You know Chatterley almost sounds like a Thai word. This film offers both the sensual and certainly the sexual; smoke and ice intertwined with darker aspects of sex, dark as in vengeance and darker as in violence.
The women are separated pretty strictly into madonnas and whores, and Jun Dara, the product of the most brutal sex act in the film, seems to struggle against his fate. His adoration of his mother, his pure rapture with Hyacinth, and hist relationship with the most interesting character in the film, Aunt Waad. Waad is portrayed amazingly by Wipawee Charoenpura, although I fear she is lost somewhat in the bevy of beauties in the film. All of them with gorgeous great Gatsby hairdos, kudos to the coiffeuse!
Charoenpura is attractive, but shows more of her heart than merely her bosom (although a scene with that in it is key to the film). Christy Chung is breathtaking, and while you do see her in flagrante, really the visual and thematic foreplay is even more arousing. Interesting that she is seen as a specifically Western wind blowing through this film, I suspect the book makes more of that.
People seem to get hung up on the coitus in this film, but I think the exploitation here that the director wants to explore is equally emotional in nature. Is Jun Dara a sympathetic character or an unsympathetic one. Seeing as we start with him as a child, one could argue for the former, but then the nature of his birth is that supposed to push us towards the latter. Khun Luang is another one that could have been seen more favorably, as the story unravels...but he is not. In a way he nobly rescued a woman in trouble, and he seems to be truly grief-stricken early in the film...
Ultimately that's what makes this a fascinating film for me, a sort of shattering of easy good|bad divisions, but as the story revolves so much around the fleshy throes and peccadilloes, the film feels more sordid than I think it wants to be? Plus all the "good" women die or become nuns? The short monologue at the end, trying to paint Jun Dara as an everyman was interesting, but it doesn't work well since we've not seen much of his everyness. Instead innocence comes across as an illusion, or maybe for the characters in this an impossibility.
Still a compelling watch, and more than the Asian bodice-ripper it appears to some as. I should say the camera-work was as delicate and teased out as the tresses of the fetching though fatally flawed femmes... I look forward to seeing other films by Nimibutr. I bet they also involve twists of fate...that's a four-letter word that's trickier than a lot of others.
6/10
The women are separated pretty strictly into madonnas and whores, and Jun Dara, the product of the most brutal sex act in the film, seems to struggle against his fate. His adoration of his mother, his pure rapture with Hyacinth, and hist relationship with the most interesting character in the film, Aunt Waad. Waad is portrayed amazingly by Wipawee Charoenpura, although I fear she is lost somewhat in the bevy of beauties in the film. All of them with gorgeous great Gatsby hairdos, kudos to the coiffeuse!
Charoenpura is attractive, but shows more of her heart than merely her bosom (although a scene with that in it is key to the film). Christy Chung is breathtaking, and while you do see her in flagrante, really the visual and thematic foreplay is even more arousing. Interesting that she is seen as a specifically Western wind blowing through this film, I suspect the book makes more of that.
People seem to get hung up on the coitus in this film, but I think the exploitation here that the director wants to explore is equally emotional in nature. Is Jun Dara a sympathetic character or an unsympathetic one. Seeing as we start with him as a child, one could argue for the former, but then the nature of his birth is that supposed to push us towards the latter. Khun Luang is another one that could have been seen more favorably, as the story unravels...but he is not. In a way he nobly rescued a woman in trouble, and he seems to be truly grief-stricken early in the film...
Ultimately that's what makes this a fascinating film for me, a sort of shattering of easy good|bad divisions, but as the story revolves so much around the fleshy throes and peccadilloes, the film feels more sordid than I think it wants to be? Plus all the "good" women die or become nuns? The short monologue at the end, trying to paint Jun Dara as an everyman was interesting, but it doesn't work well since we've not seen much of his everyness. Instead innocence comes across as an illusion, or maybe for the characters in this an impossibility.
Still a compelling watch, and more than the Asian bodice-ripper it appears to some as. I should say the camera-work was as delicate and teased out as the tresses of the fetching though fatally flawed femmes... I look forward to seeing other films by Nimibutr. I bet they also involve twists of fate...that's a four-letter word that's trickier than a lot of others.
6/10
