Wednesday, 2 February 2011
Thailand, 2005 (100 min)
Thai with English subtitles
Director: Wisit Sasanatieng.
Cast: Mahasamuth Boonyarak, Songtong Ket-Utong
First and foremost, director Wisit Sasanatieng’s world is a colourful place. To the untrained Western eye it appears to be influenced by The Wizard of Oz with Yellow Brick Road yellows, Dorothy dress blues, Emerald City greens and ruby slipper reds. But really, Wisit’s sensibilities are 100 percent Thai. His true influence is the Thai melodramas of the 1950s and 60s — the “Golden Age of Thai Cinema” — something he wanted to recreate in Tears of the Black Tiger and updates in Citizen Dog. In this classic, grandmas are reincarnated as geckos, characters from a serial romance magazine step from the pages to knock on doors, and a mountain of plastic bottles dominates the Bangkok skyline, reaching clear to the moon.
On the surface, Citizen Dog is a romantic comedy, but really it’s a satire, poking fun at hectic urban life, cell-phone chatterers and kids hooked on video games and ignored by their parents. Wisit wants to comment on materialism and conformity. Depending on his job, country bumpkin Pod’s (Mahasamuth Boonyarak) uniform says “Factory”, “Security” or “Taxi”, while his love interest, obsessive-compulsive Jin (Songtong Ket-Utong), sports the label “Maid” on her maid uniform. We’re helped along the way by folksy narration from one of the other leading lights of Thai cinema, Pen-ek Ratanaruang. -Nod to Wise Kwai for this review
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