The provocateur: Thomas Clay

British critics haven't been as enthusiastic about Thomas Clay as their continental counterparts. "Horrible and objectionable," "video-nasty territory" and "a sequence excruciating beyond any in memory" were some of the responses to the bloodcurdlingly violent finale of The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005). Other critics reacted badly to his perceived pretentiousness: his choice of a title, with its echoes of Werner Herzog's documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, and his nods toward other arthouse film-makers.

Three years on, the softly spoken Clay sounds bemused by the outrage he provoked. "I was just trying to make what I felt was a worthwhile a film," he says, "a film that I myself would want to watch. I didn't, maybe, anticipate the level of controversy Carmichael seemed to inspire in some places."

He thinks his second feature, Soi Cowboy, will make more comfortable viewing. "I'll have to wait and see what happens, but it doesn't contain the same level of graphic violence as Robert Carmichael." The new film takes its name from a street in Bangkok's red-light district, and is in two parts. The first half, the writer-director explains, is about a "bar girl and her client, looking at the details of their life together", shot in the spirit of classic European arthouse cinema - in particular, the work of Clay's beloved Antonioni. It isn't, he says, necessarily a study of a white western male exploiting a Thai woman. "It's not, despite initial appearances, necessarily clear who is exploiting who, and who is complicit in what." The second half is more "inspired by genre cinema. It's like a gangster narrative."

Is his British background important to his filmmaking? "Obviously, I was born in England and brought up there. That is always going to be part of my character. At the same time, I try to look wider than that." Clay's wife is Thai and he now lives in Thailand. Soi Cowboy was made with a Thai crew, including cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who has shot Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films. "Obviously, I had to be aware of my own perspective, my own possible biases as a foreigner in that environment," he says.

Despite the mixed response to his first film, Clay has fond memories of Cannes and is looking forward to returning. He cites the first festival screening of Robert Carmichael as a special moment: "People in the end weren't sure how to react, but it was just the experience of showing it. You've spent two years working on a film and finally you get to sit there with an audience and see how they respond. That is the moment I will remember."
Geoffrey Macnab

The provocateur: Thomas Clay, "I didn't, maybe, anticipate the level of controversy Carmichael seemed to inspire in some places."

the softly spoken Clay

Mr. Brown wrote:Well, he got another one in the festival, kudos to him for that.

Mr. Brown wrote:Sure thing mate, how old are the kids now? I'll keep you updated.

Meanwhile, a significant British discovery is the very oddball Soi Cowboy, a film made in Thailand by Thomas Clay, the young independent director whose debut The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael outraged many a couple of years ago.

The story of an obese Swede and his young Thai girlfriend, this oblique essay on sex tourism throws a decided curveball at the viewer by veering (apparently) way off-track in the last half-hour - and changing from black and white to colour - before giving us an ending that will qualify as one of the head-scratchers of the festival.

A very un-British director, Clay is doffing his hat here to auteurs such as Carlos Reygadas and Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Perhaps the least British UK film you've ever seen, Soi Cowboy confirms - as his first film didn't quite - that Clay is a man to watch.

Soi Cowboy

Wendy Ide

With his assured but deeply unpleasant debut feature, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, the British director Thomas Clay established his credentials as both a cineaste with a defiantly arthouse tastes and an arch provocateur. The artfully photographed ultra-violence garnered plenty of news headlines and rather fewer positive reviews when the film premiered in Critic’s Week in Cannes 2005. Clay drew comparisons to the arthouse enfants terrible Bruno Dumont and Gaspar Noi. A British director, he had a decidedly un-British sensibility.

With his second feature, Soi Cowboy, the 28-year-old Clay distances himself geographically as well as stylistically from his British roots. Shot entirely in Thailand, where Clay now lives, the film is divided into two distinct parts, perhaps as a nod towards Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady. The first segment, shot in rather lifeless black and white, observes the mundane minutiae of the lives of a bloated Danish ex-pat and his pregnant, childlike Thai girlfriend. The man, played by Nicholas Bro, is a film - maker – presumably he is Clay’s alter-ego, although what that says about his life in Thailand is debatable. The couple live together in a cramped apartment but it feels more like a convenient co-existence than a relationship. Clay favours long takes and an almost static camera, but he seems less confident in what to do with it than he was in his first film. At one point, during an interminable, wordless breakfast scene, the camera starts to drift gradually, almost imperceptibly, before coming to rest, inexplicably, on a toaster.

Through the quotidian dullness of the couple’s daily life, we piece together a picture of a partnership based on a kind of commerce. She gets to escape the girly bars of Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy; he gets to pop Viagra then stare hopefully at her back as she curls away from him in bed at night. Towards the end of the segment, the couple take a trip to the temples of Ayutthaya and there, when both take on the status of tourists, there seems to be a glimpse of a proper relationship rather than just a business deal. But Clay takes a long time to say very little in this part of the film.

After the stultifying austerity of the first segment, the saturated colours and the jerky hand - held camera of the second part come as a relief. Stylistically, it’s more rewarding. Set among the rural poor, the story demonstrates how much less a life is worth if the cushion of money is not there to protect it. A young man returns home, on the orders of his mafia boss, to kill his brother for some unspecified sin. However, his own life is worth little more. The couple from the first part reappear but as different characters to highlight the film’s less than profound insight that a wrong turn somewhere in life can have devastating ramifications.

Clay doesn’t let us forget his self-appointed auteur status, name-checking his own first film alongside David Lynch’s Inland Empire. But there is little sign of his supposed genius in this pretentious, fraudulent film.

Soi Cowboy
By LESLIE FELPERIN

Brit helmer Thomas Clay's sophomore feature, "Soi Cowboy," demonstrates a growing maturity. This slowburning, enigmatic drama, mostly about a Danish man and a Thai woman awkwardly living together in Bangkok, is deeper and more likeable than Clay's controversial debut, "The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael." Gone are the latter film's shock tactics, allowing Clay's cinematic sophistication to sparkle all the better. Consequently, a certain highbrow contingent will eagerly pony up for "Cowboy," but others may see little more here than a preening bricolage of allusions, richer in style than substance. B.O. prospects are strictly niche.

Corpulent Tobias Christensen (Danish character actor Nicolas Bro), a filmmaker whose career seems roughly in the same place as Thomas Clay's, and his unnamed, pregnant g.f. (newcomer Pimwalee Thampanyasan) are first met during a typical morning in their small, one-bedroom apartment. Not a word is spoken between them for at least 15 minutes of real time as each breakfasts on toast and fish, respectively.

Tobias then sets off to do some shopping, purchasing DVDs from a black-market stall (he requests, without success, a copy of "The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael"), a couple of Viagra tablets at a pharmacy and a gold bracelet for his lady. In a later comic, but quietly revealing, scene that underscores the barely concealed economic underpinnings of their relationship, she expresses pleasure with her gift, but seems more interested in its resale value, "in case of trouble," than its sentimental significance.

Dialogue and later events imply that Tobias and the Thai woman met at a bar or brothel in Bangkok's seedy Soi Cowboy red-light district, and having fallen for her, offered to support her and take her away from it all, even though she avoids having sex with him these days. However, she still stays in touch with her friends from Soi Cowboy, including Cha , a gofer for a nightclub gangster. In pic's later half Cha travels to his rural hometown to track down his older brother, also an employee of the gangster, who's gone missing.

For roughly 90 minutes, pic chugs along, loping beside Toby and his g.f. as they putter around the house, and eventually decide to take a trip to Ayutthaya to stay at a hotel and see its legendary temples. A jaunt around one ruin pays particular homage to Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura" as the couple is lost from view amid slow tracking shots of near-empty spaces and grumbling soundtrack noise.

Pic then shifts into lurid color and genre territory, as action now follows Cha on his trip to find his brother, ending with an eerie scene in a Soi Cowboy nightclub that tips its hat -- and probably a scarf and few pairs of gloves -- to David Lynch.

As it happens, "Cowboy" is chock-full of allusions to Clay's pantheon of auteur heroes, including not just Antonioni and Lynch and many other Europeans, but also notable and newer Asian helmers like Hou Hsiao-hsien (the pacing, the languid atmosphere) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (the bipartite structure, the Thai setting itself).

Although Clay manages, just about, to keep these references in service of his story, it not yet clear what his own directorial voice looks like, or what exactly it is he wants to say. Sneaking suspicion remains that the meat of movie is the relatively simple story of Tobias and his woman, and the gangster stuff is just tacked on to add exotic spice.

Although made on a much smaller budget, per press notes, than "The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael," pic looks technically pro, though lensing by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is a little murky at times in the monochrome section, perhaps deliberately.

Camera (color, B&W, 16-to-35mm), Sayombhu Mukdeeprom; production designer, Nick Kemp; sound (Dolby Digital), Thomas Clay. Reviewed at the Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), May 16, 2008. Running time: 116 MIN.

Clay, Soi Cowboy. Un certain regard. This will no doubt be the most rigorously hideous and personal and frustrating and interesting movie of the festival. Though not as good as a Weerasethakul film – the Thai setting and several moments explicitly bring Tropical Malady and Mysterious Object at Noon to mind – this puts the Thai director’s work to shame re formal severity. The first hour is near unwatchable (tons of walk-outs and hoots) as a moronic, fat pig director stand-in (initials T.C.) bangs on a laptop while his tiny, pregnant, vacuous Thai girlfriend watches TV. This goes on for a long time. He showers and showers and showers. They sleep. TC calls Europe wondering whether the financing for his movie is coming through. Sadly, no. Shot on what looks like 16mm Tri-X, super grainy, with horribly mundane compositions. By the time most of the audience has left the theater, TC and girlfriend walk past a wall of a temple, disappear from the frame, then film fades to black. When it fades up after some leader scratchings, it’s in color and features characters most of whom we’ve not seen before. TC and his wife have apparently been forgotten. The new film has a new camera style and some little bit of drama but doesn’t try to make the least bit of sense. Explicit reference, in the first part of the film, to Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, seems apropos at this point. Grade: this movie is beyond grading. (My friend would say, “I proclaim it an utter masterpiece, but don’t make me watch it!”)

Meanwhile, the Un Certain Regard selection Soi Cowboy aggressively contends for the title of "this year’s Brown Bunny." Initially a protracted, black-and-white exercise in watching nothing happen—at length—the film observes the daily routines of an obese Dane and his pregnant, disturbingly young-looking girlfriend. He showers, he sits on the couch, he searches the Bangkok streets for a DVD of Inland Empire. Director Thomas Clay supposedly drove audiences here up a wall with his 2005 film The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and Soi Cowboy likewise eagerly tries to throw off its audience at every turn. (In a self-flagellating joke, the main character talks to someone on his cell phone about making a deal with the Weinstein Company.) Influenced by—and possibly a parody of—Tropical Malady’s fissuring narrative, Cowboy extends a true middle finger to viewers who leave during the first half. Me? I had to leave 10 minutes before the end to catch my next movie, and it’s possible that if I’d stayed the film would have morphed into something else entirely.

Soi Cowboy
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) might have found a European acolyte in the surprising person of UK director Thomas Clay, who shot his second film Soi Cowboy on location in Thailand. The story of a portly European (Denmark’s Nicolas Bro, Offscreen) and his local girlfriend “saved” from the bars is also a bifurcated drama with two only loosely connected stories, but rather than reaching the heights of the Thai Boy Wonder’s films, Clay’s follow-up to the promising if extreme The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael only proves that it requires more than just pointing a camera somewhere to create mystery and meaning. The fact that the first twenty minutes are without dialogue and that more than half of it is in black-and-white will mean the death knell for this film in any commercial ventures. The film is part of the Un certain regard section here in Cannes.

That Clay has a fondness for the ennui generated by simply waiting is clear, as both Robert Carmichael and Soi Cowboy share a structural similarity in which the running time is used against the viewer in an attempt to generate a quiet before the storm-type anticipation that cannot but end with a violent catharsis. The problem with Soi Cowboy is that this quiet is awfully quiet. Antonioni, to whom this film pays “indirect homage” as the director puts it, made ennui exciting cinematographically, but Clay’s screenplay and editing leave out almost anything that might make the two main characters worthwhile to take an interest in for an hour or two.

Soi Cowboy

Jonathan Romney in Cannes

17 May 2008 14:02

Dir/scr Thomas Clay. Thailand/UK. 2008. 117 mins.

Young director Thomas Clay is one of the very few figures in current British cinema who can justifiably be described as a maverick. Clay's debut The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael - seen in Critics' Week in 2005 - won him admirers, but also saw him attacked for that film's use of extreme violence. Shot in Thailand, Soi Cowboy will similarly divide viewers but is a sure-footed, deliberately-paced feature that boldly wrong-foots us in the final stretch.

Commercially, however, Soi Cowboy is unlikely to make much of a mark, although festivals may be intrigued by this distinctive anomaly.

An opening shot in grainy black-and-white sketches the relationship of obese Scandinavian Tobias (Bro, creepy yet touchingly vulnerable) and Koi (Thampanyasan), a young Thai woman who's pregnant, although whether by him is unclear. They share a Bangkok flat ut have little to say to each other, and while Tobias is apparently besotted by her, she seems to have no interest in him except as a live-in revenue stream.

Their relationship is sexual, Tobias sustaining himself on Viagra, although Koi tells a friend she finds his attentions a nuisance.

Little happens in the opening hour - and indeed, after a painstakingly slow opening in the couple's apartment, it's a full 25 minutes before the film's sparse dialogue even kicks in. Later on, the couple visits an out-of-town tourist spot, and it becomes apparent that the awkward Tobias is unsuccessfully involved with cinema. Little happens on the trip, however: there's an extended digression involving an old lady hobbling along with a Zimmer frame, seemingly designed to amuse and infuriate the audience in equal measure. There's also a key conversation in Thai between Koi and a waitress - without subtitles, to remind us that Tobias is very much a fish out of water in this culture.

After an hour, however, the couple temporarily drops out of the picture, as the film shifts into vivid colour and a looser, more documentary-like camera style, by contrast with the long takes and largely fixed shots of the Bangkok section. A young man, Cha (Mekoh), seemingly Koi's younger brother, returns to his village. It's at this point that a startling piece of violence occurs - handled much more discreetly and effectively than in Clay's first film - and the story winds up in a sequence that may be fantasy, but is certainly indebted to David Lynch.

Some viewers may well take against Clay's unashamed cinephile tendencies: the slow takes and camera crawls of the film's first part echo Bela Tarr, while there are also nods to Reygadas's and no escaping comparisons with Thai innovator Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose Syndromes and a Century was also shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Indebted as he may be, though, Clay clearly thinks about cinema in a way that few British directors do.