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Krabi, 2562 (Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers, 2019)
🕑 Added 2020-04-15 03:03:05 +0000 UTC
To everything there is usually a season, and the spring is typically when the films from the previous fall festival season slowly make their way into the larger world, in arthouse cinemas and on various streaming platforms. But of course, we all know this is not a typical spring. As COVID-19 has its way with the planet, movie theaters are closed and distributors are in a holding pattern. Many of the films making their way to VOD and streaming are ones that debuted earlier this year, at Sundance, or were meant to open in theaters in 2020. So there are inevitably some films that will never find their way out of the pipeline.
Granted, this is a relatively minor concern in the grand scheme, but it's perhaps worth a mention because art remains one of the few things that can give us succor as the world we once knew collapses around us. Krabi, 2562 is a film that, sadly, is probably going to be overlooked in our new hellscape. Even in the best of times, it would be a tough sell. It is subtle, quiet, and demands a bit of patience. It is a film that reveals its trajectory slowly, moving in incomplete arcs and fragmentary gestures until, finally, it forms a perfect circle.
Krabi, 2562 takes its title from a place and a time. Krabi is the name of the tourist town in Thailand where the action, such as it is, unfolds. There is a commercial shoot on the shore that is the ostensible reason for our visit to Krabi, but this is just an instigating event that allows us to meet an unnamed woman (Siraphun Wattanajinda) who is a location scout for the shoot. She becomes our primary interlocutor for the film, a Thai woman who appears to live in Europe and has a strong command of English. She arrives in Krabi not as a tourist but on a work trip, as she keeps insisting. But those she meets, especially the hotel guide (Primrin Puarat), reinforce her status as a visitor. She is a hybridized subject, someone between cultures who, as a result, returns to her ancestral nation as a "foreigner."
The guide tells the visitor about a number of local legends, the most notable of which has to do with a magical serpent who, upon being slighted a a royal wedding, enacts a curse that indirectly results in the creation of the rocky shores of Krabi itself. Late in the film, we see tourists on the beach near a cave, unaware that inside the cave lurk prehistoric figures whose disconnection to present time seems to link them to "mythic" time in some way. One can detect a similarity to the work of Apichatpong here, although Krabi is a bit more concrete. Here, a town in Thailand "sells" its lore, while failing to recognize the very present elements of Thai / Siamese history welling up from the past.
Krabi, 2562 takes the numerical portion of its title from the year of the film's making (2019) in the Thai Buddhist calendar. So the filmmakers are emphasizing this problem of Western and Eastern time coexisting in a kind of vertical present. This cross-cultural conundrum is not just the theme of Krabi, 2562; it is the very foundation of its making. The film is a collaboration between Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong (Mundane History; By the Time It Gets Dark) and British filmmaker Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness). Both filmmakers are intrepid, global artists, but here they bring their own special skill sets to bear on the unique problems presented by Krabi, 2562.
After all, this is a film about coming and going, being an insider and an outsider, discovering how to see a place from multiple perspectives. Anocha, whose previous films have been highly personal, abstract interrogations of Thai cultural and political history, examines Krabi as a space of differential meaning, a sign-system wherein Thailand presents a particular image to outsiders and to itself. (Not for nothing does the film begin with schoolchildren standing in formation, reciting a pledge to the King and the Thai state.). Rivers, meanwhile, uses his experimental approach to landscape, as well as his humble, unemphatic cosmopolitanism, to see Krabi anew, like a "tourist" well acquainted with the problematics of tourism.
Together, Anocha and Rivers produce a film that works to capture the essential bustle of Krabi -- a place where, among other things, class differences are made illegible to the untrained eye. But at the same time, Krabi, 2562 applies pressure to its own premises, calling into question the degree to which any historical space or time can be accurately depicted, at least with our available means.
At one point in the film, the unnamed woman visits a defunct move theater, a place where her parents met. Inside, she sees the now-empty screen, swarming with birds who fly both in front of and behind the white expanse, producing an eerie 3D effect. This push and pull, against an uncertain backdrop, could serve as an emblem for Krabi, 2562.
