his heart isn’t in gunslinging anymore. He’s pining away for his true love Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi), a Madonna-eyed brunette with a Grace Kelly wardrobe who’s forever sighing into the distance because Dum stood her up at the lily pond pavilion where they’d promised to meet again after a decades-long separation. Now she’s wrongly betrothed to police captain Kumjorn (Arawat Ruangvuth) and would rather hang herself ‘ from a bolt of blood-red silk, of course, not some drab old hemp noose ‘ than be without her true love. All of this is mostly beside the point, as the turgid storyline is just an excuse for brains exploding with an audible squish, dizzying low-angle shots, gun barrels sizzling in the rain, painted backdrops of Van Gogh-esque sunsets, crystalline tears, women wearing red dresses against fields of moss green, golden bullets zinging against each other in midair, and the occasional knowing wink at an audience in need of a palate cleanser from the unrepentant, unabating camp. (‘Did you catch that?â?� reads a subtitle after some too-quick trick shooting. ‘If not, we’ll try it again.â?�) The end result is not unlike being pleasantly hypnotized by one of those motorized panoramas of shimmering waterfalls that hang prominently in Chinese takeout joints.
Unfortunately, the movie’s somnambulant pacing mars the impact of its visual audacity. A running time of nearly two hours feels twice as long, probably also due to the Quaalude-inflected English dubbing (while it’s admirable to try and match the translated dialogue to the existing lip flaps, no character can get a sentence out without an arbitrary pause or two that makes them seem slightly pithed). But maybe it’s cultural, as the lone extra included on the DVD is an also-yawningly paced Thai TV program interviewing some of the film’s major players. But how many other Technicolor Thai-cowboy splatter melodramas will you see this year? The typically hyperbolic DVD cover screams ‘A MUST SEE. AN INSTANT CULT HITâ?� and for once I’m inclined to agree.
This article appears in Jul 11-17, 2007.