The Sukhumvit episode in Bangkok Stories. Photos courtesy of Bangkok Stories Film
Paris had Paris Je T’aime, New York had New York I Love You. Now Bangkok has its own film ensemble drawn from different neighbourhoods of the city. Bangkok Stories, a portmanteau of six films telling tales of brief encounters and nebulous romance, will premier tonight at the 20th Short Film and Video Festival at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, before going on to cinema and television release later.
The six films, each around 15 minutes in length, derive their flavours from six Bangkok districts: Yaowarat, Silom, Phahurat, Mor Chit, Khao San and Sukhumvit. The boy-meets-girl (and boy-meets-boy) stories are sketched with a broad stroke and melancholic longing, backgrounded by the demographic characters of each neighbourhood. Thus the Phahurat episode pairs a Sikh boy with a Chinese girl (Phahurat is known as Bangkok’s Little India); the Khao San section is about a Western backpacker and her chance meeting with a Thai stranger; while the Sukhumvit part is a sun-kissed, Rohmer-like afternoon at a swimming pool of well-to-do teenagers.
“We came up with the idea of the project after the bombing of Erawan Shrine,” says Maenum Chagasik, one of the producers of Bangkok Stories. “We thought about conflict and about romance, and we thought about how Bangkok is populated by people from different backgrounds and beliefs — say in Phahurat you have the Indian-Thai and the Chinese-Thai, or around Mor Chit bus terminal you have migrants from the North and Northeast. And yet we all have been living side by side since forever.”
Maenum adds that the overarching theme of romance in the six short films — mostly kept hidden under the surface, revealed only through subtle gesture — follows the lead of the city-based ensemble such as Paris Je T’aime, in which 20 filmmakers made movies about each arrondissement, and New York I Love You, which has the same format.
“It’s time Bangkok has a film like that too!” says the producer.
Phahurat.
Thankfully this is not a tourism project (Bangkok Stories is funded mainly by TrueVisions, which will air it later this year), and the six filmmakers here care more about the humming vibe of the neighbourhoods than about their obvious characters. In Yaowarat, directed by Apinya Sakulcharoensuk, a young hotel receptionist walks through the busy Chinatown traffic at night to return to his rented room in a rundown building, a typical back-alley abode of so many non-Chinese workers lucking it out in the capital. His conversation on a rooftop with a young woman — the naturalism is a little bit forced here — reveals the dreams and desires shared by so many young people finding their temporary home in the capital.
In Khao San, directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong, a bored backpacker spends an afternoon with a smiling, super-nice Thai guy, and their fleeting encounter is balanced between mystery, friendship and a possibility of romance — two people carving out a few hours of peace in that usually chaotic street. Things become more playful and intimate in the Silom episode, directed by Vorakorn Reuthaivanichkul, in which a high school boy flirts with an office worker — the well-dressed kind you find at Silom — and the film includes a scene set in the snake museum in the Thai Red Cross compound on Rama IV. The poison of love has no protective serum, as the two young men soon learn.
The Mor Chit part could have been edgier: this bus terminal is where the influx of migrant workers converge, before they are dispersed, left at the mercy of fate in cruel Bangkok. Directed by Wichanon Somumjarn, this short features a young taxi driver and a peroxide-haired girl, both coming from the province to try their luck in Bangkok. Then in the Phahurat section, we have a Sikh boy — this is perhaps the first time a Thai film has a serious Sikh character, invested with genuine emotion — who tends to his hospital-ridden father and whose good friend is a Chinese-Thai girl. Again, an indecipherable cloud of romantic feeling hovers above them, and director Soraya Nakasuwan handles it with gentle delicacy.
In the final part set on Sukhumvit, we have two girls in bikinis sunbathing by a swimming pool (it is the one near the Bangkok Planetarium) as a cute-oafish boy tries his best to get their attention. Director Aditya Assarat, his touch always nimble, sketches a frivolous high school courtship game that’s grounded in the milieu of that wealthy neighbourhood. The girls are sumptuously haughty — you can picture them growing up into the kind that saunters around EmQuartier with expensive handbags dangling from their wrists — and yet their adolescence isn’t devoid of regret and kind understanding. Sukhumvit is the last film in the package, and one that you’ll keep thinking about.
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.