Tears of the Black Tiger
Directed by Wisit Sasanatieng
Tales of the Brothers Quay
11-film retrospective directed by Stephen & Timothy Quay
Movie formula begs to be recycled, frequently compromising quality for the sake of consistency. In rarer circumstances, narrative conventions can be a vehicle for fresh ideas. Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal 1959 shoestring caper Breathless molded the Hollywood gangster genre into a far more abstract and provocative cinematic accomplishment. Allowing absurdist storytelling to permeate the plot, Godard used a Brechtian paradigm, providing constant reminders that nothing onscreen was remotely real. In doing so, he incorporated an imaginative whimsy that revealed the limitless potential of movies—in particular how entertainment as a whole can provide a platform for profound expression. Not everyone likes Breathless, but it would be tough to argue Godard’s point.
Tears of the Black Tiger—which was completed six years ago, screened at festivals around the world and only recently, thanks to Magnolia Pictures, found an American distributor—provides Thailand’s answer to Breathless. It tells a thin story about doomed love between a poor peasant-turned-gunslinger and a lonely rich girl, stages a couple rollicking shootouts and piles on the fake blood. Every scene oozes with such deliberate stylization that it’s impossible to watch it without constantly considering the filmmaker’s ulterior motives.
I mean, really: Two cowboy types confront each other in a jungle, which is represented by a painted wall. Budget constraints? Hardly. The device underlines the theatricality of a familiar western scenario. The scene gets absorbing, revealing that performances can balance an incredulous setting. Another sequence comments on the way that escapism relies on repetitive tropes: A bullet deflects off several walls before finding its target. An intertitle informs us that the event will be replayed in order to clarify how the target was reached. While the moment lacks humor, it does clear up the type of confusion that arises in clumsily choreographed action blockbusters.
That brings me to the main problem: Tears of the Black Tiger, for all the elegancy of its structure, takes itself way too seriously. The elaborate sets and hyperrealistic color schemes look fantastic, but the aesthetic depth feels irrelevant in a movie so fascinatingly dedicated to deconstructing convention. Godard rejected massive production values in order to crack open film form. Tears of the Black Tiger contradicts its apparent intentions by embracing the schematic it aims to subvert. Writer/director Wisit Sasanatieng shows appreciable skill and originality, but he can’t resist the temptation to make the type of movie that gave rise to this curious project.
If Sasanatieng offers Thailand its Godard, the Quay brothers give Goth its Walt Disney. This prolific duo (identical twins born in America and working in London) have cranked out some of the most imaginative, mesmerizing animation since the late 1970s. Like Disney’s timeless creations, the Quays’ work unites the boundaries between art and commercialism: Their eerie stop motion designs have appeared in both arthouses and Slurpee commercials. The massive retrospective Tales of the Brothers Quay, which runs at Film Forum for a week beginning January 19, attests to the animators’ unparalleled vision. Running over two hours and featuring 11 shorts (with an intermission), the collection forms a gorgeous visual spectacle. Although some shorts seem murky or redundant, at their finest, the Quays achieve a sort of creative Zen that adheres to surrealist logic, like Salvador Dali channeling Edgar Allen Poe.
Whereas Tears of the Black Tiger takes a familiar platform to launch its experiment, the Quays conjure abstract wonderlands as a means of directly addressing the artistic process itself. The haunting imagery in 1986’s “Streets of Crocodiles,” endorsed by Terry Gilliam as one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of animation, follows a shopkeeper’s perspective through the morbid looking glass of a peep show. Inside, animated corpses perform a danse macabre that makes your average Tim Burton yarn appear downright sunny in comparison.
