Tears of the Black Tiger.

"Is it possible to evoke this movie without invoking two dozen others?" wonders David Edelstein in New York. The movie is Tears of the Black Tiger. "The director, Wisit Sasanatieng, cites fifties Thai Westerns and a strain of sixties Thai action cinema... I get a hash of forties cheapie Lash La Rue oaters; florid, wide-screen, Technicolor Douglas Sirk melodramas; lyrical Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns; homoerotic John Woo gangster shoot-'em-ups; and even George A Romero splatterfests. I used to make jokes about a hack critic who dubbed Diva 'a stylish exercise... in style,' but that about sums this one up."

At IFC News, Matt Singer notes that the film is "one giant (and, at times, difficult to swallow) homage to a film culture no one has ever seen... I enjoyed Tears's campier elements but felt my patience strain under what felt like an endless supply of ooey-gooey romantic flashbacks which are no doubt a great deal more insightful when you fully understand the culture they contain insight about. It's like trying to read a book in a foreign language you don't speak."

Updated through 1/13.

"As tiring as I generally found all this, I have to admit there is something remarkable about the whole endeavor." Nevertheless, the film warrants a mere "C+" from Bryant Frazer.

Earlier reviews: Kung Fu Cult Cinema and Edward Buscombe in Sight & Sound.

Update, 1/9: "You need no primer in obscure Thai cinema to relish the Black Tiger effect, only eyes wide open and a taste for transcendental camp," insists Nathan Lee in the Voice. "Place this bright Black Tiger in the company of 2046, Curse of the Golden Flower, and Three Times as evidence that the last gasp of celluloid exuberance draws its deepest breath in Asia."

Updates, 1/11: "What makes Tears unique is its turquoise, pinks and oranges, anything-goes-tone and expressionistic sets," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "But what makes it endure, six years and counting, is its classic tale of class difference and tragic love."

"Is a pastiche a pastiche if no one in the audience has any idea what it's referencing?" wonders Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "Everything mimics a broad, old-fashioned crowd-pleaser, and yet Tears of the Black Tiger isn't all that fun to watch."

In the New York Press, Eric Kohn calls it "Thailand's answer to Breathless. It tells a thin story about doomed love between a poor peasant-turned-gunslinger and a lonely rich girl, stages a couple rollicking shootouts and piles on the fake blood. Every scene oozes with such deliberate stylization that it's impossible to watch it without constantly considering the filmmaker's ulterior motives."

"[G]ood looks and a wealth of allusions only get you so far," writes Jürgen Fauth. "The pleasures of Tears of the Black Tiger lie exclusively in its winking, high-camp evocation of older movies and styles; there's not much worthwhile beneath the ironic postmodern attitude."

Updates, 1/12: "What is most startling is not Mr Sasanatieng's compulsive, fetishistic assembly of bits and pieces of the movie past; this kind of pastiche has, over the past decade and a half, gone from novelty to cliché," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The source of the movie's seductive appeal lies less in its vivid fakery - the mock vintage-Technicolor hues, the musical and visual quotations, the miasma of camp hanging in the air - than in its disarming sincerity."

"It begins as an exploration of movie conventions only to end up confirming the power those conventions have over us," writes Stephanie Zacharek at Salon. "In Tears of the Black Tiger, feeling trumps moviemaking cleverness every time."

Slate's Dana Stevens: "[I]t's a lurid weeper and a tribute to genre cinema and a celebration of Thai folk art - but it couldn't exist without Sergio Leone's version of the American West, which in turn couldn't exist without the Hollywood Western. And if this all sounds like a recipe for too-clever-by-half self-reflexive trickery, here's the weirdest twist of all: Tears of the Black Tiger is strangely, almost achingly, earnest."

Updates, 1/13: What a terrific overview - a three-minute history, followed by links for further exploration - Matt Riviera offers in his review of Thai Cinema / Le cinéma thaïlanais.

Steve Erickson at Gay City News: "Only in the final scene does Tears of the Black Tiger achieve the tragic grandeur it aims for. Or does it? For all the lush splendor of Sasanatieng's images, his greatest achievement may be making a film that so tantalizingly resists one's efforts to figure out what it is trying to accomplish."

Ryan Stewart at Cinematical: "Tears of the Black Tiger feels like a movie made a hundred years from now, when filmmakers have only the vaguest notion of the boundaries we in the past recognized between genres."

Posted by cphillips at January 8, 2007 1:50 PM