Beheadings, sex tapes and ancient temples all mingle in Soi Cowboy, British director Thomas Clay’s vision of modern Thailand. Yet for those already familiar with his The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, in which a drug addict masturbates to Marquis de Sade, this one might seem surprisingly contemplative.
It opens with a shot of a woman’s sleeping face, shadowed and obscured through strands of hair. Then we see her bed-partner, an obese man with double chins squashed against the pillow. This combination of the poetic and pathetic characterises the rest of the film as we follow the everyday lives of the couple – a petite Thai girl and a Danish film-maker – and slowly learn to understand the basis of their relationship: she is to satisfy his Viagra-fuelled desires while he provides her with stuffed toys and security. But just as soon as we accept this familiar narrative of mutual commodification, the perspective subtly shifts again and through a series of well-meaning courtesies and timid laughs reveals unexpected tenderness. Clay manages to avoid the traps of a self-congratulatory social commentary: the film is gratifyingly lacking in simple ‘isn’t this awful’-triggers. Instead it takes great care in precisely painting its characters, naked or dressed, eating, sleeping, their faces traced for barely-there tears or miniature smiles.
Yet Clay clearly wants more than a poignant culture-clash vignette. A radical shift halfway through puts the relationship into context: the story of a young boy hired to cut off his brother’s head takes us through placid rice fields and provincial roads across to the nightmarish clubs of the capital, where the head is delivered in a lazily Lynchian finale, complete with sleazy singer, cryptic one-liners and familiar characters restyled and reshuffled beyond recognition. The Dane appears in full white suit and gigolo shoes – a stranger without his usual slip-on sandals.
Here the film falters. The shift has all the potential of a great strategy: after the static black and white frames of the first half, the sudden dose of colour and the handheld camera provide immediate relief. But this soon induces motion sickness, as sunbeams and blurred landscapes cut and splash across the screen. In spite of long shots of the innocently pimpled assassin, this part never resumes the intimacy established by the first. Rather than being a mysterious chameleon Soi Cowboy turns into a playground for enthusiastic experiments, seemingly brainstormed together. Overall, the film lacks natural rhythm – suspense and catharsis seem oddly dislocated, the shifts appear random, the connections vague.
It is in the details that we find the redeeming features: at their best some shots are sensitive, touching and full of quiet, compassionate humour. In spite of some gratuitous indulging in the Dane’s peanut butter-induced obesity (there is an almost ridiculous amount of nude shower scenes), the sequence of the couple taking photos and posing with the same tiny umbrella is great, as are some more tangential moments (the close focus on a toaster in action or the arduously slow steps of an old woman along the wrong corridor are particularly memorable). Yet this amount of good raw material deserves better than the narrative logic of copy-paste.
