There's a movie making the festival rounds this year called “The Elephant King” and it’s about, you guessed it, Thailand. I don’t know if it played the Bangkok Film Festival last July or not, but it should have. There’s nothing wrong with sneaking a peek at yourself through someone else’s mirror. I saw the film at the Huntington Beach Film Festival in August and, seeing Thais speaking Thai in the trailer, assumed it was a Thai film, part of the burgeoning film industry here, growing up and ‘going inter’, in search of more mature markets for more mature films. This gender-bending ‘new wave’ was pioneered by Apichatpong Weerasetthakul with ‘Sut Pralat’ (‘Tropical Malady’) which was well received in overseas festivals, including gay and lesbian ones. This new genre, including ‘Ma Nakorn’, ‘Fa Talai Jon’ and others, specialize in bold, almost surrealistically garish colors, absurd plots and irrational characters, kind of an Asian magic farce genre in comparison to Latin American magic realism. But ‘Elephant King’ is not like that. It’s not even Thai. It’s gritty, realistic, and heterosexual, with all the betrayal, confusion, and hurt that that implies. In short, it’s about me, and my first year in Thailand, and presumably that of many others, something I always thought could hardly be explained, much less filmed. But first-feature writer and director Seth Grossman has done it. Perhaps I should explain to the uninitiated.
Thailand is weird, wacky, and wonderful, just how much so depending on your own individual circumstances. Things are fairly predictable for younger foreigners here, travelers and NGO workers, doing a stint, having fun, then moving on or going home. It's probably even more so for older male foreigners, taking Thai wives, and enjoying those golden years with the help of Viagra and alcohol, older Budweiser. It’s that vast middle ground in between where things get unpredictable and sometimes turbulent, both for the Thais and the foreigners involved. Many a Thai woman aged 25 and up finds herself dumped by her Thai husband for a younger woman, and left with kids to feed. Many a Western man approaching middle age finds himself divorced, bankrupt, or unemployed, frustrated and fed up with ‘the West’ and looking for alternatives. This is fertile ground for drama, both real and imagined. Sometimes it even works, and the Western guy finds himself reborn in the matrix that is Thailand, or the Thai woman finds herself recast in a new role in some foreign country. Sometimes it doesn’t, usually because the guy forgot the most basic rule: never mix alcohol and women. Many basic rules are broken in ‘The Elephant King’ and the results are tragic, just like real life sometimes.
More than two cultures, ‘Elephant King’ is really a story of two brothers, one younger and weaker, over-sensitive and slightly suicidal, one older and aggressive, over-confident and insensitive. Of course there’s a woman planted squarely in the middle of this mismatch, and of course she’s got a Thai male friend on the side, a love triangle gone rhomboid gone rumpus. There’s even a real elephant for comic relief. Care to guess who gets the girl? I ain’t tellin’. That’s not really the point, anyway. The point is: how do you know what’s real in a world where emotion is currency, and how can you truly find another when it’s so hard to even find yourself? Nothing is resolved, of course, so the writer/director turns out to be the most honest person in the story. The film works visually as well, ‘taking advantage of seedy Thai locales’ (Variety), such as a certain ‘bar beer center’ and a certain ‘warm wet massage’ parlor, all in Chiang Mai, my old stomping grounds. I even know some of the extras. It’s not an all-star cast, mostly unknown except for Ellen Burstyn, who plays the brothers’ mother, unless you count Joe Cummings, Mr. L.P. Guidebook himself, who does a quick drug deal for the cameras when he wasn’t busy being local production coordinator. Being a former film student myself and currently co-producing a festival back in the US, I can be a pretty harsh critic, fully expecting to snicker silently in the back row as the homies got their kicks touring the seamy tourist underbelly of Chiang Mai (of course the really seamy Thai underbelly is out at Santitham), but I didn’t. I got jealous. Seth Grossman told the story I’ve long wanted to tell, but found it too difficult, maybe because I was too close to it. Writer/director Grossman must have spent some time in Chiang Mai to achieve that level of realism, but I doubt that he spent ten years.
Try to find this movie if you can. Considering that it debuted at Tribeca over a year ago, it should either be finding its way into theaters or DVD store by now, though it’s likely ‘too artsy for the mall, too mainstreams for the art houses’ (Variety again). Somebody could probably make a buck packaging it for Thai audiences, though; hhhmmm…..
