The shots here are deliberately reminiscent of Jesus riding a donkey on the way to Jerusalem. We see from his face and posture that he really is very ill, and it is in this paranormal state that most of the rest of the film takes place. We enter flashbacks within the main flashback, but the collage is cleverly executed so the device does not intrude; on the contrary, the way he cuts scenes of his childhood with flashes of him in the Himalayas is brilliant.
But it’s a strange kind of brilliance; you might call the whole movie the product of plagiarism taken to the point of genius. At some point in the editing he must have decided that the film would not go on general release, and therefore he was released from any need to obey the law of copyright. As a consequence he does not merely imitate, but blatantly cuts in whole scenes from other movies; for example, the mountains are often invoked by retro shots of James Stewart hanging in space in Vertigo. He even manages-and here we cannot deny his eccentric gift-to lift scenes from Truffaut in the original French, without jarring the viewer. You could say one of the subplots is his own obsession with cinema, which is almost pathological.
As the journey down the mountain progresses, however, with Tara walking effortlessly beside him as he’s slumped over the yak’s neck, we realize in the subtlest possible way that the incomparable Tara (we have already seen her remove her prostheses from her fingers: one of the many things about her, along with her vajra, over which the camera obsesses) is slowly but surely replacing film itself as his control center.
I think that to convincingly show a man dumping the obsession of a lifetime for a woman he has only recently met must be very difficult. Frank Charles succeeds only because he is telling the truth: this is exactly how it happened, one has no doubt about that. But his problem is that carnal desire competes with spiritual thirst: he yearns for her with every chakra, but especially the second. (The crotch chakra, farang.) And so it is in this near-death fragmented state on a narrow track in the high Himalayas that we are shown the various strands of personal history that have made the man. We see the barrenness of his early life in the Midwest, where his family owned a hardware store. His father is largely ignored; we focus on his Italian mother, from whom he inherited his Latin good looks and his passion; she is portrayed as an exotic Mediterranean songbird trapped in a utilitarian cage. We see him as a kid masturbating in protest against the uncompromising vacuum of a world filled with nuts, bolts, and screws, DIY and plumbing accessories, welding torches and huge stainless-steel hoppers for seed. We see him retreat into film, which can only be viewed in theaters in those distant days. He almost takes up residence in the town’s only cinema.
I won’t spoil the movie for you, farang. You never know, it might find its way on to the black market one of these days; I might even upload it onto one of the illegal file-sharing Internet sites. Suffice to say we are led by an ingenious sequence of cuts and shots to intimately understand the director’s psychology, about which he is uncompromisingly honest. One surprise is the violence of his mind. His adolescence is not only filled with erotic imaginations, but moments of extreme rage as well. He knows not where this tendency originates, much less his bizarre gift for marrying exactly the wrong women. By the time we get to the end we are convinced that for him there is no other option; there is no way for him to retain his fragmented self, nor has he acquired the strength to change at root. Can art help?
Well, now I’ve taken you this far, I guess you’d be vexed if I didn’t at least let you have the first scene, which is also the last:
It is that squalid room on Soi 4/4 where we first encountered him. At first his bearded face-he is at his most obese now, the beautiful young director buried under a flesh mountain-fills the whole screen. As he retreats from the camera, he mutters, “Anyway, it’s less expensive doing it this way, a dummy would have cost too much.”
The camera follows him in a brief tour of the room before he climbs with difficulty onto the bed, and now, finally, I understand the books. They were the one item whose purpose eluded me. I had thought they were a perverse tease by a deranged mind; now I see their amazing innocence. They are a confession not to murder, but to a crime which scarred his soul far more deeply: an inauthentic life.
Once he has propped himself up, he says, “Okay, focus the camera on the top of my head, make sure you’ve got me from the eyes up, I don’t want any nose in this shot, but you have to angle it to take in the ear when the saw cuts above it: drama, I don’t want this to be a boring shot, ha, ha. Now get the saw and come over here and wait. Remember everything we practiced during rehearsals. Don’t duck down as you work, because the camera will catch your face and you’ll be incriminated and this scene cannot be reshot, ha, ha.”
A few moments pass during which he keeps his eyes closed, then: “Okay, I can feel the drugs working, my whole mind is slowing. That’s when she said to start. Leave the camera now and come over here. If my head starts to slump you’ll have to pull it back into the frame. Now, it should be possible for me to use my own strength to dig out the first few spoonfuls from the left lobe, the one that’s been causing all the trouble for sixty years, but if I can’t, you’ll have to help me. Use one of your hands to guide mine, but make sure I keep hold of the spoon.”
The hands holding the buzz saw are sheathed in surgical gloves of the ultra-thin, almost transparent kind; it is not possible to be sure, but I would say the hands are female-long, slim, and porcelain white. The glove successfully obscures the details of an unusual ring on the index finger of the right hand, which appears to be quite broad with tiny protuberances suggestive of gems. She proceeds slowly, taking great care not to damage the spectacularly filmatic arachnoid mater, with its great crimson webs of veins and arteries which feed the brain. When she is finished, she raises the skull, much like a waiter at Maxim’s might reveal a great dish by whipping off its cover.
“Did I just experience liftoff?” Frank Charles asks in a groggy voice.
What am I thinking? I’m thinking, Poor Sukum. I’ve solved the case for him after all, and with the best Buddhist will in the world it’s going to be hard to let him take the credit. Anyway, it’s a suicide, so what credit is there to claim? This isn’t the stuff that leads to fast-track promotion. It’s kind of funny in a sense, but I’m not laughing. The film might be a masterpiece in its own weird way, but for my money, the genius lies in the introduction. The straight, honest, naked confession of a life of luxurious failure has hit a nerve with me; I’m haunted. I send a copy to the FBI by e-mail attachment, then I call Sukum.
36
For the sake of good housekeeping, I need to follow up a little on the Fat Farang suicide. After all, records already show that I’ve interviewed Doctor Moi in connection with the file, so I really need to have her comments on the movie. Then there’s the little detail of the familiar hand holding the buzz saw, which I cannot simply ignore. Also, let’s face it, every cop loves to bust a triple-A liar.
It was Moi herself who suggested we meet at the Starbucks in the Emporium, a shopping mall on Sukhumvit, which used to be state of the art until they opened the Paragon at Silom. You can only understand the Asian passion for shopping malls when you realize you didn’t invent them, farang, we did. You added the air-conditioning and the coffee, for which we are most grateful. For the rest, it’s the local street market all over again.
Starbucks here is an Atlantic island in the middle of a Pacific Ocean of cooked-food stalls, ice-cream stands, pharmacies, cutlers, bathroom specialists, and, most important of all, vendors of electric rice cookers. Behind me is a Japanese supermarket, somewhat on the pricey side and therefore frequented mostly by HiSo Thais, Japanese, Koreans, and farang. Shopping there is a treat. All over Asia no shopper is ever required to empty their own trolley at checkout; here, though, Japanese rules apply, and you not only have your trolley lovingly discharged before your eyes, but also cop a high wai and extra-special sawatdee-krup-with-smile from the beautiful clerk, who really does convince you she’s pleased to see you. Just for the record, farang, I am not making an invidious comparison with your supermarkets (where they make you feel like a shoplifter with previous convictions who has to be watched all the time).