Cinema: Slam and Bangkok Love Story

Rabil said, "At the beginning, the camera was too tight." Fred said, "The lens was so close, I even felt a bit giddy."

Hmmm... Didn't seem to affect me, though.

I'm quoting them because among the three of us, this was the only criticism that came to mind. More generally, we were just blown away by Slam, Jonathan Lim and Christian Lee's first feature film.

Made entirely in Beijing, Slam is a coming-of-age story about 3 boys, Mouth, Monkey and Jason, who love basketball, but who are picked on by their school's leading basketball players, particularly one bully, Li Wei.

Further complicating the relationships, Mouth's father works for Li Wei's father, one of the new breed of self-made capitalists in modern China.

 
On and off the court, the one-upmanship between the two groups of boys gradually escalates to taunting and pranks. When Mouth and his mates get into a fight with Li Wei and his friends, 10,000 yuan of property in a skating rink is damaged and Mouth's father finds himself having to pay for it lest he lose his job. This puts a strain on Mouth's relationship with his single parent.

Partly for the prize money, partly to salvage their honour, the 3 boys enter a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, and the last third of the film follows their unexpected progress up the league till they meet Li Wei's team at the finals.

Even though it's a relatively well-worn story, from the word 'go' you're held captive by the story-telling. Jonathan clearly has an ear for adolescent male speech -- curt sentences expectorated, often overtaken by temper, embarrassment or mischief before they're finished. The acting is remarkably natural, especially considering how none of the lead actors had ever acted in a feature film before, only on TV, and none of the basketball antagonists had ever acted before at all.

What I found interesting was the way the competitive, often combative story of the teenagers is elegantly foiled by the subplot of the 3 adult men -- the two fathers and Li senior's personal assistant. You get a peek into grown men who have been hardened by ambition or life's struggles, but who at times can display a nuanced maturity and just the faintest hint of concern, not that they can articulate it, like most Chinese men, but noticeable nonetheless in tiny gestures. The men are the ones providing the surprise in the tale, and together with the teenagers, Slam is as much a story about relationships as it is about basketball and determination.

Still, the testosterone level is very high. Mouth has a love interest, but Jonathan Lim has deftly played it low key; he must have known that any more than just the briefest sketch of it would seriously compromise the rhythm of the whole. Actually I'm not even sure it needed to be in the movie at all. I mean, if it has to be so low key, is it really necessary anymore?

With tight editing and girded by a rap soundtrack by the Taiwanese group Machi, the film maintains a muscular pace once it gets past the early carefree days of summer vacation. It never drags; in fact at times, you may feel it going a wee bit too fast. However, as a result -- though it may not dawn on you until later -- the movie's pacing mimics the effect of competition on the viewer. You find yourself having to be very quick and alert. Your senses are heightened, watching each little flick and feint as if you yourself are inside a game.

In the end, I sort of wondered whether it was intentional that the film opened with such tight camera angles. Was it meant to get the viewer into the habit, early on, of focussing closely, locking in on target, as the characters dip, turn, twist and jump?

Go watch it and find out for yourself. Highly recommended.

* * * * *

 
One thing that Slam didn't have much time for was arthouse cinematography. For that, you'll need to catch Bangkok Love Story (Director and writer: Poj Amon, 2007).

Central to the tale is a most unlikely relationship between Cloud, a smalltime hitman, and Stone, a police officer. Cloud kidnaps Stone for a contract, but somehow refuses to kill his captive when asked to. The two of them then have to escape the wrath of the big bad guy during which Cloud is hurt.

Stone nurses him back to health in Cloud's hideout and a relationship sort of begins.

Somewhere along the way, Cloud's brother Fog is introduced. He and their mother have Aids, and with Cloud, they yearn to get away from it all to some misty place. Stone has a wife, called Sand who in the end... walks out on him. Of course.

This film has been on the gay grapevine for some months, and early reports from certain online forums have painted a picture of something akin to a modern classic.

So, how shall I put this?

 
Well, let me be frank. Just as their lips met in the second kissing scene, I burst out laughing. It was so utterly clichéd: Set in an alley, a monsoonal downpour just happens to begin, soaking their clothes. They roll onto the street, supposedly so caught up in their mutual passion, all the dirt and junk around were ignored. Meanwhile, mother and younger brother look on from the flat above with poorly-acted shock on their faces.

It was not only a cheap rip-off of the great kiss from Brokeback Mountain, it was also fatally flawed: There was no convincing passion in Cloud and Stone's embrace.

My quickly-suppressed laugh more or less sums up my Bangkok Love Story experience.

Basically, this film shows you how NOT to make a movie. Oh sure, it had very nice cinematography, but when you let moody set pieces and avantgarde camera angles trump the fundamentals of credible narrative, realistic dialogue and character development, then you have a film like Bangkok Love Story.

There was so much cliché: scrubbing yourself obsessively to wash off your first homosexual experience; crying in the shower for unrequited love; curling up foetus-like; walking down a railway platform in slow mo to meet brother at last.

The actors couldn't act: They were robots standing here, standing there, with not more than 2 facial expressions each. The dialogue was stilted, the music schmaltzy.

There were huge logical gaps, the chief of which would be why Cloud would ever choose a rooftop location to hide from his pursuers, when that rooftop is totally visible from the elevated Skytrain. Oh sure, it's a fantastic vantage point for capturing sweeping panoramas of Bangkok City with violet sunsets and menacingly dark thunderheads, but hang on, are these good reasons why it will make a good hideout for a character on the run?

 
Staying with Cloud and nursing him for a while is Stone, the erstwhile kidnap victim. Questions scream at you: How can Stone just go AWOL from his job like that? He's supposed to be a police officer.

Stone himself is later shown back at home with his penthouse loft lifestyle, and you ask: Do police officers live in penthouse lofts?

It was glaringly obvious that the whole production needed some serious workshopping that was never done. The plot, scenes and location choices must never have been critiqued. The actors never really inhabited their characters, never questioned why their characters would behave the way the script told them to behave, and then seemed unembarrassed to deliver lines that no real person over the age of 7 would ever speak.

Some parts were totally superfluous. Not a few goldfish died for nothing. Fireworks exploded in the sky... for what?

Nods -- more like contrivances, actually -- were made in the direction of social conscience. Aids, stigma, street bullying and prison were thrown into the stew, until the story became quite directionless.

The first third of the film was a puerile gay boy's masturbatory fantasy, coming across as a very poor cousin to Tsai Ming Liang's I do not want to sleep alone (see Cinema: Two stories from the slums). In the middle, it sagged as the screenwriter and director fumbled their way around trying to express equivocation in the two lead characters' feelings. Then in the last third, they had to finish off the other characters to tie up some loose ends.

I could hardly wait for the movie to finish itself off.

Yet, I have the sneaky suspicion that lots of gay boys will rave about this movie and hold it up as some sort of icon of gay expression. Puhleeze, people, don't be so shallow. Two hunks and couple of moody skyscapes do not a good movie make.

© Yawning Bread 

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