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Despite our incredibly busy schedule as the second term is coming to a close, we still had time to see Volver, a Spanish film by Pedro Almodovar.
It's definitely less difficult to understand than Hable con ella and Mala educacion, but, compared to other films by other directors, the film is still action-packed and full of intense emotions. The film centres on Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) and her struggle with her family and her past. I think the film has an overt feminist overtone, as it shows how women survive (both as an individual and as a collective group) in the society where men are all shit. I do mean it, as I think every male character in this film, from Raimunda's father to Raimunda's husband, is a purely shitty moron, who thinks of nothing but sex. Volver (a Spanish word meaning 'to return' or 'to come back') may suggest how an atrocious event in the past keeps happening and women keep tolerating and fighting against this fate.
If there's one thing I don't like about the film is how stereotypical this sexual injustice is. All women are good and all men are evil. We're well into the twenty-first century, but Almodovar still milks money from this rather jaded theme. Owing to this stereotyping, the shock at the end of the film (of course, I'm not going to tell you) sadly loses its powerful effect. I just yawned and thought 'so what' ... well life goes on, innumerable women in the cinema have tolerated the same plight, as if a majority of women had undergone the same experience. For the same shock, I'd rather admire Jocelyn Moorhouse's A Thousand Acres, which portrays the similar event in a powerfully emotional manner.
This evening I just had a chance to watch a remake of Shakespeare's The Tempest or Payu Pirote at the Faculty of Arts Theatre in Building 4. It's the last one before the building is demolished to make way for a new state-of-the-art faculty building where there will be a new theatre, a jazz lounge, three swimming pools, a helicopter pad ... oops sorry I got too carried away!
The play was well-performed by a good cast. Though they're young, I was rather surprised at their ability to memorise those difficult, lengthy poetical lines of the Bard. (This sadly also means that I'm getting old and such a kind of memory is something I really long for.) Of course the verse has been translated into beautiful Thai, but I do wonder whether it would've been easier in English. Well, call be a snob but at some points in the play the profusion of beautiful Thai verse was a bit too fast and overwhelming. Maybe I was too used to cheap Thai soap opera and basically am in need of high-quality performance once in a while to cleanse my eyes and ears of filthy things they emit nowadays out of Thai television.
The setting was marvellous and I did love the fact that they did play with the concept of space. I sat by the side of the theatre and was able to be close to some characters. The room at the back became another part of the set, thus making the audience feel like they're stranded like the cast. I quite liked this philosophy and somehow felt like I was in a 3-D cinema where they had all sorts of equipments, like water spurting out and cold breeze blowing behind, to make you feel like you were actually in the scene where all this happened. (Mat and I went to a cinema of this kind once -- it was in the Paragon, next to the aquarium).
I really liked the guy who played Caliban. Whenever he appeared on stage, his witty and natural performance eclipsed other characters around him, even Prospero, who seemed a bit too stern and, with his sleeves a bit too long, looked more like a boy band singer than an island entrepreneur. But don't take me wrong -- I DO admire Prospero, his perfect memory, and his powerful voice, all these making him a rising star in future Thai theatre. But, to my opinion, it seemed like the guy who played Caliban looked like he was born for the role and his funny action didn't look forced at all.
The costumes were also good and pretty experimental. I loved Ariel's costume with inset lights. I really liked it when the whole theatre was dark and all I saw was just these lights from her costume, making me feel like I was at the bottom of the ocean. So hauntingly beautiful and scary at the same time!
The end of the play did drive home those messages the Bard tries to get across. Maybe what we need now is forgiveness and for Prospero it is a magnificent act. I didn't have trouble understanding this when I first read the play a long while ago. But watching the play once again this evening made me doubt. How could Shakespeare make Prospero change his mind so quickly it did make The Tempest a bit of an escape? Or maybe I've become too pessimistic to believe that people could reach such a state of epiphany and become benevolent? Or maybe I'm not that old enough to understand such act of kindness? Or maybe I'm just too evil? I think the last one is right ... :)
Anyway, that's nothing to do with the play. It's just my own reflections upon what the Bard tries to get at. The remake itself was overall beautifully rendered and those who appreciate the Bard's work shouldn't miss it at all, as the beautiful Thai translation of the verse has kept all these artistic merits intact. The music also complemented all this nicely. A thumb up from me! (But who am I to give this sort of opinion? This is clearly a gesture of a man who is so sure of himself and think of himself as an important critic. So I'd better put my thumb back and become humble once again ...)
For more details of the play, visit their official website.
Utopia under the Nail (or Utopia nai sok leb in Thai) is a collection of eleven short stories by a relatively new author, Mud Sudphathai. It might strike someone as weird to write its review roughly almost three years after the book was published. But I just got the book yesterday when I had a chance to go to the TBT (Thailand Book Tower). The other book I bought was Lu Xun's The Real Story of Ah Q. (I haven't read this one yet but will write a review soon after reading it, I promise.)
I feel that Utopia is relatively less known. I was not sure whether it entered the SEA Write competition, but I was quite sure that it's not short-listed. This fact alone says as much: it's been underrated and suffered the plight of a good book that should've been appreciated more. This is the reason why I'm here writing its review and will do everything I can to make people spot this book again. (Well, at least it's what I hope ...)
The ten short stories are mainly about people living in the city, their intersecting fates and consequences. Compared to Pravda Yoon's Probability (Kwam na ja pen), which I think had inspired this work quite a lot, Utopia, though less sharp or powerfully concise, is much more readable and the author's messages seem to get across fine.
Some stories in this collection deal with alienation in the city and how urbanites find it impossible to communicate or to reach out. Some deal with the issue of capitalist competition that turns Bangkok into a dog-eats-dog society, where people are left with not much choice but to vie against each other in a rather heartless fashion. Owing to these, some urbanites face tragic ends as in 'Ice Flakes in the Fridge' ('Kled nam khaeng nai tu yen'). Some choose to look at it from a brighter perspective, as in 'The Green Miracle' ('Patiharn see kheaw'), one of my favourite stories in this collection.
On my first reading last night, I had no difficulty comparing this to Chakapan Kangwal's collection of short stories A Traveller's Journey to a Room under the Staircase (Nak Dern Thang Su Hong Kep Khong Tai Bandai), which deals with the similar conflict between ruthless capitalist society and the conflict between traditional humanist values. This book was short-listed in the SEA Write Award competition, so I wouldn't see why Utopia was not likewise selected.
Comparing between the two, I find Utopia more optimistic as it strikes a lighter note, giving us hope and kindling our nostalgia. Of course, it does frankly portray the underside of urban lifestyle (greediness, shallowness, and all such stuff) but it also shows that we cannot easily escape this. So here's the choice: keep dreaming of another utopia or make this hell a proper utopia. The second choice is of course harder to swallow, but it may turn out to be more pragmatic than the first one, or at least this is what the author thinks. I, however, need to have some more time to reflect upon this before subscribing to it, as right now my urban world is not at all that bad. Or maybe I'm just too middle-class to notice all this ...
Kira Kira, a lovely novel by Cynthia Kadohata, has recently been translated into Thai by one of my close friends, Sudakarn Patamadilok. So I took this chance to review this book to boost the already successful sale, as well as to leave my reflections on the book so that they will not come to pester me later.
A lot of people would classify this as children's literature, but I beg to differ. It has got a lot to offer to adult readers too, as the messages here are relevent perhaps more to adults than to children. One narrative layer of this novel is about a relationship between two sisters, Lynn and Katie, with a clearly Bildungsroman overtone. Underlying this narrative is another layer of darker truths, i.e. racial discrimination and capitalism. Kadohata is a great story-teller who manages to weave all these two layers together and makes it a pleasant read. I did finish it all in one go last night.
The characterisation is craftily done, as both Katie and Lynn are round characters, sometimes devilishly naughty sometimes innocently thoughtful, but what is impressive is that both learn to live together and understand each other, partly because of the harsh economic problems that surround their family. Both of their parents work hard to support the family whereas they grow up to learn to assist whenever and wherever they can. The ending comes a bit as a shock but I could see it coming. But a good, optimistic turn follows, giving a wonderful message of growth and self-learning. I'd like to suggest this lovely novel to middle-class youngsters in Thailand who are incredibly spoiled and never learn the harsh realities of life as they're too well-protected. I'm sure it'll make them look at their life in a new light and appreciate life more.
Perhaps a good book may just serve this purpose -- to make one appreciate one's and others' lives more.
This month is pretty historic -- I've managed to write five entries so far (including this one)!!! It seems this mania is not going to stop. Let's see how long this blog craze can go.
Capote is one of the most beautifully painful films I've watched. The message is clear -- one cannot avoid exploitation and appropriation in an act of writing. There's also violence and a writer is always engaged in Foucauldian power relations, whether s/he is aware or not. In writing a new form of 'non-fiction', Truman Capote, whether he's conscious or not, shows us that the writer can never act as a sheet of transparent glass. Capote is never innocent in retelling the story of the cruel crime and in fact he himself can be considered as a 'murderer', no less cold-blooded by the two criminals who are executed at the end of the film.
In fact, we simply cannot blame just Capote. It's the whole publishing industry, which creates competitive atmosphere where writers are compelled to find something new and original to offer to the hungry public. Capote succeeds in this world and becomes a writer hungry to be in the limelight, enjoying being the centre of attention telling people stories. In writing his most famous book In Cold Blood he also suffers from this hunger and ambition, being put in an awkward situation whereby he needs to squeeze information out of the two criminals, one of which (Perry Smith) is portrayed as somehow more benign than him, blindly regarding Capote as a true friend and never suspecting that Capote's got a hidden motif in this friendship.
However, no one emerges innocent from this film. Capote's incident, in which the writer himself didn't seem to survive his guilt of extorting information from an 'innocent' criminal 'in cold blood', makes us revise how we look at other authors, such as Harper Lee, who also seem to have a benign cause in portraying lives of the less unfortunate and become commercially successful in the course of this. Capote the film makes us see the underside of this 'benign' business and shows us that true innocence and good will in this publishing industry are questionable. Even the film itself in rendering the life of Truman Capote also commits the same crime of thriving on the misery of another person's life. The irony is subtle and sad, hence the indescribably 'sad and clinical' sentiment of the whole film. Perhaps this business of exploitation is unavoidable. Even I myself writing a review of this film can also be construed as participating in this sad business. So maybe this is a good point to stop.
