Sugarless


Director: Patana Jirawong
Year: 2005

This is another independent debut work from a young Thai director that was shot on video, but there is actually a story attached to it. Now this film very likely will never show up in the multiplexes here or ever be released on DVD because of its somewhat sordid depiction of Bangkok and its offsetting urban fairy tale search for true love. Let’s just say that the “happy ending” of this one won’t be found in Cinderella.

Long ago Withit came from the countryside to look for his girlfriend who had left for Bangkok seven years previously and disappeared. He assumes she went into prostitution and so he becomes a taxi cab driver in hopes that one day he will pick her up and so nightly he trawls along the streets where they work. He is thirty-five years old though and needs to find a wife. So when he reads a letter in the Lonely Hearts section of the newspaper from Beau asking for a good man to take care of her and her education he replies. With just a few lies. He tells her that he is a wealthy owner of a chili paste factory and is looking for his true love. After a period of time, they agree to finally meet in the park on New Year’s Eve.

But Withit isn’t the only one with a few fabrications to answer for. Beau isn’t a first year student at university but in fact is a male transvestite who has been selling his body since he was a teenager. When asked by one customer why he does this, Beau tells him that when his customers orgasm he is truly happy. But he wants love and so enters into this correspondence with a man and sends a picture of a woman to him. On the day they are to meet Beau beams with happiness and it never really occurs to him that Withit might be somewhat disappointed.

But they never are able to find each in the large park and both go back to their lonely lives thinking they have been jilted. Later that night the cab driver picks up Beau working the streets and they go for a little ride. While the film first picks up with Withit it is fairly light and sets the viewer up for a sweet romance, but at the halfway point when it switches its narrative to Beau the story sobers up quickly as it follows his rather dismal life. It is a strange but intriguing film of sad people looking for love in all the wrong places.

Viewed at the World Film Festival of Bangkok