2008 Bangkok International Film Festival
The low-key opening film was Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, though there was also a gala screening of Nonzee Nimibutr's long-awaited historical epic Queens Of Langkasuka. Nonzee's film has been in production for over three years, and it will be fascinating to see it when it goes on general release next month, although, judging from the trailer, it might not live up to expectations. The explicit Filipino drama Serbis won the Southeast Asian competition. Love Of Siam, one of the most successful Thai films of 2007, was also screened, along with Catherine Breillat's period drama The Last Mistress and Bruce LaBruce's gay zombie film Otto Or Up With Dead People.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Woody's Allen's fourth consecutive European film, after three London productions (Match Point, Scoop, and the badly-received Cassandra's Dream). It stars Scarlett Johansson, who also appeared in Match Point and Scoop. The film feels very light and inconsequential, with its holiday-romance plot and an ending which puts all the characters back to the same positions they were in at the beginning. Penelope Cruz gives the most passionate performance; her final scene with its jealous rage recalls Judy Davis's first scene in Deconstructing Harry. Barcelona's city council certainly got their money's worth: they funded the film, which is full of picture-postcard Catalan scenery.
In Otto, a young man (the Otto of the title) who thinks he's a zombie (and might actually be one) is hired by Medea, a pretentious art film director, to star in a gay zombie film titled Up With Dead People. Medea's earnest revolutionary rhetoric recalls the sloganeering of The Raspberry Reich; she also paraphrases Apocalypse Now: "I love the smell of the graveyard in the afternoon. It smells like extermination". Ingeniously, her girlfriend, Hella, appears to be trapped in a silent movie: she is always shown in black-and-white, and her dialogue is delivered via inter-titles. The most notorious sequence is a more graphic version of a scene in David Cronenberg's Crash. The film was co-produced by Terence Koh, and his artworks can be seen in some of the sets.
Brillante Mendoza's film Serbis is, Like La Chatte A Deux Tetes, set almost entirely in an adult movie theatre (named Family, apparently a real location). It opens with a 35mm print being threaded into a projector, and ends with the celluloid burning up and the projector grinding to a halt. In between, Serbis follows the lives of a family living and working in the Family cinema, as they deal with pregnancy, infidelity, a large boil, and a stray goat. Their cinema is patronised by 'service boys', whose services are shown in rather graphic detail (again, like La Chatte A Deux Tetes), though the real star is the dilapidated Family cinema itself.
posted by Matthew Hunt at 05:41
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