Tears of the Black Tiger

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Tears of the Black Tiger
The Thai DVD cover.
Directed by	Wisit Sasanatieng
Produced by	Nonzee Nimibutr
Written by	Wisit Sasanatieng
Starring	Chartchai Ngamsan Stella Malucchi Supakorn Kitsuwan Sombat Metanee
Music by	Amornbhong Methakunavudh
Cinematography	Nattawut Kittikhun
Editing by	Dusanee Puinongpho
Distributed by	Five Star Production
Release date(s)	June 2000
Running time	110 min. Thailand
Country	Thailand
Language	Thai
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Tears of the Black Tiger (Thai: ฟ้าทะลายโจร, or Fah talai jone, literally, The Heavens Strike the Thief) is a 2000 Thai western film written and directed by Wisit Sasanatieng. With a story involving the tragic romance of a fatalistic, working-class hero who has become an outlaw and the upper-class daughter of a provincial governor, the movie is equal parts homage to and parody of Thai action movies of the 1960s and melodramatic romantic tearjerkers.

With a style that has been compared to the revisionist westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, the movie has become a cult classic because of its conspicuous action, colors and style. It was the first Thai film to be selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival.^[1] After having its release delayed by Miramax, the film will be screened in US theaters in January 2007.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Cast 3 Origins and production 4 Soundtrack 4.1 Track listing 5 Festivals and awards 6 Film distribution and DVD 7 References and notes 8 External links

[edit] Plot

A young woman in a magenta dress carrying a suitcase and an umbrella to shield her from the rain walks along a wooden walkway in a lotus pond to an ornate gazebo built in the middle. She is waiting for someone. She pulls a handkerchief out of her belt. A small photograph falls out. It's a picture of the man she is waiting for.

His name is Dum. Dressed all in black and wearing a black cowboy hat, he is with another man named Mahesuan. The pair, both carrying pistols, enter a house and engage in a shootout with some other men. Dum, being a crack shot, proves his ability by purposefully ricocheting a bullet around the room in a Rube Goldberg fashion so that it hits his intended target – a man's forehead. A red screen with some text then flashes up and asks: "Did you catch that? If not, we'll show it again!" And so the shot is replayed in slow motion.

Another man is hiding in the ceiling. Dum has him pinpointed. He shoves Mahesuan out of the way just before the man fires a shot and then Dum blasts several holes in the ceiling. The man in the ceiling falls to the floor.

Dum then rushes off, with no explanation to Mahesuan. He rides his horse at a fast gallop across the plain, finally reaching the gazebo where the woman had been waiting. But he took too long. She is gone. Her name is Rumpoey. She has returned home, where she is to be engaged to another man in an arranged marriage.

Back at camp, Mahesuan takes exception to being paired with Dum. Before Dum joined the gang, Mahesuan was the right-hand man of his boss, Fai. Dum has gone off, so Mahesuan goes to find him. He finds Dum playing harmonica, and then baits Dum into having a gunfight. As they stand in an open field, sizing each other up, the fast-drawing Dum takes aim and fires before Mahesuan can get a shot off. Mahesuan then finds he has not been injured at all, but a dead snake drops down out of an overhanging tree branch and onto his cowboy hat. Dum killed the snake, saving Mahesuan's life.

Dum then retrieves his harmonica from the ground and wraps it lovingly in a handkerchief. He then thinks back to his childhood 10 years before. As a girl, Rumpoey and her father, the provincial governor, came to stay with Dum's father, a district chief.^[2]

Rumpoey is a precocious, demanding girl, who bosses Dum around. Dum takes her on a tour of the countryside, demonstrating his accuracy with a slingshot by shooting a bird with a ricochet shot. When Dum insists on playing his wooden flute instead of taking Rumpoey for a boat ride in the lotus pond, she grabs the flute and smashes it. In the lotus pond, Dum shows Rumpoey the gazebo, the "Sala Awaiting the Maiden", and tells her a story about it, that a woodcutter had built it long ago as a place to await the daughter of a wealthy family whom he'd met and fallen in love with. However, when the maiden was prevented from meeting the woodcutter, she committed suicide by hanging herself, leaving the woodcutter broken hearted. The story greatly saddens Rumpoey and from then on she treats Dum less imperiously. On the way back home, their boat collides with another that is filled with some local boys. They taunt Rumpoey and Dum steps up to defend her, and uses an oar to joust with another boy. Dum is struck across the forehead with an oar. The cut is deep and bleeds profusely. The boat overturns, and the other boys bid a hasty retreat. Dum rescues Rumpoey from the water, but when he takes her home, Rumpoey's father is angry that his daughter was put at risk. So Dum is punished by his father, who lashes the boy's back with a rattan cane. Dum's scars take a long time in healing. Rumpoey feels sorry for him and buys Dum a harmonica to replace the flute she broke. Her feelings for Dum have changed.

Shifting back to present time, Dum and Mahesuan arrive at an abandoned Buddhist temple. In front of the Buddha statue, they swear a blood oath and seal it by drinking each other's blood mixed with rice whisky and getting drunk together.

Meanwhile, the local governor (Rumpoey's father) is meeting with Kumjorn, an ambitious new police captain who is eager to bring law and order to the wild west that Suphanburi Province has become. The chief threat is the gang of hoodlum horsemen headed by the brutal Fai, who has successfully avoided capture because no one dares inform on him. However, Kumjorn has an informant and he knows the location of Fai's fortress hideout. A huge attack is planned for the next day.

Kumjorn is also the man whom Rumpoey's father intends her to marry. Resigned to her fate, she allows Captain Kumjorn to take a small, silver-framed photograph of her to keep as a good luck charm during the battle with Fai.

The battle ensues, with both sides armed heavily with rifles, machine guns and grenades. As the police brigade seems to be gaining the upper hand, thanks in part to the grenade-throwing skills of the comical Sergeant Yam, Dum and Mahesuan arrive on a cliff overlooking the battle and use rocket-propelled grenade launchers to decimate the police forces. Kumjorn is the only one left alive, and Dum is ordered by Fai to go execute him. Kumjorn pleads with Dum to tell his fiancée of his fate, and he pulls out the framed photo of Rumpoey. In shock at seeing Rumpoey's photo, Dum is stabbed in the chest with his own knife and allows Kumjorn to escape.

As Dum is being treated by his friend Mahesuan, he feverishly dreams back to one year before, when he was a university student in Bangkok. One day, while he was eating his lunch on a bench on campus, he was spotted by Rumpoey, also a student and eager to become re-aquainted with her childhood friend. Dum at first refuses to acknowledge her, saying that a high-class person such as she would not know the likes of him, and he gives her a false name. But later Rumpoey hears Dum playing his harmonica. She snatches it away from him and looks at the engraving – it's the one she gave him nine years before. Dum then pleads Rumpoey to leave him be, reasoning that they are from different classes and are fated to never be together.

Rumpoey, saddened by Dum's refusal, is walking alone in the woods near campus when she is accosted by a young man and two of his friends. In fact, they are the same boys from the boat accident nine years before that left Dum with a scar on his forehead. As the boys' ringleader steps in to steal a kiss from Rumpoey, he is smacked on the back of his head by a lunch bucket wielded by Dum. A fight ensues that leaves the three boys bruised and battered. But, they all belong to influential families, and it is Dum who is expelled over the incident. Finding Dum walking, Rumpoey offers to give him a lift in her car. She then instructs her driver to take them to Bang Pu, an ocean beach resort near Bangkok that Rumpoey had told Dum about when they were children. There, Dum and Rumpoey confide their love for each other, and Rumpoey agrees to meet him a year later at the Sala Awaiting the Maiden.

However, Dum arrives back at his home to find the hut ransacked and his father's men laying dead. His father is near death, and says a rival village chief came to kill him in order to take his district chief's post. Dum then grabs his father's rifle from the wall and goes to find the men who perpetrated the murder. He finds them and kills many of them, but is overpowered and runs away. He has one bullet left, and he resigns to use it on himself. But before he can pull the trigger, the rifle is snatched from him. It is Fai, who has ridden up with his army of horsemen. Fai recognizes the rifle as belonging to Dum's father, and explains that years before, Dum's father had saved his life. So Fai wants to repay him for that deed by killing the men who murdered him. The men are rounded up and Fai hands a pistol to Dum to finish the last ones off. There is no turning back – Dum is now an outlaw.

Shifting back to present time, it is the night before the wedding of Rumpoey and Kumjorn. Broken hearted that Dum broke his promise to meet her, she attempts to commit suicide by hanging herself, but her maid stops her.

Fai, meanwhile, is planning an attack on the governor's mansion. With full knowledge that the entire police force will be concentrated there, he hopes to wipe them all out. Mahesuan, suspecting that Dum intentionally let Kumjorn go free, betrays Dum and tricks him into giving up his pistol. A gun battle ensues, and Dum is wounded, though he escapes and treats his wound himself.

Dum, dressed in a white suit, appears at the wedding ceremony to offer his blessings to Kumjorn and Rumpoey. He then warns Kumjorn of Fai's plans to attack, but Kumjorn instead wants to shoot the man he knows only as "Black Tiger". During the wedding party, Kumjorn dances with Rumpoey and becomes angrier and angrier that Dum is the man she loves. She then leaves the dance in tears and Kumjorn goes to get drunk with his men. Kumjorn later enters Rumpoey's room and starts to rape her, but just then Fai's men attack, and Kumjorn leaves her to go engage in the firefight.

Fai is killed by the governor, who runs the criminal through the back with a bayonet and then shoots him with the rifle. Mahesuan discovers Rumpoey and takes her for his own. When he is confronted by the white-suited Dum, Mahesuan at first can't believe his eyes that Dum is still alive. He then demands a rematch gun battle with the Black Tiger. It is raining, and a drop of water drips through a hole in the brim of Mahesuan's hat, distracting him. At that moment, Dum fires, but Mahesuan fires a split second later. Their bullets meet in mid-air, but Dum's knocks the other off course and finds its way into Mahesuan's teeth, blowing the gunman's head right off.

Dum is then confronted by Kumjorn. Resigned to the fate that he'll never marry Rumpoey, Dum reaches in his pocket. Kumjorn, believing that he is reaching for his gun, shoots Dum. But Dum was only reaching for the photograph of Rumpoey that Kumjorn had once carried. He only wanted to return it.

As Dum lays dying with Rumpoey sobbing over him, some of Dum's words from the beach are narrated again – that life is suffering, punctuated only by a never-ending search for happy moments.

[edit] Cast

• Chartchai Ngamsan as Dum Dua/Black Tiger
• Suwinit Panjamawat as Dum Dua (youth)
• Stella Malucchi as Rumpoey Prasit
• Supakorn Kitsuwon as Mahesuan
• Arawat Ruangvuth as Police Captain Kumjorn
• Sombat Metanee as Fai
• Pairoj Jaisingha as Phya Prasit (Rumpoey's father)
• Naiyana Sheewanun as Rumpoey's maid
• Kanchit Kwanpracha as Kamnan Dua (Dum's father)
• Chamloen Sridang as Sergeant Yam

[edit] Origins and production

Wisit Sasanatieng drew on many Thai-cultural influences in the creation of Tears of the Black Tiger, including Thai films of the 1950s made by pioneering director Rattana Pestonji, which he had viewed at the Thailand National Film Archive. It also draws on 1960s and '70s Thai action cinema, which featured the likes of Mitr Chaibancha and Sombat Metanee (who co-stars as gang leader Fai), so-called raberd poa, khaow pao kratom ("bomb the mountain, burn the huts") films that were looked down upon by critics at the time. Other influences include the novels of Thai humorist Por Intharapalit and an old Thai pop ballad, "Fon Sang Fah" ("When the Rain Bids the Sky Farewell").

"I do love those 'rain' songs. I kept picturing a beautiful frame of two guys shooting each other in the rain. And that sparked it all," Wisit said in a 2000 interview. Initially Fon Sang Fah was to be the title of the film, but eventually Fah talai jone (literally "the heavens strike the thief") was chosen. "It can convey either a sense of obsoleteness or the feel of great chic, depending on the film's context," the director continued. "In terms of the film it refers to predestination, in which most Thais believe. To put it frankly, the main reason is simply because I liked the name." (Fah talai jone is also the Thai name for an herb, Andrographis paniculata.)^[3]

Tears of the Black Tiger was the directorial debut for Wisit, who had previously penned the screenplays for the 1950s-set teenage gangster tale Dang Bireley's and Young Gangsters and the historical Thai ghost legend, Nang Nak, both directed by Nonzee Nimibutr.

The style of filmmaking in Tears of the Black Tiger reflects those influences, as well as much older aspects of Thai culture. For example, the first gun battle between Mahesuan and Dum is set on what is obviously a soundstage with a painted background, a setting that is similar to likay (Thai folk opera).

"I wanted the audience to feel like they're reading a novel with moving illustrations," Wisit said in a 2001 interview. "It's pure imagination and completely unrealistic. I wanted to try and go back to our roots. I wanted to make a link between the traditional and the contemporary in our own style."^[4]

Over-saturated colors were used as part of the overall production design to reflect scenes of rural Thailand, which the director saw as bright and colorful. Walls on the sets and locations were painted pink or green, and lighting was used to achieve the desired effect, but the film was additionally treated in the color grading process. To process the color, the film was transferred to digital Betacam tape and then back to 35 mm film.

To experiment with the set design and lighting effects, Wisit was able to try them out in a commercial he directed for Wrangler Jeans, which featured the film's leading man, Chartchai Ngamsuan, as a boxer.^[5] The commercial is sometimes included with theatrical prints of the film.

Most of the cast, including Chartchai as the fatalistic Dum, Thai-speaking farang model Stella Malucchi as Rumpoey and Supakorn Kitsuwon as Mahasuan, were all newcomers, whom the director said he chose because he felt established stars wouldn't be able to handle the old-style dialog. However, there are experienced actors in the cast as well, including Sombat Metanee and Naiyana Sheewanun, who worked in the era of Thai filmmaking that Wisit was trying to recreate.

Additionally, old-style ways of promoting the film were used. In the 1950s, films were promoted with serial novels, radio dramas. Wisit and his wife Koynuch wrote some chapters that were published as a book after the film was released and a radio version of the film was performed while it was in cinemas in Thailand. Also, Wisit designed movie posters and print ads that emulated the style of Thai film posters from the '50s and '60s.^[6]

[edit] Soundtrack

See also: Music of Thailand

Just as Tears of the Black Tiger has been compared to the Spaghetti Westerns of director Sergio Leone, the music in the film has been called "Morriconesque", in reference to Ennio Morricone, who composed the haunting scores to Leone's films.^[7]

However, the score is sourced from the types of big band jazz and pop music sounds that were heard in Thailand in the 1940s and '50s. Among the songs is "Fon Sang Fah" ("When the Rain Bids the Sky Farewell"). There is also "Mercy", composed by 1940s Thai bandleader and jazz violinist Eua Sunthornsanan, which features whimsical fiddle playing and whistling. However, the lyrics to the song, written by Leud Prasomsap, offer a contrast to the mood evoked by the jaunty tune:

What a miserable life, so alone

No one cares for me

I'm so alone, so lonesome I could die^[8]

Tears of the Black Tiger
Soundtrack by various artists
Released	2000
Genre	Big band jazz, easy listening pop
Length	38:20
Label	BEC-TERO Entertainment

[edit] Track listing

A soundtrack CD was issued around the time the film was released. The first half of the CD is the songs with vocals. The songs are then repeated on the second half of the CD as instrumentals.

1. "Mercy" (Leud Prasomsap/Eua Sunthornsanan) – 3:01
   • Performed by Veera Bamsungsi
2. "The Moon Lament" (Wisit Sasanatieng, Siriphan Techajindawong/Traditional) – 3:23
   • Performed by Yaowaret Methakhunnawut
3. "Fon Sang Fah" ("When the Rain Bid the Sky Farewell") (Salai Krailoed/Suthin Thesarak) – 2:49
   • Performed by Kamonwan Thasanon
4. "Destiny" (Kaew Achariyakun, Wet Sunthonjamon) – 2:55
   • Performed by Niwat Charoenmit
5. "Beautiful Beach" (Sakon Mitranon/Sanae Komarachun) – 3:10
   • Performed by Kamonwan Thasanon
6. "Splendid Night Sky" (Kaew Achariyakun/Eua Sunthornsanan) – 3:04
   • Performed by Yaowaret Mathakhunnawut
7. "Mercy" (Eua Sunthornsanan) – 3:01
8. "The Moon Lament" (traditional) – 3:24
9. "Fon Sang Fah" ("When the Rain Bid the Sky Farewell") (Suthin Thesarak) – 2:51
10. "Destiny" (Wet Sunthonjamon) – 2:55
11. "Beautiful Beach" (Sanae Komarachun) – 3:11
12. "Splendid Night Sky" (Eua Sunthornsanan) – 3:04
13. "Horse Riding" – 1:04^[9]

[edit] Festivals and awards

• Tears of the Black Tiger was the first Thai film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was in the Un Certain Regard competition.
• At the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2000, it won the Dragons & Tigers Award for best new director.^[10]
• Winner of best art direction at the Gijon Film Festival in 2001.
• Jury prize at the fifth Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival.^[11]
• Best costume design at the Thailand National Film Association Awards.
• Screened at the 2006 Bangkok International Film Festival as part of a tribute to Sombat Metanee, who portrays the outlaw leader, Fai.

[edit] Film distribution and DVD

US distribution rights for the film were purchased in 2001 by Miramax Films, which changed the ending and then shelved the film indefinitely.

In 2006, Magnolia Pictures acquired the rights to the film, with a limited release in United States theaters set for January 2007. It will be the original version of the film.^[12]

European distribution has been handled by Luc Besson's EuropaCorp and by Pathé, which have marketed a shortened version of the film, 101 minutes, cut from the original running time of 110 minutes.

A DVD with the complete version of the film, with English subtitles, was distributed in Thailand by Digital Right, but it is out of print.

[edit] References and notes

[edit] External links

• Fah talai jone at the Internet Movie Database
• Tears of the Black Tiger at All Movie Guide
• Tears of the Black Tiger at Rotten Tomatoes

Wisit Sasanatieng
Films: Tears of the Black Tiger (2000) | Mah Nakorn (2005) | The Unseeable (2006) | Armful (in development)
Screenplays: Dang Bireley's and Young Gangsters (1997) | Nang Nak (1999)