Pen-Ek Ratanaruang is the other great name of contemporary Thai cinema along with Apichatpong Weeraseethakul. Both have studied in the USA and have found an international audience thanks to the festivals interests –in Cannes in 2004, one can remember the venenous beauty of award-winning Tropical Malady not far from Lynch’s Mullholland Drive or Murnau’s Sunrise.
But there aren’t many similarities between those two filmmakers. First working as a graphic designer, Ratanaruang has another idea of beauty, which his more for him a question of style: floating camera, beautiful slow motion and sidelong framings. A hazy style who hasn’t given up to take cinema as a fine art, with majesty and maybe a little bit of affectation. An apocalyptic wind blows over his simple yet obscure tales, rejecting all violence outside in order to keep only an unsettling oddness: after Last Life in the Universe in 2003, Invisible Waves for example followed a man from Macao to Hong-Kong passing through Phuket by representing the twists and turns of his guilt as a curious Mafia-like organization. Great influence of modern cinema: bergmanian stupor, antonionian silence and desolation.
His sixth feature, Ploy, should satisfy the aficionados of this kind of cinema but not only because this time everything is more simple and more attractive in a way. Thriller is still there, but as always, as if it was suffocated, pending ; this time it’s driven by erotic scenes. Ploy is the name of a young woman a married man meets in a bar, and whom he asks to spend the night on the couch of the hotel room where he stays with his wife, waiting for a funeral. Soon attached to her, he will put his marriage in danger while in another room (and maybe another time) a chambermaid and a barman are playing erotic games (which aroused Thai censorship cuts after having required more incomprehensible cuts on Weerasethakul’s Syndroms and a Century). Those are two stories that are only related by a common sensual approach, as well as Ratanaruang’s gift to create complex yet moving structures. Ploy has been released this week in France after it was screened in many festivals last year from Cannes to Toronto through St. Louis or London. Soon, Addithya Assarat’s first feature film Wonderful Town, winner of the latest Rotterdam competitive section, will confirm Thai cinema’s great health.
Bastien Hader