September 10, 2006
the protector
Tom yum goong is not the first foreign-based film to take the English title The Protector, but it is the most recent, seemingly unrelated to the Indian silent Ajit Yoddho (1934), the French thriller Le Protecteur (1974).
Most reviews of the present film mention the torch-passing joke when Tony Jaa's character, arriving at Sydney's airport, exchanges a double-take with Jackie Chan, in turn exiting the country. It's a bit of an allegory, you see, about martial arts heroes breaking into the anglophone market. What these reviews don't manage to mention is that Jackie Chan's second effort at an EngLang incursion (after box-office bomb The Big Brawl) was Wei long meng tan, or as it was called in most markets, The Protector (1985). In that film, Chan's partner is killed and there's a kidnapped girl to recover; for Jaa, two decades later, his father is killed and the kidnapees are pachyderms. Didn't Karl Marx in fact say that everything happens twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as elephants?
It's hard to say what this film is up to, investing so heavily in that lineage — but it's not misplaced, really. Jaa's kung fu style ("Muay Thai"), though ballyhooed per the rules of discourse as new and different, is deeply indebted to Chan's. This is not so much true in close combat (where the movie seems more interested in a parade of styles, from capoeira to "ultimate fighting") but in the movements of multiple combatants within enclosed, complex spaces. If the bravura sequence is a four-minute following shot where Jaa fights his way up the various levels of the familiar restaurant/club/thunderdome/kingpin's lair (getting noticeably exhausted and sloppy as he nears the top, which is a nice touch), the more eloquent choreography happens in some ludicrous crypto-warehouse containing, among other things, some strangely oriented chain-link fences and, oh yeah, a disemboweled bus. In these scenes, Jaa's particular kinesis, alternately highlit and obscured by the camera's deep desire to look at things from below, is plenty thrilling.
Jaa himself is peculiarly impassive — "peculiar" because it's not really the familiarly Orientalist imperturbability intent on suggesting an interiority that is at once absolute and inhuman, the subject without subjectivity. Jaa offers something like a negatve impassivity: while elaborating Chan's goofball ballet of violence, he seems intent on refusing Chan's comedic charisma. Physical comedy is Chan's gift to martial arts; Jaa returns seriousness to it , a comic seriousness of which the little elephant is the emblem. Indeed, Jaa is the little elephant; his character has, it seems, never aged beyond the opening scenes, when we see him as a child, bonding with his charges. Over the full course of the film, Jaa hasn't the slightest flirtation, nor moment of self-awareness. He is a serious boy, with all the implacable destruction that implies.
Or maybe Jaa the actor is just another Keanu, constitutionally unable to express anything at all beyond a vexed wonderment that people will still fight him, given his manifest physical superiority. Hollywood, too, suffers from that puzzlement, and is gruesomely acrobatic as a matter of course in going about its business. This just might work out.
Posted by jane at September 10, 2006 12:39 PM | TrackBack