The Basis of Pathos

Watching Penek Ratanaruang's 2001 critically acclaimed Thai film, Monrak Transistor twice in 3 days, it dawned upon me that while Pan(Suppakorn Kitsuwan) got himself into both literal and figurative deep shit because of his country-boy ignorance, I am finding it difficult avoiding trouble despite knowing better.

Monrak Transistor is essentially a love story about a Thai couple, Pan and Sadaw(Siriyakorn Pukkavesa). Set against the typical idyllic Thai canal village setting of Bangnamlai, the all too sweet beginning of their sad love story leaves you with a sense of morbid forbidding that this is nothing but a mere precursor for something really bad later.

Narrated from the perspective of a prison warden in charge of Pan's prison cell, who also used to be Pan's fellow lead singer on their folk music band in Bangnamlai, we are taken through how Pan eventually married Sadaw despite her father's disapproval of him, to how he was forcibly conscripted into the army when she was 5 months preganant, only to return more than 2 years later.

The thing that struck me most was how Pan was constantly forced to run away from one place to another out of desperation. He decided to go AWOL from the army after coming in second in a folk singing competition because he was desperate to make it big as a folk singer.

He ran away from the folk singing troope after waiting more than 2 years for his big break, because he accidentally killed the scheming boss of the troope when rejecting his homosexual advances and was desperate not to be implicated. He had to run away from the cane plantation which he arrived at, because he punched a rogue supervisor who refused to acknowledge a gambling debt owed to a fellow worker and threatened to gun both of them down.

It was perhaps significant that he got cripped while trying to run away for a fourth time(while wearing an oversized tee-shirt with the number 44 on it at that). Desperate and penniless in Bangkok, he collaborated with the fellow co-worker he escaped with to rob for cash, so that he could go home to Sadaw. But despite their elaborate strategy, the police found him and before long he was on the run again.

He managed to escape once, but when he emerged from the place in the alley he was hiding at and decided to run again after bumping into police, he was hit by an oncoming vehicle.

After serving a 2-year sentence for robbery and his previous AWOL offence, he wisened up and decided to go home. At Bangnamlai, however, he finds a hardened Sadaw who had a second child by a sweet-talking medical entrepreneur while he had his fling with a fellow folk singer in Bangkok.

The film also showed up farcical elements of Thai society. The murky waters of the Thai folk-singing industry(how Pan had to wait 2 years for his accidental big break because he did not have the "tits and ass" of his fellow female contest winner) and the hypocrisy of high society (whose idea of a fancy dress party was to dress up like poor people at a charity fundraiser dinner "so that they can understand the poor better") are just 2 obvious examples.

As with all other films, there is the usual hiccup here and there, but despite its technical shortcomings, I find the charm of this film irresitable.

Perhaps it is a passing fad thing - given my current preoccupation with wanting to speak Thai, maybe it is all due to the sad story that sucks the pathos out from its viewers. I would like to think that there is a little more to that.

You see, Pan got into a whole load of trouble partly because of his sheer raw sense of justice. And I have gotten into a hell lot of trouble because of my inherent sense of justice too.

And while Pan's time in jail was his rite of passage that wisened him up to the ways of the world, it is perhaps a shuddering reminder that my "jail" would be no less shittier if I choose to go down the wayward path. More so, since unlike the country bumpkin that was Pan, I do already know better.