Review by Andrew Swafford
For people like me who have been brought up on American media, attending an international film festival like TIFF is a valuable opportunity to see the way that artists from various far flung countries represent themselves, as opposed to the way we may have seen them misrepresented in American media that exotifies or whitewashes their culture. Most English-speaking audiences have probably never been knowingly exposed to Thailand on screen, but they’ve seen it as a shorthand for “exotic paradise” in, to name one example, James Bond films. As a cross-cultural collaboration set in Thailand between a Thai filmmaker and a British one, Krabi, 2562 is largely about the disconnect between what Thailand is and how it’s been sold by the global commercial film industry.
The film’s protagonist is a location scout, traversing the island of Krabi for ideas about how to visually present a landscape that has already been commodified by global pop culture and, as a result, turned into a tourist trap populated by the mostly-faceless hordes of beach-lounging white folks here captured from a distance and en masse. Along the way, we experience open-ended interviews with locals, a karaoke performance, an obviously problematic commercial shoot (associating the “exotic” locale with Neanderthals) done by Thai filmmakers themselves, many surreal encounters with “real” (?) Neanderthals, and a trip to a symbolically closed local movie theater, with a shrine to the theater’s guardian spirit going mostly unused.
Co-directors Ben Rivers (UK) and Anocha Suwichakornpong (Thailand) are both veterans of the avant-garde and slow cinema cinematic traditions, and present this complex search for authenticity/truth in an appropriately fragmented and patient manner, trusting the audience to piece together a series of sometimes disjointed images into a larger picture. In doing so, they make direct reference to Thailand’s most critically celebrated filmmaker, slow cinema sage Apichatpong Weerasethakul, at one point shooting inside the cave where Uncle Boonmee somewhat famously reincarnates, as well as including a discussion about that film being banned for being too subversive. The problem of respectfully depicting Thailand, the film suggests, is a multi-dimensional one: not only has the space been already appropriated by Americans (et al) seeking to exploit its natural beauty, but the local government is actively squandering attempts to do otherwise – it’s more profitable to go along with reductive appropriation than it is to cultivate artists who might represent their homeland in a way that complicates the status quo. I’m still puzzling over certain elements of Krabi, 2562, but of course I am – it’s an ambitious film that plunges deep into the murky waters of representation and doesn’t bother coming up for air.