There's a great movie waiting to be made someday set in the seedier districts of Bangkok, zones like Soi Nana or Soi Cowboy with their louche atmosphere of vice and carnality. I can tell you this, though: It certainly won't be Alex Garland ("The Beach") who pens the script. "The Tesseract," a film by Thai director Oxide Pang based on Garland's novel of the same name, betrays a view of Bangkok so superficial it makes Sofia Coppola's Tokyo look profound in comparison.
There's no way you could deploy the elements present in Patpong -- sex, gangsters, drugs, hookers, danger, decadence and more sex -- and not have the outline of a script dangling before your nose like a pair of panties on a stripper's stiletto heel. But to make something memorable would be to get beyond the surface and uncover something real, something true about these people, this place, this moment in time.
Don't expect this from Garland. Not since Jay McInerney's "Ransom" have we seen such shallow, tourist-level impressions of Asia passed off as ex-pat insight. Garland's a hack, but it's his shtick, and works as long as it's fopped onto Western audiences with even less experience of Asia than himself. What's truly incomprehensible, however, is why a Thai director would want to put this drivel up on the screen. (The answer is of course Garland's "name recognition" factor, which makes it far easier to finance a film made in Thailand.)
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