"Tears of the Black Tiger"; "Seraphim Falls"

By Dennis Harvey

The sweet eye candy of Eastern Western “Tears of the Black Tiger”

Filmmaking in Thailand has been on an artistic roll for the last several years, a renaissance that got the seal of international acknowledgement in 2001, when “Tears of a Black Tiger” became the first Thai feature ever officially invited to Cannes.

Europeans (especially those Frenchies) often consider us Yanks to be a little culturally backward, and in this case they are correct: It has taken six long years for “Tears” to finally show up on regular U.S. theatre screens, long after its tour of festivals, DVD and VCD bins. (I got my copy in Chinatown for four bucks several years ago.)

Well, better late than never. And the big screen is where “Tears” really should be seen, since it’s eye candy to a positively cavity-risking degree. This exercise in campy genre pastiche is colorful the way, say, 1950s MGM musicals were — the color just about leaps off the screen and gives you an ocular smackdown.

This first feature by Wisit Sasanatieng is an homage to Westerns of that Hollywood era. But other classic movie conventions are also fair game for its over-the-top parody — for one thing, there’s enough machine gun action here for a dozen “Scarfaces.” Despite all ten-gallon-hat-wearing, quick-drawing and T’baccy-spittin’ amidst wide open spaces (though some of them are back-projected, or simply painted), it’s at heart something very Thai: A tragic star-crossed love story.

The deliberately convoluted flashback structure chronicles an impossible love between rich city girl Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi), the Governor’s daughter, and poor peasant boy Dum (Chartchai Ngamsan), whom she first meets during a childhood visit to the countryside. Ten years later, serial hard luck has turned him into the sharpest shooter in a bandit king’s marauding gang, while Rumpoey is betrothed to a straight-arrow young police captain. Needless to say, however, outlaw and debutante still burn with forbidden love for each other.

With its exaggeratedly iconic performances, eye-popping costumes (the heroine’s gowns are so loud they seem almost 3-D) and gorgeously fetishistic production design (her house is a riot of teal and fuchsia), “Tears of the Black Tiger” is kinda like a fashion model — best at standing around, looking great.
There’s not a whole lotta narrative drive here, something Sasanatieng would improve upon with his next film, 2004’s equally wacky “Citizen Dog.” (Since then he’s made a horror film, last year’s “Pen Choo Kab Pee” a.k.a. “The Unseeable,” and is now working on a martial arts flick that hopefully will prove his Zhang Yimou-style breakout to larger audiences.)

But an occasional lull while style clobbers substance does just limited harm to “Tears’” silly symphony of aesthetic excess. There’s plenty of candy-colored entertainment value in a movie whose shoot-em-up blood fountains out-gush Peckinpah; whose action can always pause for a lachrymose soundtrack ballad; whose brawny hero saves the heroine from imminent ravishment so many times it becomes a running joke; and whose art direction would make the classic cowpoke likes of John Wayne break out in he-manly hives.

“Seraphim Falls”: Nature doesn’t nurture

One of the reasons the movie medium immediately became popular is because it afforded everyone an opportunity to see remote and exotic places they might never experience otherwise. That’s got to partly explain the appeal of Westerns, too — more people enjoy those wide open spaces and rugged terrain while seated comfortably in a theater than would actually want to, y’know, rough it in the brush.

Me, I actually do like that stuff, albeit via backpacking rather than cowboy-style on horseback. But I also like seeing the same mountain, desert, et al. landscapes in Westerns — because, well, they’re pretty. And violent conflict in beautiful surroundings…hey, that’s entertainment!

A progression of landscapes is so central to the new western “Seraphim Falls” that you might well wonder if the script was developed around the location scouting, rather than the other way around. Shot primarily in New Mexico (standing in for Northern Nevada), plus a bit in Oregon, it’s a story that starts in the extreme winter of high mountains and ends in the purgatorial heat of summertime desert salt flats. Thus nature as well as guns and other manmade perils get plenty of chances to threaten human life en route.

The reason for this epic, hardly recreational trek is a relentless thirst for blood vengeance by Carver (Liam Neeson) from his quarry Gideon (Pierce Brosnan). Just what Gideon did to merit such committed hatred is revealed only in “Seraphim’s” last half-hour. But it’s clearly something major, and very personal — Carver doesn’t waver for a moment from his purpose, even as the fugitive self-defensively picks off his hired posse of five one by one.

All this taking place just after the Civil War, mod cons are not exactly plentiful west of the Mississippi. Lack of food, water, horse, warmth, and weaponry can happen easily and fatally. In the film’s first 20 minutes alone, Brosnan gasps and squirms through all the physical punishment he’d doled out (or nonchalantly endured) as James Bond: He’s shot, falls off a mountain into freezing rapids, then over a waterfall; has to perform self-surgery with a very big knife, then uses said knife to do very bad things to one bounty hunter who’d‘ve gladly done him ill instead. And that’s just the beginning of the perils to befall him.

Brosnan seems to relish (as in last year’s terrific, overlooked “The Matador”) such opportunities to masochistically de-bunk his suave Bond image. By contrast, the normally estimable Neeson just stands (or rides) around looking grim and determined.

But performance isn’t really the thing in “Seraphim Falls,” anyway. Nor is the violence, though it’s pretty grisly — one particularly nasty idea finds a whole new disgusting use for a horse carcass.

You get the feeling that David Von Acken, a TV director (“Cold Case,” “Oz,” etc.) making his first feature, and co-scenarist Abby Everett Jaques is really about Myth. As the movie goes on — and on and on — it grows more affectedly mythic, in a sort of Old Testament-meets-Sergio Leone way. Characters start showing up who are all too symbolic. The last and worst is one played by Angelica Huston that can only be described as a yakkety hallucination (or as, groan, the Angel of Death). There does come a point when you find yourself thinking “Just kill each other so we can go home.”

Best to ignore “Seraphim Falls’” pretentious streak and enjoy it as a stunning if brutal backcountry travelogue. The film’s press notes make a great deal out of the fact that it’s photographed by the Oscar-winning John Toll, who seems to specialize in outdoorsy epics (“Braveheart,” “The Thin Red Line,” “Legends of the Fall,” “The Last Samurai,” etc.).

CGI monsters and alien worlds are all very nice. But Toll’s spectacular widescreen work here reminds that Nature came up with better FX a long, long time ago.

02.06.2007