Making Waves in Asian Cinema

Within the last five years a handful of little-known advertising industry figures in Thailand have switched hats and transformed their nation’s moribund, derivative and teen-obsessed film industry into an archly inventive, adult-oriented showcase for a promising new wave in Asian cinema.

“Bangkok Dangerous,” one of the most sensuous and disturbing films of this sharp new wave, hits L.A. theaters this week. It observes what happens when love enters the world of a remorseless hit man who is also a deaf-mute, cocooned in a silent world of luxuriant sleaze. It plays like “A Fistful of Dollars” or “Amores Perros” as imagined by Buster Keaton or Rimbaud.

The film is the work of the 36-year-old Pang twins, Oxide and Danny, formerly of Hong Kong. Like many of the emerging filmmakers of Thailand’s new wave, the Pangs only had experience making TV commercials before they launched their art-house film careers in 1997.

“I was just a commercial director,” Oxide Pang says via phone from Bangkok as part of a campaign to promote the film across Asia. His brother, he explains, is on his way to screen the film at a festival in Japan. “I was a film colorist, doing special effects on commercials,” Pang says. “And sometimes I was the director on commercials for television. My brother was working in commercials also, as an editor.”

Born in Hong Kong in 1965, the brothers knew from an early age what they wanted to do for a living. “From the age of 15, we knew that we wanted to make movies,” Pang recalls. “We loved old black-and-white movies, particularly the work of the Japanese filmmaker [Akira] Kurosawa. But we never talked to our parents about making films. They expected that we would become doctors or teachers. So I didn’t go to the university to make movies--I studied chemistry.”

Oxide Pang’s chemistry training and creative bent were enough to land him a job in Hong Kong as a film colorist creating special effects for Central Digital Pictures in 1989. Danny found work that same year editing commercials in the film production department of Hong Kong’s Star TV. Along with South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand, Hong Kong was then in the midst of an economic boom.

In 1992, Central Digital expanded into the Thai commercial market and relocated Oxide Pang to head up its new department for commercials and special effects. By the end of ‘92, he left that firm and took over as senior colorist at Thailand post-production house Kantana Film.

Pang was inspired by his new homeland.

“I saved the money to buy a 16-millimeter camera. I started shooting a lot of experimental and short films,” he recalls. He even collaborated with Danny on a script--a high-concept urban drama centering on the moral odyssey of a single character. The script, “Who’s Running,” was “something about a destiny of a human. Fate and destiny,” Pang explains. He tossed it in a drawer and forgot about it.

In 1992, Thailand’s 70-year-old film industry had all but vanished. The few movies made by local artists were knockoffs of U.S. or Hong Kong-style films financed by the Thai music industry as promotional vehicles for its legions of teen music stars. By 1997, when the economic boom in eastern Asia had gone bust, not even teen films could get made (only 17 Thai films were made that year). American film imports accounted for 80% of Thai box office receipts.

In that bleak cultural setting, the Thai new wave began to take shape. Several ad executives, most notably Penek Ratanaruang and Nonzee Nimibutr, started making films emblematic of the new generation. Ratanaruang’s “Fun Bar Karaoke” attracted critical notice at the Berlin Film Festival with its urban tale of corruption and collapse in modern Bangkok. Nimibutr’s action yarn “Daeng Bailey and the Young Gangsters” broke all extant box office records in Bangkok for a Thai film.

The novelty of seeing high-quality Thai films with realistic settings and mature actors and themes inspired moviemakers and audiences alike. In true storybook fashion, one day his boss came into his office and asked if he knew any interesting and original film stories on Thai themes, Oxide Pang recalls, “and I said, ‘I’ve got a script; I’ve got everything.”’

The Pang brothers’ first feature, “Who’s Running,” a 103-minute drama told from a Thai perspective, became an art-house and box office smash.

Having learned how to grab an audience’s attention in a 30-second spot, the Pang brothers applied that skill to films. Their work was marked by the brothers’ unconventional story lines, colored with Oxide’s nuanced cinematic palette and Danny’s staccato audio rhythms and edits. “We used all the technical [and organizational skills] learned from making commercials to make a long commercial,” Oxide Pang says. “For me, that is the concept for making a feature film.”

For their second feature, they were mulling different scenarios. Then Pang remembered a news story he had seen on TV when he first arrived in the country. “I saw a killer, and he was crying in front of the camera. [The killer was confessing that] he didn’t know the people he killed. But he felt regret that he done it. And he was crying and saying that he wanted to take responsibility for his [act]. He didn’t want to make any more trouble for the family or the kids.

“So at that moment I decided to make a movie about a killer and do something about this kind of feeling. Actually, a killer may be able to do his work and feel nothing [for a while], but one day when he realizes what he’s done is wrong, maybe on that day he will also be crying. So that is the concept of ‘Bangkok Dangerous.”’ The brothers combined the story of a hit man with one about a deaf-mute.

Nimibutr, who had emerged as a significant producer-director of Thailand’s new wave, agreed to produce and help get financing for the Pangs’ odd tale about a silent sociopath.

“Nonzee is important to us because he made us feel confidence and he found investors for us, and because he is a director and he knows what the feelings of a director are. He knows what I’m thinking. So he trusts me. He just told me, ‘Just try to make it into a script.’ That’s it.”

The brothers worked out the script and production aspects as a team.

“We never fight,” Pang says. “The story, the concept of the script we wrote together. And then I selected the locations for the film, and filmed the picture, and took care of the color of the picture. And then my brother took care of the pacing and editing of the movie. We decided everything in advance.”

“Bangkok Dangerous” employs a variety of unusual techniques. It blends both black-and-white and color sequences; juxtaposes multiple textures of sound traffic, gunfire, shouts--interspersed with sequences where sound is muted or absent; and uses freeze frames and passages where the action is slowed, speeded up or blurred. What are meant to be thrilling chase scenes circle forward in languid, ever tightening coils of suspense. And there is almost no dialogue.

One of the more refreshing sequences in the film occurs when an innocent girl, Fon (Premsinee Ratanasopha), treats her mute boyfriend, Kong (Pawalit Mongkolpisit), to his first movie. Her choice: Charlie Chaplin.

Says Pang, “The first time I designed this movie, I asked myself: ‘If the movie has no dialogue, the audience might not understand it; they might get bored. But when I remembered Charlie Chaplin, I knew, this solved my problem. Because Kong never goes to the movies. But one time the girl takes him there and he is able to laugh. That means, if you want to make your life more happy, you have the choice. You can’t say, ‘No one cares for me, I am so unhappy.’ Happiness is a choice, and it is something that you must find for yourself.”

For the roles of the laconic killers Kong and Joe (Pisek Intarakanchit), they turned to models they knew from the advertising world. “They never made a movie before. They came from commercials, magazines and music videos.”

“Bangkok Dangerous” won the 2000 International Critics Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Says Pang, “I felt excellent when our film won at Toronto. Because this is my first premiere; our film had never shown in another country. The day that we finished the film, we took it to Toronto, but all we could think about was, ‘Is there anybody going to like our style? Is there anybody going to understand what we’re talking about?’ And after the Toronto [screening], they give us the award. I realized that all the questions were answered already. I am very grateful.”