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WONDERFUL TOWN
Written & Directed by Aditya Assarat
Produced by Soros Sukhum & Jetnipith Teerakulchanyut
Released by Kino International
Thai with English subtitles
Thailand. 92 min. Not Rated
With Supphasit Kansen, Anchalee Saisoontorn & Dul Yaambunying

Writer/director Aditya Assarat sets up a familiar premise in his debut feature. It could have been the traditional tale of the city mouse and the country mouse, or the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter, or any film with the handsome stranger and the small-town girl. But the unique setting and affecting individualized characters impart a contemporary ache.

Ton (Supphasit Kansen), a junior architect from the capital, rents a room in the small, off the beaten track motel run by Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn). A very appealing couple, their slowly growing connection is prompted by scents, sounds, and laundry (a lot of which always hangs on the rooftop line). Surrounded by water, whether free flowing in nature or in showers and flushing toilets, nothing around them seems to thoroughly dry out.

That’s because this Wonderful Town is Takua Pa in southern Thailand, and nothing and no one is quite what they seem since the tsunami of December 2004. The beach is again calmly beautiful, and Ton’s company sees the opportunity to build a new tourist resort. But the survivors are as much haunted ruins as the many wrecked structures they avoid. Like automatons, they stare hollow-eyed with the invisible wounds of posttraumatic stress. While Na is now responsible for her orphaned nephew, her teen brother, Wit (Dul Yaambunying), hangs out with a local gang, a restless rebel focused on keeping other people from being happy. 

In addition to the vividness of the lushly recovering locale, Ton’s unusual gentleness is a key to the film’s seductiveness. As he sings to Na, the beautiful guitar-suffused score by Koichi Shimizu and Zai Kuning emphasizes their yearning. Ton finds contentment and love in the quiet away from the city, but quiet does not mean peaceful. He and Na create a separate peace, with the eternal optimism of irrepressible young love that life can go on. But, unable to hide their feelings, their affair sparks unexpectedly extremely strong reactions.

As slowly paced as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s contemplative look at Thailand's recent past in Syndromes and a Century, this love story is more grounded in detailed realism than the mismatched couple by the Thai shore at the center of Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s freewheeling Last Life in the Universe. So the conclusion jars in abruptly switching to human behavior more familiar in a post-apocalyptic disaster movie. Assarat apparently feels that with an increase in such extreme natural disasters as the tsunami, the apocalypse may no longer be futuristic, but the present. Nora Lee Mandel
July 18, 2008