Wonderful Town

It's funny, most critics either didn't like this (too thin, boring) or loved it (delicate, tells so much with so little).

I found myself in the middle, understanding both sides.

This gentle, quiet, slow moving romance between a Thai woman who runs a nearly abandoned hotel, and an architect who comes to town to help repair a local beach resort after it was devastated by the Tsunami has moments of great grace and tenderness, and moments that feel either heavy handed, or not-quite earned.

There's an attempt to capture the spooky atmosphere of a town that's been destroyed, leaving behind thousands of ghosts. That works well when it's unspoken and vague, a little less well when it's made concrete in the form of the lead woman's angry rootless bother and her friends, who bring literal violence and danger into the story, in a slightly forced way.

None-the-less, a well made, well acted, well shot, thought provoking first feature.

It probably does not give too much away to point out that the title is facetious. The "town" depicted in the film consists of a small seaside municipality in Thailand, presumably two or three years after the tsunami of 2004. The town is, for all intents and purposes, dead, but a young architect from Bangkok arrives to supervise construction of a new resort hotel. Evidently, investment in local tourism is just re-starting, but the place is still essentially a ghost town with only one functioning "rest-stop" type hotel inland. The architect starts to flirt with the young woman who works in this hotel, and whose family owns and runs it. A romance begins against the bleak backdrop, a world in which everyone left after the disaster of 2004 knows everyone else. Before long the out-of-towner architect has some unpleasant encounters with a gang of teenage petty hoodlums who ride around the area on little whining motorcycles. The building sense of unease is successfully conveyed, but the reason the film fails on several levels is that it relies too much on the audience's ability to perceive the "telepathy" between the characters, telepathy consistent with Oriental societies. It will not be immediately clear to many why the film ends the way it does, for example, or what the characters actually mean by their gazes and actions. There is a lot of "eye language", the meaning of which will only become clear to the viewer after walking out of the cinema and pondering the movie for a while. This dissipates the immediate effectiveness of the film and its screenplay, since movies — unlike books — cannot communicate thoughts easily. The performances are competent but not otherwise remarkable. Perhaps the film's only unqualified success is that the main character of the film, throughout, is undoubtedly the town itself.

Aditya Assarat's début film 'Wonderful Town' is unusual, but there are aspects of it which left me puzzling as to what the director was trying to achieve. In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami quiet young architect seduces a shy hotel worker; it's sweetly observed, but hardly a dramatic story, and the role of the great flood is mainly to ensure that the tale can be told in an eerily empty landscape. The local youth dislike the visitor, however, and this provides a savage twist in the end; but even their hostility is vague, strangely noble and shown softly even when at it most horrific. More like a ripple than a wave, I didn't dislike this movie, but was hardly swept away.

This first film from director Aditya Assarat is mostly quiet and absorbing. The film tells of the relationship of Ton (Supphasit Kansen), an architect who is supervising the building of a resort hotel on the beach in southern Thailand, post tsunami, and Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn), a hotel clerk/maid who lives in a town in the mountains of Thailand. Ton stays at the hotel and slowly you see the relationship of these two people evolve,how it ebbs and flows. You see the sweet moments and challenges, including Na being concerned that the townspeople are gossiping about them. The two characters are fairly likable and Na seems to become prettier as the movie goes on. The scenery of the mountains is very nice, the cinematography is very good. This film is slow moving and has an undercurrent of foreboding throughout, but I found the pace to be essential and the acting by the two main actors very good. Even the musical score, mostly an acoustic guitar, is good. Not for everyone due to its slow moving pace, its a must for fans of Asian cinema and anyone who feels they can relate to a story like this. I felt this film was well made and captured the essence of time and place extremely well. A fairly impressive debut for Aditya Assarat.

The genius of this film is that it uses sub-plot to mask its main plot: this is NOT about whether or not the lovers squeeze a happy ending out of their situation; rather it is about how the main character Na gets her brother back and makes her family whole again. It starts and ends with this. It is nothing short of brilliant of this director to have hidden this right before our eyes through tapping into our prejudices about sex and relationships. If you don't get this of course you will find this movie full of question marks and loose ends. Also the pace of this movie is perfect; it is the pace of life in Thai towns. Those who don't understand this may have been to Thailand but unless they have wasted an entire day or more waiting to get somewhere have not had an authentically Thai experience. This movie is a good example both in how it tells its story and the technology of the lives it portrays of how global culture is evolving into something beautiful and subtly expressive. It apologizes for nothing about Thai culture, and, like Thailand itself, shows a vitality that is capable of assimilating what it likes from ours without losing even a shred of its integrity. I congratulate this director and everyone associated with this film, it is a gem!