American moviegoers now have a chance to see Leonardo DiCaprio — in his first major film role since “Titanic” — portray a Thailand-bound backpacker in the movie adaptation of Alex Garland’s 1997 novel, “The Beach.”
In honor of this cinematic occasion, I have traveled across the globe to a beach that epitomizes what, over the course of the movie, Leo’s Richard character grows to despise. This particular beach has long enjoyed a reputation as a laid-back stop-off for weary backpackers and drug-addled hipsters. Recently, however, it has started to show growing pains, as a unified, high-turnover vision of Western leisure has begun to take over.
Admittedly, there is still plenty of charm to this place. In the morning, travelers can sit in the sun and stretch a $1 breakfast into a blissful three-hour idle while seabirds soar over the bay. At night, when brownouts don’t kill the local power supply, the beach-side palm trees glow with Christmas lights as travelers chat and sip tea around restaurant bonfires. During the day, these travelers occupy themselves with snorkeling, diving, wilderness trekking, card games, warm beer, marijuana or simply staring off into space along the warm waterfront. In the shadows, an occasional stray cat flicks its tail and languorously squeezes its eyes shut. Here, a reed hut near the beach rents for about $2; a slightly nicer accommodation with a bathroom starts at about $5. Food is cheap, facilities are adequate, drugs are plentiful and days are unstructured.
There is, however, a vaguely artificial air in this beach mecca. The natives
here occupy the fringes — driving minivans, serving tea, selling trinkets.
Many of them are not native to this place at all, but are hustlers and
entrepreneurs who’ve come from the big city to try their luck. Restaurants
here don’t play native tunes, opting instead for the tried-and-true Western
stylings of Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, Ice Cube and Portishead. Storefront
markets offer henna tattoos, Marlboros, hair-braiding, bottled water,
snorkel rental and international phone calls. At the far fringes of the
beachfront, naked concrete and rebar structures attest to the impending
arrival of newer and nicer resort hotels. Thirty-seven dive shops line the
beachfront here — a four-fold increase from 1996. Fifty-five restaurants
crowd the main road, over twice as many as in 1997. And while the 1999
Lonely Planet guide reports that this town boasts just two Internet cafes,
I’ve counted nine.
This place I describe is not on Phi Phi Island, set of “The Beach,” nor is it
on Koh Samui or Koh Phangan in Thailand. This is not the land of jungles,
kick-boxing or banana pancakes. I’m not even in Southeast Asia. Rather, I
am 4,500 miles away from Thailand — in the land of deserts, Bedouins and
Moses: Today, in the hopes of better understanding “The Beach,” I have come to a southern Sinai Egyptian beach town on the Gulf of Aquaba, called Dahab.
My presence here has been more significant than it might seem in the final days before Leo again hits the big screen. This is because, in a multitude of
ways, the story of Dahab runs parallel to the story of “The Beach:” It is
the story of how an obscure beach “paradise” became a very crowded place.
This is also the story of an ever-changing, increasingly wealthy world that
is brimming with human beings — 1.6 billion of whom are projected to spend
$2 trillion traveling away from their homes this year.
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In the introduction to a 1999 book called “The Tourist City,” Dennis R. Judd
and Susan S. Fainstein write that, “the globalization of mass tourism leads
to an odd paradox. Whereas the appeal of tourism is the opportunity to see
something different, cities that are remade to attract tourists are more and
more alike.”
Although the authors were referring to cities such as Atlanta and Baltimore,
their thesis could just as easily be applied to international backpacker
backwaters like Dahab in Egypt, Koh Samui in Thailand or any number of
other cut-rate beachfront Shangri-Las in places like Indonesia, Costa Rica
or Madagascar. These places, which have more in common with each other than
with their home cultures, have come to constitute what might be called a
trans-global Beach Nation — a loosely-conglomerated free-market republic
founded solely on its capacity to cater to the wants and needs of young
budget travelers from industrialized nations.
The inevitable problem with the Beach Nation, of course, is that, through the
very act of creating an infrastructure catering to these wants and needs, this place tends to mutate into a caricature of itself: A
crowded, self-referencing economic zone that could just as well be located
in a heated Milwaukee convention center. Or, to put it another way:
Foreign places invariably lose their foreignness as they adapt themselves to
foreigners.
Leo fans who catch the opening of “The Beach” this weekend will see a dark
cinematic interpretation of what happens when a select group of foreigners
in Thailand tries to reverse this trend by keeping their foreign place a
secret.
Since the corporeal world is somewhat lacking in plot points and rising action, however, I have come to Egypt to investigate backpacker trends on a more realistic level. As a birthplace of “exotic” mass-tourism (Thomas Cook began giving Nile river cruises here in the 1860s), Egypt has long been adapting its heritage and its image to the tourist market. The Sinai peninsula, on the other hand — which only recently came out of touristic obscurity after years of isolation and war — provides a vivid, relatively uncomplicated example of how the Beach Nation evolves.
One hundred years ago, when Western tourists began flocking to Egypt’s ancient Pharaonic sites (an 1898 postcard referred to Cairo as “a winter suburb of London”), the Sinai was a draw only for devout Christians making the dangerous pilgrimage to Mount Sinai. When a British army officer named R.A. Bagnold became the first person to drive a car to the tip of the Sinai in 1927, he reported that the place featured little more than empty desert and a few wandering Bedouin.
To a large extent, the Sinai remained that way for the next 40 years, until Israel wrested the territory from Egypt during 1967′s Six Day War. It was under the Israeli occupation that transportation and housing infrastructure first arrived in the Sinai on a significant scale. Thus, unlike the islands of Thailand (whose travel origins are invariably muddled with dubious, competing tales of Ur-hippies who supposedly waded ashore in the ’50s or ’60s), the beach evolution of Dahab is fairly clear-cut.
Dahab (which is the Arabic word for “gold”) is located on the southeastern coast of the Sinai, and shares a reef-rich stretch of the Gulf of Aquaba with a town called Sharm el-Sheikh. After the Israelis left in 1982, Sharm el-Sheikh rapidly transformed into a full-fledged resort town, complete with golf courses, casinos and discos. Sharm el-Sheikh’s population increased eight-fold during the 1990s, and its various resorts stretched their way across 5 miles of shoreline.
This left Dahab (which, 50 miles to the north, was a bit more isolated and had a less-impressive reef ) to thrive as a sleepy, inexpensive alternative to Sharm el-Sheikh. Friendly Bedouin provided ready companionship and cheap marijuana, and a few claptrap facilities were put together to meet the needs of wanderers passing through. Thus, much like Koh Samui and Phi Phi Island came to be defined as an alternative to Thailand tourist magnets like Pattaya and Phuket, Dahab found its identity as a laid-back anti-resort.
Today, I walk my way past the restaurants and hotels of Dahab Bay to Assalah, a Bedouin village which once sat a bit north of the tourist zone. These days, Assalah still retains its Bedouin character, even as tourist guest houses and dive shops crowd both its southern and northern boundaries. Camels here are still tethered to rough cinderblock homes, goats still wander the streets and naked Bedouin children still frolic in the deep-blue gulf waters. The landscape is very striking and severe: Dry desert basins, jagged brown mountains, long black shadows.
This Bedouin village was once the nucleus that sustained the first significant wave of international travelers to grace these shores in the 1980s. Back then, the Bedouin mixed with small numbers of Bohemian Israelis and Western vagabonds in what was little more than a ragtag colony of beach huts, grotty restaurants and aluminum folding chairs. There were no international phone booths, no scuba diving schools and no electricity. Camel treks into the desert were arranged face-to-face — not through travel agencies — and pizza was not on restaurant menus. Mountain Bedouins kept the community in an abundant supply of marijuana, and — when there was a demand — acid, speed and heroin. When a surplus of travelers arrived, people slept in restaurants or on the beach. Dahab had all the aesthetic appeal of a squatter’s camp, but a lazy charm and a determined party spirit prevailed.
Over time, things changed: New Egyptians moved in alongside the Bedouins, new businesses opened up, new travelers arrived. Conservationists declared the waters around the Sinai to be one of the “Seven Underwater Wonders of the World,” and scores of divers made their way north to Dahab’s reefs. On top of this, the Cold War ended, Western prosperity grew and legions of new budget travelers headed for the less-expensive parts of the world. As the Middle Eastern backpacker circuit grew in popularity, the Sinai became an overland way station between Egypt, Israel, Jordan and (later) Syria. Laid-back Dahab turned into a kind of postmodern frontier outpost, where weary travelers could put aside their itineraries for a few weeks and chill out.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Dahab mainstreamed to the point where it became an appendage of the Beach Nation. Old-timers I’ve talked to — Egyptians and Westerners alike — say things really began to change here around 1995 or 1996. Dive shops organized and flourished, new hotels and “beach camps” were built and restaurateurs from one end of the bay to the other bought bigger speakers after discovering the bewitching power of the Bob Marley “Legend” CD. Bedouins found themselves increasingly outnumbered by Cairenes, and financial bottom lines began to be more of a priority.
If any one event sealed Dahab’s entry into the Beach Nation, however, it was the 1997 massacre of 58 tourists by Islamic extremists at Queen Hatshepsut’s temple in Upper Egypt. The Egyptian tourist authority immediately touted the Sinai as a safe alternative to the Nile Valley, European travel agents sold package trips to the Red Sea region without ever mentioning the word “Egypt” and many foreign travelers saw their first glimpse of the country at the brand-new Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport. Resort towns like Sharm el-Sheikh, Hurghada and Nuweiba saw the bulk of the new traffic, but the overflow splashed much of the younger crowd into Dahab. In adapting to needs and demands of the new visitors, the once-unassuming Bedouin beach village rapidly completed its transition into a tourist colony.
Unlike the inhabitants of Leonardo DiCaprio’s cinematic beach community — who react to change (and the threat of change) with secrecy, denial and violence — Dahab’s beach veterans seem to be taking the new changes and new company with a kind of wistful fatalism. Achmed, the proprietor of my $5 hotel — who first came to Dahab 12 years ago — summed it up for me the best of anyone.
“Dahab means ‘gold’ in Arabic,” he said, “but now we call this place ‘silver.’ It’s still good, but it’s not what it used to be.”
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Late in the screenplay version of “The Beach,” Leo’s Richard character briefly leaves his secluded island to buy supplies from a town on Ko Phangan. His reaction to the crowded Beach Nation atmosphere there is unambiguous: “This was why we kept the secret,” he says in a voiceover. “If these assholes ever found out about our island, they’d take just one night to spoil it forever.”
Richard’s assumption — that the Beach Nation threatens his notion of paradise — is both understandable and unfair. Understandable because it’s natural to bemoan the encroachment of the Beach Nation into once-pristine places. Unfair because the Beach Nation — in ghettoizing the inevitable crush of Western travelers — performs a protective function. Not only do such travel ghettos siphon the bulk of tourists into a relatively small area (thus keeping a wealth of other regions native and pristine), but the Beach Nation also helps local governments address the importance of formal conservation efforts. As with Thailand, it is no coincidence that the bulk of Egypt’s national parks and reserves are being developed in high-traffic tourist areas.
Beyond protection, however, the Beach Nation — crowded as it may be — still does a pretty good job of providing its visitors with a good time. Most travelers, even backpackers, don’t require an island paradise all to their own. Part of the charm of budget travel is that it blurs the line between being a king and being a bum. Exclusivity notwithstanding, sitting and doing nothing on a warm beach in the Sinai (or Thailand, or Belize, or Bali …) with a return ticket and a carefully managed wad of spending cash will probably always be a popular youth pastime. And, like Ko Samui, Dahab will no doubt retain its reputation as a place where travelers come for a two-day visit and end up staying for five weeks.
It’s also important to remember that the Beach Nation (and its imperialist instinct) is governed not by the juggernaut of inevitability, but by the cold demands of the free market. Those who don’t mind giving up basic comforts (a very small percentage, in practice) will continue to have their anonymous adventures and, from time to time, briefly discover places that resemble paradise. On the other hand, those who insist on idle comfort — be it cheap marijuana at the Beach Nation or 24-hour room service at the Beach Hilton — will have to learn to deal with all the new company.
In the end, any assessment of leisure travel has to come to terms with our fanciful notions of what “paradise” is in the first place. Until fairly recently, paradise was considered to be Eden, an earthly heaven with four rivers flowing from its borders. At the outset of the exploration era, in fact, mapmakers placed Eden in the uncharted corners of Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. Later, adventurers and scholars (Voltaire among them) surmised Eden was in the New World. These days, with the world mapped and explored many times over, we are still looking for Eden in the Other — other climes, other times, other states of mind.
The problem with this is that, when we try to plant our flag in the Other, we find that what seemed like Eden tends to mimic home. And the more it resembles home, the less it resembles Eden. It’s a vicious cycle, but we can’t seem to get over it.
And that, of course, is what gives “The Beach” its drama — because anyone who’s paged through Genesis will know that the real fun starts not with the Edenic bliss, but the desire to control it.
PREY VENG, Cambodia, and SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand — In the sun-baked flatlands of Cambodia, where dust stings the eyes and chokes the pores, there is a tiny clapboard house on cement stilts. It is home to three generations of runaway slaves.
The man of the house, Sokha, recently returned after nearly two years in captivity. His home is just as he left it: barren with a few dirty pillows passing for furniture. Slivers of daylight glow through cracks in the walls. The family’s most valuable possession, a sow, waddles and snorts beneath the elevated floorboards.
Before his December escape, Sokha (a pseudonym) was the property of a deep-sea trawler captain. The 39-year-old Cambodian, his teenage son and two young nephews were purchased for roughly $650, he said, each through brokers promising under-the-table jobs in a fish cannery.
There was no cannery. They were instead smuggled to a pier in neighboring Thailand, where they were shoved aboard a wooden vessel that motored into a lawless sea. His uncle had fallen for the same scam five years prior and escaped to warn the others. But Sokha told his son, then just 16, that this venture would turn out differently. He was wrong.
“We worked constantly, for no pay, through seasickness and vomiting, sometimes for two or three days straight,” he said. “We obeyed the captain’s every word.”
Near-daily death threats reinforced the captain’s supremacy. So did his Vietnam War-era K-54 pistol, and the night he carved up another slave’s face in view of the crew. “For 20 hours a day, we were forced to catch and sort sea creatures: mackerel, crabs, squid.” It’s back-breaking work, under the searing tropical sun. “But the fish wasn’t for us,” he added.
So who was it all for?
The answer should unsettle anyone who closely examines Thailand’s multi-billion dollar wild-caught seafood industry and the darkest links in its supply chain.
“It’s an export-oriented market. And we know the countries where these products are exported to,” said Lisa Rende Taylor, chief technical specialist with the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking or UNIAP. “Do the math.”
For Americans, the calculation is worrisome. Thailand is the United States’ second-largest supplier of foreign seafood. Of America’s total seafood imports, one out of every six pounds comes from the Southeast Asian nation.
In 2011 alone, Thailand exported 827 million pounds of seafood worth more than $2.5 billion to the US, according to National Marine Fisheries Service figures. The only nation that consumes more Thai seafood exports is Japan.
Murder is an occupational hazard. But a monotonous job assembling iPads is heaven compared to slavery on a Thai trawler, where conditions are as grueling and violent as any 19th-century American plantation. The lucky escape within a year or so. Less fortunate are those traded several times over for years on end.
Denying that the fruits of forced labor reach the biggest importers of Thai seafood — Japan, America, China and the European Union — has become increasingly implausible.
The accounts of ex-slaves, Thai fishing syndicates, officials, exporters and anti-trafficking case workers, gathered by GlobalPost in a three-month investigation, illuminate an opaque offshore supply chain enmeshed in slavery.
A long trail of offshore operators — slave boats, motherships and independent fishmongers — can obfuscate the origins of slave-caught seafood before it ever reaches the shore. While the industry’s biggest earners rely on clannish and violence-prone fishing crews for raw material, they’re distanced from the worst abuses by hundreds of nautical miles and several degrees of middlemen.
The result is that many Thai factory bosses have no idea who caught the seafood they process for foreign consumers.
There are caveats. The majority of Thailand’s two largest seafood exports to the US — tuna and shrimp — are sourced differently. Most “Thai” tuna is actually imported from overseas and processed for re-export. The shrimp industry, though routinely accused of abusing poor migrants, is at least vulnerable to spot checks on seaside farms.
The same cannot be said for deep-sea trawlers, the favored vessel of slave-driving captains.
The species caught by Thai trawlers legal and illicit alike include sardines, mackerel, cuttlefish, squid, anchovies and “trash fish,” tiny or foul-tasting catch ground into animal food or preserved to create fish sauce. Americans consume these breeds en masse. One in five pounds of America’s imported mackerel or sardines comes from Thailand, according to US government records. For processed fish balls, puddings or cakes — made from trawlers’ trash fish — the figure is one in three pounds. Thai fish sauce supplies nearly 80 percent of the American market.
All that trawler catch ends up in familiar American fare: anchovy pizzas, squid linguine, smoked mackerel salads and fish fillets on ice. Even pets are entangled: trash fish is a common dog- and cat-food ingredient. But industry representatives in Thailand admit there’s often no way to tell whether a particular package of deep-sea fish was caught using forced labor.
Using bar codes, American shoppers can track packaged Thai-exported seafood to its onshore processing facility, said Arthon Piboonthanapatana, secretary general of the Thai Frozen Foods Association. “You can trace it back to the factories.”
But exporters, he said, are not in the business of policing the fishing syndicates that supply their factories. “We only have the power to enforce our members,” Arthon said. “We have no power to enforce other stakeholders such as boats or fishermen.”
American seafood importers consider themselves similarly powerless in overseeing far-flung Thai boats. “Western regulatory agencies have little or no reach, or authority, over various parts of the value chain,” said Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, America’s chief seafood trade organization and lobbying group based outside Washington, DC. The institute will promptly respond to allegations against specific factories, he said. But so far, it has not found an effective way to monitor conditions on deep-sea boats catching US-bound fish.
“We have started discussions with our members about just how far an audit could realistically go and whether, perhaps, there are dockside audits that could be developed,” Gibbons said.
The “nature of boats being at sea,” he said, presents a major challenge to industry’s self-policing efforts.
International pressure to rid Thailand’s seafood trade of slavery is mounting. Thailand teeters just above the US State Department’s worst human-trafficking ranking and could be downgraded this summer. Last year, during a visit that vexed Bangkok officials, a UN rapporteur declared that forced labor is “notoriously common” in Thailand’s fishing sector and even alleged police complicity.
“It’s not like monitoring brothels, plantations or factories … all this labor is at sea,” Rende Taylor said. “So it’s essentially a universe where captains are king. Some are out to make as much money as possible by working these guys around the clock and being as cruel as they want to be.”
BANGKOK, Thailand — There are no battlefield guarantees in Asia’s bloodiest Islamic insurgency, a jihad in Thailand’s tropical south that has ended nearly 5,000 lives.
But there are a few rules of thumb. In their self-proclaimed “holy war” to carve out the world’s newest Muslim state on the Thai-Malaysia border, jihadis consider soldiers, cops, Buddhist monks, government teachers and their Muslim collaborators as fair game. Backpackers partying just a short distance up the coast are left alone.
But less mercy is offered to a different sort of tourist: Malaysian men, many fellow Muslims, border-hopping into insurgents’ turf for paid sex. Now, after a bloody Sunday night bombing spree in their favored brothel town, Malaysia’s government is warning its men to stay away.
Shortly after sunset on Sept. 18, in the gritty Thai border town of Su-Ngai Golok, a series of explosions erupted on a busy lane lined with hotels, food stalls and karaoke joints.
Televised mobile-phone footage shows pyres raging in front of a bar fitted with Christmas lights, Thai code signaling the availability of cheap beer and hands-on female hostesses. A half-naked man, his clothes singed and shredded, is seen sprawled nearby in the street.
Five were killed in the bombings, four of them Malaysian. Roughly 110 were wounded, some severely. If Islamic insurgents aimed only for men on the prowl, they failed: A 3-year-old Malaysian boy was among the dead.
The attack is surprising, even for insurgents known for beheading Buddhist monks and torching village headmen in the street. Though Malaysian tourists have been targeted before, such strikes are rare and have never caused so many foreign deaths in one night.
Worse yet, the attacks signal jihadis’ heightened brazenness and stomp out any flickering promise of peace talks.
Just months ago, Thailand’s military acknowledged secret meetings with separatists, whose ultimate goal is restoring a Connecticut-sized sultanate called “Patani.” At the turn of the 20th century, Thailand (than called Siam) seized the tiny kingdom and claimed dominion over its Muslim, ethnically Malay inhabitants.
More than 100 years later, armed resistance to Thai rule has hit its stride. Since a 2004 declaration of renewed jihad, more than 4,700 have died and insurgents have evolved into Taliban-worthy bombers. In 2007, a particularly bloody year, jihadis in Thailand managed 91 bomb deaths — 13 more than that year’s bombing death toll against U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan.
As a younger wave of Islamic militants grows more agile and lethal, they appear more distant from an old-guard of separatists willing to negotiate with the Thai military.
Quasi-secret peace talks, which seemed to offer a twinkle of hope just months ago, have collapsed. “It’s closed. It’s finished,” said Kasturi Mahkota, a senior member of the separatist group Patani United Liberation Organization.
“Now, at this point, there is no cease-fire agreement,” Kasturi said over the phone from Scandinavia, his home-in-exile. “We’re not going to surrender. We’re not going to give goodwill to them.”
But perhaps the separatists willing to negotiate have nothing to surrender in the first place.
Kasturi and other old-guard leaders have proclaimed an alliance with the insurgency’s backbone militia, BRN-C, and claimed joint responsibility for roughly 80 percent of attacks. In reality, he and his ilk are “pretenders to the cause” according to insurgency expert Zach Abuza in an Institute for National Security Studies report released this week.
They consist of “a few exiles in Malaysia and Europe who command no forces and do not have the loyalty of men on the ground,” according to the report.
The real killers abhor the thought of negotiation. They’re also more radical than ever, said Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, who has documented the insurgency for more than a decade.
“It’s a liberation war,” he said. “They do not believe in coexistence with the Thai population. They aim to win the war by wiping Thailand clean of non-Malay Muslims.”
Muslims from Malaysia, who share customs and language with Malay-speaking natives in the insurgents’ territory, are seldom attacked in Thailand — unless they’re loitering around spots deemed decadent by jihadi hardliners.
“They feel an ideological justification to target vice: brothels, karaoke joints, nightclubs,” Sunai said. “They want to send a message that, as a Muslim, you shouldn’t get involved in dirty activities.”
Thai authorities, however, seem to hate acknowledging insurgents’ ideological motives. Police are apt to cast them as rudderless bandits and smugglers. Within hours of the Su-Ngai Golok attacks, a senior officer announced, with little proof, that the bombings were retaliation for cops seizing 100,000 meth pills earlier that week.
Dismissing the rebels as mere criminals diminishes an unpleasant thought for Buddhist Thai authorities: that an estimated 8,000 armed separatists believe Allah condones their killing. Calling them drug runners also strikes at the jihadis’ proclaimed piety; a Muslim can only boast of so much righteousness if his living comes from smuggling bundles of meth.
But just as the Taliban is believed to fund attacks with Afghani heroin, proclaiming its jihadi credentials all the while, many experts believe Thailand’s insurgency is similarly tied to the drug trade.
“Some are funded by underground business like contract killings, drug smuggling and human trafficking,” Sunai said. “That doesn’t mean they don’t also have political motives. They can be paid to attack by drug lords who are unhappy with law enforcement … killing two birds with one stone.”
With peace talks appearing futile, and jihadis growing more bold, hopes of settling Thailand’s insurgency appear bleak. In the estimation of Abuza, the terror expert, the rebels aren’t winning “but they are also not losing, which, in an insurgency, is often enough.”
Many of the remaining ethnic Thais, roughly 15 percent of the population, have stockpiled guns and assembled all-Buddhist militias. The rest have simply fled the region.
A turn in the road appeared several months ago when Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, then on the campaign trail, traveled to the region in a red hijab and promised a semi-autonomous zone to give local Muslims greater political power.
But after her July election victory, the new premier’s cabinet dismissed her pledges as mere ideas. Prominent academics and non-separatist Muslim groups have pressured her to honor her campaign commitment. “I think it’s finished,” Kasturi said. “That was just for the election. Now they don’t dare talk about it.”
Given doubts that aging rebels in exile can reign in young militants, it’s unclear whether any action by the Thai state would soothe the insurgency. The new breed does not appear willing to sit down for tea with the Thai military or even issue public declarations. They prefer to speak through violence and the occasional handwritten threat scattered around their victims’ corpses.
“There will be no negotiation with our enemy. We will not accept any compromise. We will not debate in the parliament,” says one written screed acquired by Human Rights Watch.
“We will purge all Siamese infidels out of our territory to purify our religion and culture … we will establish our country as a Muslim country to be recognized internationally.”
What does feel-good Oscar winner “The King’s Speech” have in common with a movie from Thailand called “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” which opens this week in New York and Los Angeles? I could make stuff up — they both fit the definition of a narrative feature film, they’re about the same length, and the writers of both films were educated at American universities — but we’re not getting any six degrees of Kevin Bacon here. While it’s true that both movies feature members of the royal family, in only one of them do we witness a princess copulating with a catfish. (“The King’s Speech” is a pretty good movie and all, but just a bit lacking on the aquatic bestiality front.)
Seriously, the real answer is almost nothing. Except that these two films are the most recent winners of the two most prestigious awards in international cinema — the only ones that teenagers with movie cameras from Borneo to Omaha bother to fantasize about — and the distance between them offers us a portrait of the diversity, and perhaps the schizophrenia, of global movie culture.
“The King’s Speech” is a well-crafted, old-fashioned entertainment, a nostalgic costume drama aimed at middle-class adult filmgoers all around the world. It was constructed to win Academy Awards, and it delivered. “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” on the other hand, is a highly personal art film made with nonprofessional actors, aimed at the tiny audience of global cinephiles who are willing to take this strange and original work on its own terms. It won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival precisely because it makes no compromise with mainstream filmmaking conventions and ignores commercial considerations. If foreign-language art cinema attracts a tiny audience in the United States these days, Asian art cinema attracts nearly none. It goes without saying that “Uncle Boonmee” won’t duplicate the $100 million-plus box-office returns of “The King’s Speech”; it probably won’t reach one-half of 1 percent of that number.
The sense that Oscar’s best-picture award and the Palme d’Or are handed out in alternate and only faintly connected universes — and represent radically different notions of what movies are and do — is nothing new, even if it seems particularly exaggerated this year. But before we move to that level, let me grab a moment to try and un-scare you about “Uncle Boonmee.” No, it’s not for everybody and it isn’t trying to be. But there’s absolutely no reason you can’t enjoy the sentimental, comic-inspirational history lesson of “The King’s Speech” and enjoy Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s gorgeous, loopy modern-day fairy tale about a dying man visited by ghosts and (apparently) figments and fragments of previous existences. After the Cannes premiere last year, a friend of mine described “Uncle Boonmee” as a “Buddhist tone-poem about death,” and although he was being half-derisive, that’s not a bad summary.
Although it may seem plotless by Hollywood standards “Uncle Boonmee” indeed has a plot, and one that’s probably more comprehensible than Weerasethakul’s best-known previous films, “Tropical Malady” and “Syndromes and a Century.” Still, there’s no denying that the last days of the eponymous Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), a farmer near the forests of northern Thailand, are punctuated by unexplained leaps and caesuras, as well as by a visit from his wife (who’s been dead for 19 years) and their son (who has been living in the jungle among a race of monkey-ghosts). That mythical-seeming liaison between a princess and an amorous jungle catfish, for instance, has nothing obvious to do with the rueful, leisurely tragicomedy of the main story about Boonmee, his visiting sister-in-law (Jenjira Pongpas) and a farm foreman cum Buddhist monk (Sakda Kaewbuadee). At first, I wondered whether I’d been so exhausted at Cannes that I’d failed to grasp the connection, but seeing the movie a second time confirmed that the answer is implied, or under the surface, or simply left up to you.
As the small but devoted following that has made Weerasethakul an international film-festival favorite already knows, his movies blend influences from both West and East, including surrealism and dream psychology, Theravada Buddhism and quantum physics, and Asian film from Yasujiro Ozu to low-budget pop Thai movies. (The Monkey Ghost costume worn by Boonmee’s son, for instance, is silly and spooky — and oddly effective in both directions.) He occasionally gets some stick from Asian critics for allegedly making films aimed at a Western elite audience, but they’re missing the point. He may have more fans in Paris or New York than he does in Bangkok — where the Thai government has intermittently banned his films — but he’s far from a household name in any neighborhood on any continent, and is likely to stay that way. “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” is a rich, beautiful, haunting and sweet work from an accomplished dream-poet, who can stand alongside any other artist working in the medium. But it has almost no relationship to the expectations and associations that generally come with the sentence, “Let’s go to a movie.”
“The King’s Speech” is, of course, exactly that kind of movie, almost too much so. Although wonderfully played by its cast and loaded with historical charm, the film is carefully paced and calibrated to deliver precisely the emotional beats the audience almost unconsciously expects. The internal life of “The King’s Speech” derives entirely from the interplay of Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter; as cinema, it’s strictly an efficient machine, which is what makes the best-director Oscar given to Tom Hooper seem so insulting in a field that included Darren Aronofsky, the Coens, David Fincher and David O. Russell. This is not “a movie that makes you dream,” in David Lynch’s famous phrase. (Even among this year’s largely excellent list of Oscar-nominated films, only Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” possesses that quality.)
If the yawning cultural and aesthetic chasm between “The King’s Speech” and “Uncle Boonmee” represents the long-standing transatlantic divide that separates the Oscars from Cannes, it hasn’t always been as dramatic as it looks today. As recently as 2002, a Palme d’Or-winning film — Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” — was a major contender in the Oscar race, winning awards for its star and director (although not for best picture). Only two movies have ever won both the Palme d’Or and the best-picture Oscar, and those may surprise you as much as they did me: Billy Wilder’s 1945 “Lost Weekend,” a soap opera of drunken madness starring Ray Milland, and Delbert Mann’s awkward romance “Marty,” with Ernest Borgnine, 10 years later. But quite a few Palme d’Or winners have gone on to significant critical and popular success and multiple Oscar nominations, including “M*A*S*H,” “Taxi Driver,” “Apocalypse Now,” “All That Jazz,” “The Piano” and “Pulp Fiction.” (Quite a few more have won foreign-language Oscars, but nobody, frankly, cares about that.)
For roughly the past two decades, however, the continents have slowly been drifting apart. I don’t mean America and Europe, where pop culture is no less hegemonic than it is here, but the floating islands inhabited by Oscar voters and Cannes juries. Of the last 10 best-picture winners, only “No Country for Old Men” even played at Cannes, while “The Pianist” and Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″ are the only Palme d’Or pictures since the mid-’90s to make any significant impact on the American consciousness. For every modest foreign-language success, like “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” — which did pretty damn well for a Romanian film about an illegal abortion — there are movies like “The Class” (2008), “L’Enfant” (2005), “The Son’s Room” (2001) or “Eternity and a Day” (1998), which virtually didn’t exist for Yank viewers despite glowing international reviews.
Now, it’d be easy to conclude that art cinema has become too rarefied and self-reflective, or that Hollywood is overly concerned with delivering a prepackaged and predictable moviegoing experience, or that both things are simultaneously true. Indeed, I agree with that, about halfway: “The King’s Speech” could use a bit of “Uncle Boonmee’s” wandering water-buffalo spirit, and while I hesitate to tell Weerasethakul what to do, he could stand to edge half a step closer to the audience. But as his Buddhist tone-poem movie reminds us, life and death are cyclical, and the paths we travel converge and diverge. Frankly, it speaks well of international film’s vitality that something as weird and lovely and completely uncommercial as “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” can share the world stage with a film like “The King’s Speech,” if only metaphorically and for a fraction of a second. And if Colin Firth has sex with a fish in his next movie, you read it here first.
“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” is now playing at Film Forum in New York and opens March 4 at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.
Mothers carrying babies and grown men hoisting elders on their backs fled Myanmar with 15,000 countrymen Monday as ethnic rebels clashed with government troops a day after an election widely considered a sham to cement military power.
Fighting raged at key points on the Thai border, wounding at least 10 people on both sides of the frontier as stray shots fell into Thai territory.
The clashes underlined Myanmar’s vulnerability to unrest even as it passes through a key stage of the ruling junta’s self-proclaimed “road map to democracy.” The country has been ruled by the military near-continuously since 1962, and rebellions by its ethnic minorities predate its independence from Britain in 1948.
In the heaviest clashes, Karen rebels reportedly seized a police station and post office Sunday in the Myanmar border town of Myawaddy. Sporadic gun and mortar fire continued into Monday afternoon. More fighting broke out further south for one hour Monday at the Three Pagodas Pass, said local Thai official Chamras Jungnoi, but there was no word on any casualties.
Thai officials said late Monday that fighting had quieted and government troops had regained control of Myawaddy.
Groups representing ethnic minorities who make up some 40 percent of Myanmar’s population had warned in recent days that civil war could erupt if the military tried to impose its highly centralized constitution and deprive them of rights.
Refugee camps in Thailand already house tens of thousands of ethnic Karen who have fled decades of fighting in the border regions, but Monday marked the biggest one-day tide of refugees to flee into Thailand in recent years.
Refugees marched, shepherded by Thai security personnel, through the streets of the Thai town of Mae Sot, which is just across a river from Myawaddy. Those few carrying belongings toted them on top of their heads, while several lucky ones got rides on pickup trucks.
“At least 15,000 refugees have crossed from eastern Myanmar into northern Thailand since this morning,” said Andrej Mahecic, spokesman for the U.N.’s refugee agency, which was providing tents and other materials to shelter the refugees. Non-governmental groups also were offering aid, he said from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
Refugees continued to arrive into the evening, and some independent estimates put their number closer to 20,000.
They were being sheltered near the Mae Sot airport at a location that was becoming overcrowded, Mahecic said.
Col. Wannatip Wongwai, commander of Thailand’s Third Army Region responsible for security in the area, said Myanmar government troops appeared to have retaken control of Myawaddy, and the Karen rebels held just a few positions on the town’s outskirts.
“As soon as the situation is under control, we will start sending the refugees back to Myawaddy,” he told The Associated Press.
The fighting threatened to overshadow electoral developments, which include mounting chagrin on the part of anti-government parties over what they charge was blatant cheating on behalf of the military’s chosen candidates.
Visiting New Delhi, President Barack Obama said it was unacceptable for Myanmar’s government to “steal an election” and hold its people’s aspirations hostage to the regime’s greed and paranoia.
Obama says leaders in countries like the U.S. and India have a responsibility to condemn such gross violations of human rights. He was speaking before India’s parliament.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said “the voting was held in conditions that were insufficiently inclusive, participatory and transparent,” and expressed concern about the reports of fighting, urging all sides to refrain from actions that could raise tensions further, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Monday from the United Nations.
State media and the Election Commission reported Monday that 40 junta-backed candidates won their races, but a day after the polls closed, virtually no other official results — even on voter turnout — were available, and there was no timetable for releasing them.
The junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party was certain to win an overwhelming number of seats. It fielded 1,112 candidates for the 1,159 seats in the two-house national parliament and 14 regional parliaments. The largest anti-government party, the National Democratic Force, contested just 164 spots.
And the constitution sets aside 25 percent of parliamentary seats for military appointees.
The NDF said provisional returns it had collected showed it winning 15 seats.
NDF chief Khin Maung Swe accused the USDP of using every possible method to steal the vote, and said it was “sure to win 90 percent if they continue to cheat in such manner.”
He described a case in the central city of Mandalay, where one NDF candidate ran against Health Minister Kyaw Myint, the USDP candidate. An initial count at polling booths Sunday evening showed the NDF candidate in front, but later that night, a bag of 3,376 ballots from advance voting arrived, which included 2,500 in favor of the USDP, enough to make it the winner.
Khin Maung Swe said there were many cases where lagging USDP candidates received a boost from the arrival of such ballots. Exile Myanmar media had reported that people casting advance ballots were often pressured to vote for the pro-government party.
The NDF is led by breakaway members of the former National League for Democracy of detained Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party won a landslide victory in the last elections in 1990 but was barred from taking office. It was disbanded this year after declining to register.
Suu Kyi’s term of house arrest is supposed to expire Saturday, and her lawyer Nyan Win said Monday he was certain she would be released. “We are making plans for a welcoming ceremony,” he said.
Ban’s statement from U.N. headquarters repeated a call for lifting restrictions on Suu Kyi, who has been locked up in her Yangon villa on and off since 1989 and is one of some 2,200 political prisoners in Myanmar.
One of her two sons, 33-year-old Kim Aris, applied for a visa Monday in Bangkok in hopes of seeing his mother for the first time in 10 years. He lives in Britain and repeatedly has been denied visas to enter Myanmar.
Asked if he was optimistic, Aris told reporters he had “not too much hope. But there’s always a little bit of hope. We’ll see.” He called the elections “a load of rubbish.”
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Associated Press photographer Apichart Weerawong in Mae Sot, Thailand, and writers Thanyarat Doksone in Bangkok, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Frank Jordans in Geneva contributed to this report.
(Credit: Alena Brozova via Shutterstock) 
A Thai go-go dancers waits for customers at Bangkok's normally packed Soi Cowboy red-light area just before curfew May 25, 2010. Bar owners and go-go dancers say a night-time curfew in the Thai capital has badly affected their business, with tourist scared off and expatriate customers staying home. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj (THAILAND - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST TRAVEL BUSINESS)(Credit: Reuters) 
Stills from "Uncle Boonmee" and "The King's Speech" 
