Dir. Lim Buh Lun [Or] Dy Saveth
Maybe I should have actually
read
the blog review that first introduced me to this film and the closest to a full
version to view it. The blog,
Die Danger
Die Die Kill, is a recent discovery of mine, and now thanks to it my scale
for world cinema has drastically increased more than before. So many films
you'd probably be only able to find online in terrible rips. Ones that may
perish forever one day because no one cares about anything without prestige
even if they could say a lot about a
country as much as the art house films do. I want to see as many of them as I
can before they do perish or if the interweb gets crabby about people uploading
said films. But I should have read that he had to view a un-subtitled version
to actually see it, and that it is ninety percent
dialogue. The result
of this is what would happen if someone who is monolinguist, me only able speak
English in my cretinous mindset, trying to watch a dialogue heavy drama, with
some fantastical elements, without any real idea what was going on except
facial expressions and intonation. And this is the first film I've seen from
Cambodia, introducing me to their culture and their language for the first time
cinematically. I can register Japanese from all the films and animation I've
seen. I'm able to distinguish German thanks to the East German dialects of the
band
Rammstein. But hearing
Cambodian and how it sounds meant I had to adapt to it for the first time.
Without subtitles it actually made the sense of listening to the language, rather
than reading text at the bottom of the screen, and still watching the images
above, more significant. I confess I blanked through many parts of the film,
but it was quite an enlightening experience I should do more often. The results
of having no subtitles is twofold. The first is that facial expressions became
something I had to pay dividends to more so than usual, realising how far too
dependable I am as a Western viewer to subtitles at times with my film viewing
to explain everything. Even if I didn't get a lot of what the film was about, I
no longer neglected the importance of facial expression in communication, even
when it got very hammy even without the subtitles. Secondly, the language
becomes a series of aural rhythms by itself, able to appreciate the sounds of
the language and speech for once, backed up by a score that ping-ponged from
traditional instruments to funk, psychedelic wah-wah guitar.
What I can gather, in terms of
information on the plot, is that it's based on a Cambodian folk tale. A
princess, Chompa Toung, played by Dy
Saveth who may have been the director too explaining the confusion in the
credit at the beginning of the review, is introduced. When she laughs, flower
petals literally flow from out of her mouth. She is given a crocodile's egg as
a gift, but when it's an adult the beast becomes a man-eater who ends up being
let loose and attacks people in the village her family presides over. Taking
the blame, she sacrifices herself to the crocodile, but a heavenly being
literally stood on top of the clouds intervenes and saves her, his magic
depicted as lines actually scratched into the celluloid itself. This is where
the whole folk tale, having read it after viewing the film, ends, but the adaptation
goes further. It becomes much more
difficult to follow but things can be established. With a pet kitten turning
into a woman to be her aide, Toung ventures out into the world after being
saved, finding a new place to be her home when the two are caught by a stream
by a giant. Possibly a supernatural king, or just a regular one connected with
the giant, rules the new home, and she now possesses a new place of luxury to
live life in. A prince takes interest in her, siring a superhumanly strong son,
but in I how I interpret what happens, a group of young women, four exactly,
take immense displeasure in this relationship, and with some outsider help,
cloud his mind and push Chompa Toung out of the way. With a bumbling potential
lover from her old home, and a lot of scenes of people kowtowing in royal halls,
and moments where the kings have contemplative or scrunched up faces like the
famous statue of the Thinker, this mess is somehow resolved.
There is a strong possibility
that the lack of subtitles actually makes this of any reward rather than the
actual story. It could still be entertaining if I understood it all, but with
the closest thing comparable to it being a melodrama crossed with fantasy, it
has a lot of dialogue but not necessary any melodramatics or drama just from
the visual content. It's not visually splendid either even considering the
rough looking version I saw. Almost all the film for that ninety percent of
time is actually people sat in lavish rooms talking. Sitting in front of
important people, kowtowing, talking more, maybe offering a gift or an
accusation, more kowtowing, rinse wash and repeat. Its great education for how
to behave in front of Cambodian mythological royalty, but my lack of knowledge
of the language scuppers me from trying to grasp the narrative after the first
part based on the folk tale. There is as much a possibility that it's a
terrible film for a native Cambodian film fan, believing dialogue is of
importance but forgetting it needs to be cinematic and compelling. Without the
language barrier, what could be a dull mess, although not a lot of people could
watch any film in another language then theirs without subtitles, actually
becomes engaging by being completely lost in it and having to notice how the actors
speak. At points it's a fantasy film too, supernatural in the way I thought the
whole film would be going into it. Honestly, a fantasy film which was
continually set pieces after set pieces, with what practical effects were available
to the production, can travel onto YouTube
to many other countries without subtitles. It's not a case of it being a bad or
a good film, or an insulting trivialisation of a country through its low budget
genre filmmaking, but in preferable the best case examples, a sincere enjoyment
in seeing a country rarely talked about in terms of cinema trying its hand at
these existing genres and melding their own traditions and ideas to them.
Viewing your cousins from the other side of the world and how they'd tackle
anything from a fantasy melodrama like this or reinterpreting Star Wars. The deity in the clouds is a
male actor superimposed on top of clouds. The giant is another male actor who,
thanks to superimposition, is made gigantic compared to everyone else. A jump
cut turns a cat into a human woman. The crocodile is a very fake one on the
water, or is part of the many pieces of footage clearly borrowed from nature documentaries,
dark blue on the battered and buggered VHS rip I viewed, spliced into the film.
There was even an accidental effect in the version I viewed which actually
added to it, an accident in the transfer of the film on tape where it blurs
and, breaking the fourth wall, you see the literal celluloid film at a distance
you are watching, adding to the off kilter tone.
Whether one could find a lot truly entertaining or not is up
to debate. But I must confess that, in an age where there are still so many
films unavailable, and many without people to subtitle them yet, I've become
more braver in trying to watch films which I have no understanding of the
language at all.
Chompa Toung was an
extreme because most of it was just dialogue, but that made it an unique
experience in its own right. I would be grateful as well to see a subtitled
version too even if its the same jiggered looking version I've already seen.
Its best for you the reader to try viewing it yourself. I will post the review
from the blog
Die Danger Die Die Kill here
-
http://diedangerdiediekill.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/chompa-toung-cambodia-1974.html
.
There is a link within it to the version of the film I
viewed. After that it's up to your own opinion.
I've probably been watching too many trashier martial arts movies throughout the last through months. I adore their questionable dubs and erratic tones, but its good to watch one which is crafted exceptionally. Seeing this film again, you can see how much the Hong Kong cinema of the eighties was liable to catch the eye of Western viewers like me. Its also good to go back to this film when the first Siu-Tung film I covered on here was Belly of the Beast (2003) with Steven Seagal. This is not a cheap shot at Seagal, but reading the review below, or actually seeing A Chinese Ghost Story, you can see why I say this.
