Bangkok Time

"Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another."

So notes the philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin on the topic of translation, a focal point which helps to viewer of Santi Taepanich's Bangkok Time to make sense of all the film's fragments. Why do shots seem so disordered, and what about the city-and disorder of its 'untimely' operations-resist the process of meaning-making which spell routine for critics and fellow movie goers alike? Like other films, "Bangkok Time" has a succession of shots, the running time of a conventional film, characters developed well enough to empathize with or feel their isolation, and a polished feel (though some may debate this) in the sense that film's conventional elements-i.e., sound, image, movement- converge. Apart from these similarities, Santi's creation is unlike any other ever to depict Bangkok. The miracle of cinema, the assembly of a moving mosaic unlike any other, glue this incredible experience into the history of cinema's greatest projects: the visualization of the city.

If there is a general story illuminated in "Bangkok Time," it might be reduced to how life is experienced 'between' a night nurse named Fon, a night owl blackmarketeer named One, and a male prostitute played by Ananda Everingham: three Bangkok residents connected through a series of encounters which extend the 'time' of their relationships. The assembly of this story is disordered. For some, the lack of an organized 'linear' story with developed characters amounts to a breach in the relationship between viewer and film, that the director/cinematographer supposedly owes to the audience. But Santi, like the camera- eye of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, refuses to tell this lie. In a more honest account of the city, time is disordered. Follow Henri Bergson. Follow Gilles Deleuze. "That past is, the present was" and so fragments rain down with both the comical and tragic elements that the past brings to the present. A landscape meets close-ups of faces/ a phone call from an ex boyfriend's present girlfriend/an island (Koh Samed?)/a meeting in the provincial woods between a woman and her former partner to discuss the contingency of an unexpected pregnancy/ the same two sleeping beside one another. This montage departs briefly from the city at a random interval in time but it can not escape the protracted action of urban life. The actions of characters are determined by the city, a city that tells stories.

One way of dispelling the enigma of "Bangkok Time" (and not just why there are no excess of reviews on this masterpiece of a film) would be to suggest this film has a theme that makes sense of the city. For example: waiting and anticipation signified in the parallel between pregnancy and the urban economy, arrivals and departures projected in images of airplanes at dusk, a flashback/flash-forward oriented shaped by a memory's reflection and anticipation, and the predominance of the urban landscape on the actions of characters. On this last point, the two primary characters are seen at multiple instances crossing bridges (the Pin Klao connecting Bangkok's Thonburi side with the tourist destination of the Old City), and navigating the landscape away from the action of the film (e,g., morning boat rides up the Chaopraya River, underneath that same bridge, and away from the urban chaos of the central Silom night markets of Bangkok). Exceptional minimalist musical cues enter the frame between evening and morning, 'times' lacking in film's representation of place. In the end, the story is about an encounter, which the city facilitates daily-and so the close of the film is an opening for the infinity of possible encounters in Bangkok. Fon, a night nurse working in the same vicinity, met One after the latter encountered the battering of the non-official economy. Because of the alienation of the city One cracks himself over the head with beer bottles in order to find recurring 'official' reasons to meet Fon on her night shift. The viewer finds Fon's relationship to Ananda's character a bit more mysterious. But, at the very least, their encounter provides an aside to the repetitive images of a favorite melodrama illustrating a provincial girl arriving in Bangkok, which she falls asleep to each night as if to reassure herself of an urban dream. Dreams, myths, stories and the impossibility of escaping the contingencies of place are, as Santi presciently projects, the stuff of everyday life.

Due to the mere one week running of the film at Bangkok's Lido theater, and the lack of availability of the film elsewhere, my own selective memory serves to re-imagine and reassemble the film in this review (perhaps my translation of the film is fraught with errors). But the film's assembly, and particularly the way in which the film helps to re-assemble one's image of Bangkok, is productive for the viewer. The questions might not reside in 'what do the images mean' but 'how are they assembled' and what possibility to they present in re-imagining the city? And for those familiar with the landscape of any city, the film will have something to say to you, the translator.