Tears of the Black Tiger: Over the top

An exercise in high style and utterly inspired loopiness, the Thai meta-oater Tears of the Black Tiger whips the American movie Western and Douglas Sirk-style melodrama in a blender, spices it with some retro Thai influences and pours out what might be called a postmodern "Eastern."

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A bizarre, multicultural pastiche, director Wisit Sasanatieng's film truly has to be seen to be believed. It's all a marriage of throwback Asian cool and new-school gore, with tears shed and love lost. But here, buddy love and Buddhism are trumped by blood shooting from bodies, heads exploding like overripe summer squashes and brain chunks flying through the air in visceral overstatement.

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In matters of film convention, it appears there may be no such thing as East and West. Though Sasanatieng has claimed obscure Thai auteur Rattana Pestonji as an influence, Tears of the Black Tiger will be instantly familiar to Western viewers with its color-saturated cinematography beholden to the excesses of Technicolor musicals and Sirkian melodrama, its psychologically wounded heroes and dastardly villains, and themes of vengeance and impossible love. Colors are so intense they practically vibrate off the screen as rivers turn scarlet with spilled blood and buildings boast the hot-pink shades of Barbie's dream house.

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The film opens with a twisted, stylized color palette of blinding poppy red and Astroturf green as a beautiful woman, Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi), waits with a suitcase in her hand for her cowboy lover, Dum – aka the Black Tiger (Chartchai Ngamsan) – in the middle of a psychedelic lotus field. As in so many Westerns – and apparently quite a few Thai genre films – that lady with the glycerin tears clouding her vision will just have to wait. Her dreamboat has matters he has to take care of before he can find romantic fulfillment.

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Foremost among them is bloody revenge for his father's murder.

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As the film flashes back and forth in time, Rumpoey and the Black Tiger find the terms of their doom-laced romance set in childhood. Rumpoey is a wealthy city girl who has come to the country, and who casts her spell on the peasant boy Dum. In this love affair strangely forged in sadistic violence, their star-crossed romance is sealed when a local bully leaves a moon-shaped scar on Dum's forehead and other, emotional scars on his lovers' hearts.

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Mere plot recitation cannot capture what makes Tears of the Black Tiger so outrageously original, and reminiscent in tone to the self-referential, conceptual artist's films of Tracey Moffatt or Isaac Julien. Often suggesting a revisionist joke about screen masculinity, Tears of the Black Tiger mixes up überbutch strutting with weepy cowboy sentimentality in the most extreme way imaginable, in a film where rain showers arrive as if on cue when characters are at their most despairing.

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At once stylistically over the top and conceptually austere, the actions of the film unfold on obvious sets with Maxfield Parrish sunsets or, in darker moments, pitch-black skies. In Sasanatieng's hyperbolic world of good and evil, the bad guys look like silent-movie villains with their grease-pencil mustaches and their psychotic laughter, while the good guys are scarred in every sense. Even the dialogue retains the corn-fed vernacular of old-school American Westerns, with lines such as the one delivered by Rumpoey's maid after her charge gets caught in a rainstorm waiting for the Black Tiger to show: "Look, you're all soaked through!" Elsewhere, one character exclaims, "Sheeee-it!"

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With its many winks to its audience, Tears of the Black Tiger is cursed with only one tangible flaw: an emotional hollowness that makes the film more a theoretical exercise than a loving homage one might see in Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven. Perhaps informed by his background in art and advertising, Sasanatieng's work has a delectability that is primarily visual and stylistic, and the often-hyperbolic acting and artificial setting don't do much to enhance its superficial emotions.