TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER
• Jim Johnson on the joys of a Noodle Western
It is about betrayal, loyalty and unavoidable fate.

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Tears of the Black Tiger (cert. 18)
Director: Wisit Sasanatieng. With Chartchai Ngamsan (Seua Dum/Black Tiger), Stella Malucchi (Rumpoey) and Supakorn Kitsuwon
(Mahesuan).

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon became the first foreign language film to take more than a hundred million dollars at the US box office. It was an unprecedented achievement for a subtitled Chinese film to become so popular with western cinema audiences. Suddenly, we were all aware of a different style of filmmaking, a refreshing alternative to the usual Hollywood offering. Tears of the Black Tiger, also an Asian film, has benefited from the stir that Crouching Tiger caused. But we shouldn’t expect many similarities; Asian films are no more universal than European ones and Tears is made in Thailand, not China. The director, Wisit Sasanatieng, is part of the ‘New Wave’ of Thai cinema, an industry that had been struggling for over five years. It took the film 'Iron Ladies', a local hit and festival favourite, to kick-start the recovery. Iron Ladies is the true story of a Thai male volleyball team - the majority of whom are gays, transvestites and transsexuals - and their rise from obscurity to national champions. To further fuel the high expectations and anticipation surrounding its release, Tears of the Black Tiger has already won Sasanatieng the Dragons & Tiger Award for best new director at Vancouver last autumn. It has also become the first Thai film ever to screen in selection at Cannes.

The story centres on the life of Seua Dum, a young peasant boy who meets a rich city girl by the name of Rumpoey. She has been evacuated from Bangkok to escape the fallout of the Pacific War. They soon become close friends but their parents forbid any further contact once Rumpoey returns home. They meet by chance, several years later and eventually rekindle their relationship and fall in love. But Rumpoey’s influential father has promised her hand to his bravest police captain. So Dum and Rumpoey make arrangements to elope, they plan to meet in a woodcutter’s sala in the middle of a marsh, a place where their fondness for each other had first begun to show. But when Dum returns to the countryside his life takes an unexpected turn. He discovers that his family has been brutally attacked. Dum’s priorities change; his love for Rumpoey is temporarily eclipsed by the need to avenge his family. This brings him into contact with Fai, a bandit gang leader, who takes him under his wing, nurtures his fighting instincts and harnesses them for his own cause.

Dum seems to revel in the life of a bandit, quickly earning respect and his new alias as ‘The Black Tiger’. From then on his path seems destined to cross with that of Captain Kumjorn, Rumpoey’s husband to be, who is making a spirited attempt at ending the Fai gang’s reign of terror.

Tears of the Black Tiger doesn’t fit neatly into any one category. Sure, it’s a Western - it’s got plenty of gunfights; smoking barrels; slow motion sequences of flying bullets; close-ups of the twitching eyes and sweating brows of duelling gunmen waiting to draw; not to mention impossibly precise feats of marksmanship - but it’s unlike any other Western you will have ever seen. It’s a comedy - but hardly a side-splitter, often you feel unsure of whether you’re supposed to be laughing or not. It is also a parody of old-fashioned melodramatic cinema, but again, at times you wonder whether it is being ironic or just old-fashioned and melodramatic. At its core is a classic tale of love, which is doomed from the start because of an unbridgeable class divide. It is about betrayal, loyalty and unavoidable fate.

The way in which this classic story is told will surprise. For starters, there is no attempt at realism. Nor computer generated graphics to produce fantastic but convincing scenery. Instead this film successfully attempts to resemble an old comic strip. There are bizarre two-dimensional backdrops and characters and landscapes which are made to look artificial by the use of vivid colouring. Tears’ heroes and villains also fit the comic book style, they perform suitably daring or dastardly feats respectively and all have a tendency to go off on a clichéd monologue. It is the vivid, retro colours which are the most noticeable element of the cinematography. Just have a look at the promotional shots, they resemble those early ‘colour’ postcards that were really black-and-white but then got painted over in colour by hand. Once you get used to this it helps create a feel for the film, but initially it’s a shock and just looks naff.

It was Sasanatieng’s time in the world of advertising that allowed him to experiment with different visual styles. A Wrangler commercial and one for noodles in particular gave him the practise he needed to come up with the unique look for Tears.

The combination of styles makes Tears so interesting. That and some terrific fight sequences. There are cowboy shootouts to rival any spaghetti Western but with an added modern twist. Like Tarantino, Sasanatieng seems to have a fascination with showing the gruesome reality of killing and, also like Tarantino, in such scenes he usually manages to shock the audience and make them laugh at the same time.

Tears of the Black Tiger is certainly worth seeing for its originality. How much you enjoy it however will depend on whether you can cope with all the insanity, whether you decide that its ironic and funny or just corny and tedious. There are some parts that move so slowly that your enthusiasm will really be put to the test. Then there are some painful songs that keep cropping up, they’re amusing at first but you might find they start to grate after a while. But underlying all this is an intriguing story told in a fantastical and memorable way.

© Jim Johnson 2001

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