Director Kongkiat Khomsiri's professed love for Martin Scorsese's mean-street movies is evident, beyond all doubts, in his new film Anthapan (The Hooligan). Think Goodfellas, with the 1950s Bangkok substituting New York's Little Italy, and an ingenuous Thai rookie replacing Ray Liotta. But then, we also see Chinese triads, brutal knife fights, Western-style shootout, the reference to Field Marshall Sarit's coup d'etat and the rise of the police as the force more wicked than the mafia _ and Kongkiat's film is a melange of influence, style, and politics.
Anthapan
Starring Krissada Sukosol Clapp, Somchai Khemglad. Directed by Kongkiat Khomsiri. In Thai with English subtitles.
It is a film half-way between nostalgia and vandalism, between legend and history.
This is not the first time Siamese hoodlums in tight shirts, brylcreemed hair and rock 'n' rolling tendency terrorise Bangkok on film: It was Nonzee Nimibutr's 1997 film, 2499 Anthanpan Krong Muang (Daeng Bireley and Young Gangsters), that first relived the "real story" of armed thugs and gang war of the 1950s. That movie, as all film students know, is seminal, for it marked the renaissance of contemporary Thai cinema through the cocktail of history and spectacle. Nonzee's film was a hit, deservedly, and despite its agenda of retelling the lively chapter of our post-war years _ it was attacked for distorting "facts" about its real-life characters _ his art-direction savoir faire somehow elevates his good-looking thugs into a near myth, highlighted by their photogenic murders and The Godfather-like intercut between religion and violence.
Kongkiat says he grew up worshipping Nonzee's film, but he also has his idea about how the story of young gangsters of the 1950s should be told. Basically in Anthanpan, he vamps things up and makes the action more visceral: the killings are bloodier, swifter, uglier. He wants to make it more, well, "real", and he goes as far as to include what looks like documentary-style interviews of several old people who seemed to live during the period of the young gangsters and witnessed their terror and exploits. This is a shrewd move: by confusing us whether those interviewees actually know what really happened back then, the film obscures the border between what's factual and apocryphal. What's "real" is simultaneously made more real and then subverted. When reality is mutable, so is history. Such frisson would've been more fascinating had Kongkiat been a less physical director; his movie springs to life when people move, and not when they talk (shout, mostly).
The director has a fine lead in Krissada Sukosol Clapp. A lean, intense man, Krissada has a classical face and a raspy voice, which makes him especially scary when you compose that with the prominent veins on his arms, the cold of his gaze, and the reptilian prowl of his walk _ in short, it's stupid to say, as some people do, that because he's good-looking he's the last person you'd expect to see playing a savage killer. Anthapan has a deep flaw in the script that's unable to flesh out the soul of any of the characters, but Krissada works to get inside the skin of his, Jod, the golden-hearted hoodlum who can repeatedly stab an enemy to death with a crab's claw in one scene and go home to cuddle up with his mother in the next.
Indeed, Anthapan revels in the cliches of gangsterism we often see in Hong Kong triad flicks, especially the early Johnny To's. Honour among crooks, the bond of "family", loyalty, dignity, and the lamentation that killers remember the faces of every one of their victims _ these familiar themes play out in the adventure of Jod and his buddy, Daeng (Somchai Khemglad), in the swamp of mafia lairs and gambling dens around Bangkok's old quarters. Early in the film, Jod has a violent knife fight against an opponent. It begins as an honourable score-settling, before it swirls into a scene of blood and sweat and naked torsos, almost Peckinpah-ish in heat if not in cynicism, and Kongkiat, whose previous works include a boxing film Chaiya and a thriller Slice, proves himself to be one of the most skillful directors at work when it comes to raw, dark, forbidden territory.
His love for Scorsese serves him well, though only in the department of style and rhythm. The violence in Anthapan is not redemptive. There's no blood baptism, and the characters' interactions with the upheaval of the world and particularly of their society are cursory, despite the potential. Anthapan dotes on the cultural and social signposts of the period: Jod and Daeng revere Elvis and James Dean, they jitterbug to rock 'n' roll music, and soon comes the coup d'etat of Field Marshall Sarit and the crackdown on thugs during his dictatorial rule. In their thuggish quest, Jod and Daeng may brush up against the surrounding turmoil _ Jod is thrown into jail briefly _ but if the world threatens to sweep them away, or if all of this is some kind of precursor to the bigger mess and greater freedom that would arrive with the 1970s and the Vietnam War, the film merely gives them a swift glance before resuming the riot.
Like Nonzee's 2499 Anthapan Krong Muang, this new film about the same period got some details mixed up (for a start, the hippie era seems to arrive way too early), but I do not plan to harp on this. Instead, this is indicative: new filmmakers choose to re-create the past not according to what happened but what they remember. They rewrite history, perhaps like governments do, and like what we all do. It's not right, but it's what we do. I don't know if he means it, but Kongkiat's inclusion of actual (really?) interviews of eyewitnesses disorientates those who seek truth in movies, and at the same time covers the inaccuracy of his own re-creation by the same means. Jod is real, but how real is Jod? Anthapan is bloodied, skilful and far from perfect, yet it leaves us questions that will continue _ and maybe it's best _ to remain unanswered.
