Pride & Passion

It’s the final week of shooting on Jan Dara, and the location is Khao Yai National Park, a two-hour drive from Bangkok, where a lavish set has been prepared to resemble an aristocratic complex of five houses from the 1950s. Work begins at a wrenching 6 a.m. and drags on for 22 hours, and the temperature is soaring. It will soon get hotter. The final scene in the production schedule is a sybaritic consummation of furtive desire between two female characters. That has created anticipation, apprehension, curiosity and some plain old sauciness that one suspects was the intention from the start of 40-year-old director/co-producer Nonzee Nimibutr, Thailand’s auteur of the momentand a sly yet appealing character in just about every way.

Jan Dara is the most anticipated Thai film in years for a couple of reasons. It will be Nonzee’s third movie, and his first two, Dan Bireley and the Young Gangsters and Nang Nak, both broke box office records in Thailand. Nang Nak went on to tour the European festival circuit, where Nonzee was proclaimed something of a wing-collar art house director, giving Thailand a seat at the ongoing banquet of honor being served up to Asian filmmakers. Indeed, the new movie is being produced by Hong Kong’s Peter Ho-Sun Chan, who directed The Love Letter for Dreamworks in 1999, and Nonzee is pushing the production schedule to wrap in time to exhibit the film at Cannes.

The other cause for excitement is that Jan Dara is the filmed version of a 1966 literary novel known intimately to almost all in Thailand, or at least most of the males. “Jan Dara was where sex education started for most of us,” says 39-year-old hipster director Pen-ek Ratanaruang (6ixtynin9). While the dramatic content is key, the flesh quotient in the movie is generous. Nonzee estimates that 20% of screen time features some nudity, and that includes voyeurism, four rapes and, of course, the lesbian scene Nonzee has held for the final day of shooting. “In my first film,” marvels Nonzee, tugging on a Marlboro Light cigarette, “I wasn’t even allowed to show a pair of breasts.” But the board of censors is no longer made up of policemen, as it was in the past. In fact, Nonzee himself is on the board now, so he is hoping to get away with more. “Everybody in Thailand is having sex everyday,” he says, “yet nobody wants to confront it openly, talk about it openly. It’s people’s hypocrisy that makes it taboo. We need to be more honest about sex. It’s not a crime.” In addition, Nonzee is not throwing away any stuff too steamy for local consumption. “I’ll do two versions of this movie,” he grins. “One for Thailand and one for everybody else.” Sly. That’s the Nonzee way.

The fame of the book, a tale of guilt and retribution told through a prism of frank sexuality, is such that many directors wanted to film it, but Nonzee was the producer’s first choice after the success of Nang Nak. Jan Dara, the curious but ultimately doomed main character (played by Thai TV actor Eakarat Sarsukh), is abandoned from the start of his life: his mother dies during childbirth and his father brands him a bastard. (The boy’s first memory of his father is watching him have sex with a nanny.) At 13, he is thrown out of the family home for supposedly trying to rape his stepsister. Nonzee’s movie concentrates on Jan Dara’s return to the house as a young adult to exact vengeance from his father. His life is further complicated by three women: a highly Westernized stepmother who brings Malay colonial influence into the picture (she smokes and drinks coffee), a manipulative stepsister whom he’s forced to marry and a virginal classmate. Ultimately, the main character doesn’t get revenge: instead, he unwittingly ends up repeating his father’s self-destructive life.

Nonzee has had a pretty damaged life too. His parents abandoned him, and he was raised by grandparents. He recalls “crying in the corner at parties when all the other children had parents come and pick them up.” His mother rematerialized when he was 17, only to instruct him to become an engineer. He was horrified. “She turns up unannounced and expects me to listen to her. I hated her at that moment and told her I felt nothing for her.”

Engineering was never considered: Nonzee went straight into television commercials, working his way up the ranks. He stops for a moment, rubs his eyes, scratches his chest and considers his lot. “I’ve always felt very unloved,” says Nonzee, who has a failed marriage and a six-year-old daughter he dotes on. “My films and my life are a search for some of that missing love.” As a hot director, however, he is hardly lonely. His set is studded with young female extras fresh from Bangkok modeling schools, all hoping for the big break. One beauty demanded to be Nonzee’s personal coffee-maker, and though ordered off the set, she managed to stay on for the duration. “I get this all the time,” says Nonzee, looking less than chagrined.

On the final day of shooting, Nonzee arrives spot on time, taking small steps in his prissy, dancerish walk. Dressed in cuffed chinos, Abercrombie sweatshirt and red bandana, the director comes across as half-ballerina, half-bad boy. Then he does a tricky little act: he claims to be uncertain as to how to film the lesbian scene. His two actresses are uncertain too, and they sit down with the director to discuss the angles, the actions, what they’re expected to perform. Pataravarin Timkul, 23, televison star and daughter of one of Thailand’s most famous actresses, is definitely nervous: she’s never done a sex scene on camera. “For Thais to do a love scene with any nudity is very rare, never mind a lesbian scene,” she exasperates. Canadian-Chinese actress Christy Chung, 30, has, and says she’s looking forward to it. “Pataravarin is so beautiful,” she beams. “I’d far rather make love to her than half the guys I’ve had to do it with in movies.”

Filming begins after sunset, and Timkul has already downed several cans of Heineken, insisting she was so nervous the night before she couldn’t sleep. Chung has a few too. It’s a miminal set: white walls, rotating ceiling fans, a plain dark wooden bed. Nonzee drapes a mosquito net over the bed and parts it so the camera can watch through a gap. The girls get up from behind the monitor in an adjoining room where Nonzee orchestrates the shots, take a big sigh and get ready to rumble. “Action!” The girls sit erect on the bed, kissing each other. Nonzee strains on a succession of cigarettes as he looks through the lens; he is concentrating so hard that at one point he whacks his head on his monitor.

Timkul and Chung remove each other’s filmy, linen nightshirts and kiss each other’s bodies. Then they pour it onwarm, succulent, osculant, shadowy love. The crew has been joined by a couple of hangers-on, though there were about 100 more who wanted to hang, and everyone sits round the monitor liking what they see. Cigarettes are lit, but nobody’s puffing. Cans are open, nobody’s drinking. The whole scene takes three minutes but it plays like slow motion. “Cut,” cries the director. The girls rush from the bed to the monitor to see the playback, which they view tensely, clearly a little embarrassed.

They go back to bed and do it all over again, although this time Nonzee says he wants the action to be more aggressive, with more of a dominant-and-submissive relationship between the women. Again, the three minute scene seems to go on forever, with Timkul on top of Chung. Then comes a third retake, with the same setup; this time Nonzee prods even more aggressiveness from Timkul. The girls take this on board but seem a little disheartened that the slow, feminine sensuality they envisioned is giving way to flat-out canine thrust. This becomes the final takebecause Nonzee has gotten what he wanted from the start. He knew the actresses would be uncomfortable with a raunchy scene, so he made pretend he was improvising.

His reason, how- ever, is a valid one. “This scene had to be disturbing to watch,” he says over celebratory champagne. “It’s seen through the eyes of Jan Darawho is witnessing a sex act between his stepmother and his step-sister/wife so it’s got to be shocking.” The girls look more dismayed than liberated, like they’ve just had frustrating sex.

Nonzee’s most endearing trick has been to remain a commercial director within Thailand while gaining respect on the art house circuit overseas. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa used to say that the best way to become international was to be as true to one’s own culture as possible. Nonzee is no different, and tips his hat to Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou for the same reason. “His films all smack of the East, particularly Ju Dou, and I want to give Thai cinema the same sense of identity that Yimou gave Chinese cinema.” Rival director and friend Ratanaruang has Nonzee down better than any. “I think he’s more Chen Kaige than Zhang Yimou,” he enthuses. “Kaige is capable of art house, but he’s also got business savvy. That’s something Nonzee instinctively has.” He may not be blessed with the talent of a Zhang Yimou, but Nonzee’s cleverness more than compensates. Streetwise, savvy, this film will work for him too. “Nobody in Thailand could do this project better than Nonzee,” says Timkul. “He’s very hip, he understands what people want and they love him for it.” Whether he goes international or not, Nonzee is writing a whole new page of Thai cinematic history.