Crying Tiger
Director: Santi Taepanich
Year: 2005
Running Time: 94 minutes
In the northeast of Thailand lies the region
of Issan a very poor rural section of the country where jobs outside
of farming are few and opportunities are fewer. Many of these people migrate
to Bangkok where they hope to make enough money to be able to support their
family back home and they count the days till they can go back to visit.
Many Thais think of them as backwards with their lack of education and
heavy accent and its tough for them to make it in the big city. It is
also where some of the best Thai food and music comes from those heartbreaking
plaintive songs that often are used for Thai film soundtracks (and sprinkled
liberally through this one). The title of the film comes from a Thai dish
from Issan of barbecued beef and hot spicy chili sauce.
This documentary follows the lives of four natives
from Issan who have come to Bangkok to make a living their dreams are
small but their perseverance and spirit are not. The film seamlessly switches
back and forth between them over a period of months as some of these dreams
are chased after and failure is always relentlessly shadowing them. Within
this format are some wonderful slices of Thai life that are soaked with
the kind of authenticity that you cant begin to experience in a typical
Thai film.
One of the subjects begins as a restaurant parking
lot attendant dressed in an embarrassing fish costume along with others
dressed as shrimps or lobsters and their duties consist of simply waving
cars on in. He quits though and joins a traveling troupe consisting of
dwarves, clowns, transvestites, comedians and singers. His talent for imitating
the call of the water buffalo comes in handy but he pines to see his
mom and feels terrible guilt for not being successful. An older singer
has already become successful but his popularity is on the wane and he
talks wistfully of the good days and now he only wants to go home and sit
on his farm with his wife by his side.
A female taxi driver is happy to have a job, but
her dream is one day to drive a big rig truck all over Thailand especially
to her hometown to show what she has done. The final character gets the
majority of the screen time and his story is perhaps the most interesting
to western Thai film fans. He came to Bangkok to be a cook but was enticed
into a career of being a stuntman in films. Here he gets banged up on a
continuous basis clay pots broken over his head set on fire he gets
1,000 baht ($25) for every scar 1,500 baht for crashing through a real
pane of glass. His dream is someday to get beat up by Tony Jaa and he religiously
studies his every move in Ong Bak and tries to imitate them. The final
few minutes of the film are stirring sometimes its the small victories
in life that really count that keep the human race filled with dreams
and moving on. If you have seen Tom Yum Goong, look for our man to receive
a bashing at the hands of Tony in the first fight. He was asked earlier
if he ever wanted to beat up the hero and he replied with a laugh that
this was impossible in Thai films the hero always wins well in this
film he is a hero of a different kind. It is hard to gage whether most
people would find this interesting I would venture that the more interested
in Thailand that you are, the more you will enjoy this. I thought it was
terrific.
Source: Screener (DVD does not have subs)
My rating for this film: 7.5