time travel

1

Krabi 2562 – A Subtle Critique of One of Thailand’s Most Visited Regions

Krabi 2562

Krabi 2562 Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

Why Watch Krabi 2562?

  • If you’re a fan of films built around a medley of scenes that segue between narrative and fiction
  • To jump between past, ancient past, and present day Krabi
  • For a subtle critique of the changing region
From: Thailand, Asia
Watch: Trailer, IMDb
Next: Mysterious Object at Noon, Mimosas, Android's Dream

A Political Opening

Krabi 2562 opens with a shot of a school assembly outdoors (see picture above). The students chant the national anthem, and salute the national religion (Buddhism) and the monarchy that rules ‘for the happiness of the people.’ It feels a bit dystopian, but this indoctrinated patriotism is pretty common throughout the world (even American school kids sing a bunch of patriotic songs in elementary school). After the singing stops, the camera cuts to an image of two plastic sheep. It’s a juxtaposition that symbolizes the blind patriotism of the kids and teachers.

I expected the film to contain more of a political message after the political jab in the opening. I also embarrassingly thought it would portray a dystopian future due to my ignorance that the date is in fact taken from the Buddhist calendar instead of the Gregorian one we’re familiar with; 2652 = 2019. Instead, Krabi 2562 is built around a series of clips of life in the region from interviews to deadpan narratives. There’s no main characters, not much of a continuous narrative, and it’s not a documentary either. In this sense, the style reminded me a bit of another Thai film, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon, and a bit of Andrea Bussman’s Fausto, two more films that weave together a mix of footage to create a feeling of story.

Time Traveling

Instead of following a particular character, the film hops between different scenes: some which seem real; and others that seem fictional. Seen together, they create a sense of the feeling of life in Krabi and how it’s changing. Some scenes, such as the interview with the boxer reminiscing on his past life, and the lady following in her parent’s footsteps, evoke a recent past. Other scenes, those that feature the ancient myths told by the Thai guide, and those that feature a pair of cavemen, evoke the ancient past. Whilst the contemporary present is represented by the tourists (foreign and domestic) visiting the region, and the advertising crew using the region’s natural beauty for an ad shoot. Whilst it doesn’t explicitly shout out that the region is taking a bad direction from past to present, it does show that local culture is being marginalized. The cavemen, boxer, and native crew member have been pushed aside (the native crew member literally disappears); the wildlife have turned into statues in a zoo inspected by people in Hazmat suits; and the myths and landscape have been converted into tourist draws. It’s as if the region is being ‘sanitized’ to cater to tourists and the outside world.

However, one thing that is lasting is the areas beautiful landscape. It still looks like the same place that the cavemen inhabited. It existed before stories. Despite the incursions of the outer world, the quiet soundtrack, populated mostly by the natural sounds of birds and cicadas, seems to hint that nature is also still in control. Whilst the people of Krabi can be pushed aside and marginalized, and the animals frozen in time, the beautiful landscapes’ immutability will continue to draw life to the region be it native or foreign.

What to Watch Next

If you want to watch more films built around a medley of scenes that segue between narrative and fiction, check out Andrea Bussman’s Fausto and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon.

Or if you want to watch another film whose narrative seamlessly jumps between the past and present, I strongly recommend watching Oliver Laxe’s Mimosas. (On a side note, Oliver Laxe actually makes a cameo in Krabi 2562 as the ad commercial director). You could also watch The Last of Us, another intriguing film which follows an African migrant that gets stuck with a modern day caveman in the wild, preventing him from reaching his European dream.

Finally, if you wanted to watch a slow, experimental sci-fi set in a touristic region (as I thought this film was going to be), check out Ion de Sosa’s Androids Dream, set in the Spanish beach resort town of Benindorm in the off-season.

2

Someday or One Day – Tragedy Strikes Love in a Puzzling Story

By Sebastian Torrelio

Someday or One Day

More so than the mystery of where Huang Yu-Xuan (Ko Chia-Yen) and Wang Quan-Sheng (Hsu Kuang-Han) have gone—where their spirits have bounded off too, whom takes the place of which body and how they return—is the mystery of how Someday or One Day, an adaptation of the hit Taiwanese television drama, went so terribly south. Primary director of the original Tien Jen Huang returns here to create a baffling story of dualities reflected against identical-looking dualities, an improbable mess that only rides so far on cute delicacy before the tape unwinds entirely.

At first, things seem steady, though speedy. A wistful camera wanders over pristine decorative interiors like a gift shop, so much of the plot to come only teased through low-budget VFX snapshots. Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan, having met-cute at record pace, are two entities who spend most of their time longingly sighing and staring out into the distance, their vague young adult concerns very present, though indecipherable. Teens at odds with their singularity, so commonplace in the drama of modern Chinese media, cannot just be scanned for relatability – something needs to be presented to the viewer, clearly.

And so enters the plot of Someday or One Day – shocked from the sudden death of Quan-Sheng, Yu-Hsuan spends her years daydreaming away from society, stuck in her own head, before waking up years later in the body of a mutual friend Chen Yun-Ru (also Ko playing a double role) years prior before her love’s demise. Yun-Ru finds herself in the most complicated role perceivable, forced to convince her friends from their past of their oncoming danger, barely able to articulate the hell she’s been pacing through ever since.

To Ko and Hsu’s credit, nothing about their performances here drag, the success of their well-established chemistry is the only real ingredient to make the movie’s breakthrough romantic first kiss come close to operating. Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan relate through their favorite couple song, lifted from the TV series; they incur the abusive collateral of time spent together equal to time spent apart. If everything seems trivially, tonally normal in their lives, maybe it’s because it should be, for the most part.

The most interesting thing at play with Someday, as with a lot of Chinese rom-coms in this vein, is the relationship of everyday individuals to their romantic fate: if it’s coincidence that brought us together, is it coincidence that is keeping us together? Altogether, not a bad question that “Someday asks directly at least once. Huang even guides us to a different existential question: are dreams the barrier to our happiness? The normalcy of a relationship growing into, outward and apart can and has been subject to a more inspective eye than this hundreds of times, on better and easier to ascertain platforms.

The original TV series, spanning 13 episodes that dive deeper into the sinister mystery behind Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan’s body bouncing history and conundrum, gained acclaim for its nourishing continuum, a collective audience experience that intertwines pop tendencies and true-hearted romance. How this film adaptation, branded neither specifically as a sequel nor a creative reboot, functions parallel to that is beyond comprehension.

Seen at AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Monterey Park