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Actually, if you go back to his infrequent posts on what he was doing over there the last year and a half I think we've had the work print in hand for a while now :mrgreen:
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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The Hollywood Reporter:
Soi Cowboy

Bottom Line: A British director retains a foreigner’s distance to his story of interracial relationships in Thailand.
By Maggie Lee


May 17, 2008

Film Review: Soi Cowboy, Cannes, Un Certain Regard

The dynamics of a mixed-race relationship based on the transaction between economic security and emotional or sexual gratification have seldom been addressed full-on, until “Soi Cowboy.” To screenwriter-director Thomas Clay’s credit, he neither sensationalizes the relationship nor glamorizes its underworld backdrop. To the film’s detriment, he does not dramatize them compellingly either.
Debuting in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard provides sufficient cachet to boost “Soi Cowboy’s” festival life elsewhere. Commercial prospects are another story. Despite the hints of raciness in the subject, Clay brings nothing new to the table. The low-key delivery and languishing pace will consign public release to small, intimate affairs in Europe, and not necessarily in Thailand at all.
The film is sharply divided into two parts. The first, which is longer, is in black-and-white. The austere beauty of monochrome and the formal compositions of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (“Syndromes and a Century”) lend subtlety to the documentary-like representation. The incongruity of the relationship is not conveyed through conversations, but accentuated by physical differences: one being a corpulent “farang,” the other a petite, pregnant Thai girl. A scene in a restaurant where tensions about interracial liaisons flare up is most interesting, but annoying without English subtitles.
The second part follows the homecoming trip of two city-bound brothers, which turns out to be a mafia assignment. Shot with a handheld, in saturated colors, events may or not be the prequel to the first story, adding to the overall air of uncertainty.
There are traces of influence by Thai auteurs, most visibly Apichatpong Weerasethakul and, at a further remove, Pen-ek Ratanaruang. Only Clay has blanched the enigmatic aura of the former and the sensuous insouciance of the latter to make it more basic and transparent for Western consumption. Like “Som Tum” (Thai papaya salad) with chili — it still tastes good but without the bite.
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Excusing the grammar (it appears to have been translated), a little from actor Nicolas Bro:
Danish Actor Nicolas Bro In The film ”Soi Comboy”

Today spectators, a few thousand journalists and filmmakers will watch his performance as ”Tobias” in English Thomas Clays film ”Soi Cowboy”, writes the Danish newspaper Politiken.
The film will be shown twice at Cannes' second largest theater Salle Debussy.
It happens, with Nicolas Bro currently filming in Iceland.
Because of his work in Iceland, Nicolas Bro do not in Cannes to promote ”Soi Cowboy”. We captured him, however, on a mobile phone, which he explains how he ended up in this movie:
”I had met Thomas Clay to a film festival in Spain, where he showed his first feature film”.
"Later he saw' Offscreen 'on filmfestivalen in London, and seemed obvious that I was the right to play Tobias in his new films.
"Soi Cowboy" is an incredibly detailed and very stagnant thriller in predominantly black and white, which played out in Thailand.
You find a big, thick Dane in Bangkok with a slender pregnant Thai girl. They live together in a near-total silence. And she is not much for his sexual overtures.
But the Thai girl needs Tobias to protect her from having to work in ”Soi Cowboy”, which is a red ligth street in Bangkok, Thailand.
90 minutes in to the two-hour long film turns from black and white to color. And now played out a bloody history from a rural area, where a young guy forced to decapitate his big brother and bring his head to a mafiaboss in Bangkok.
"Shooting of the movie last October in Thailand was an incredibly sweaty game", remember Nicolas Bro.
"The recording was only a month. But it was some demented long days. Usually, we worked between 15 and 17 hours a day in excruciating moist heat”, the Danish actor tells Politiken.
”And I'm obviously Thomas Clays alter ego in the film. For he was continuing to dress me out in the same terrible clothes, which he walks around”,says Nicolas Bro with a big mockery through mobile phone from Reykjavik to Politiken.
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Must've missed this one, anyway, Tom's Cannes speech:
Un Certain Regard: "Soi Cowboy" by Thomas Clay

Director Thomas Clay, presenting "Soi Cowboy" in the Un Certain Regard selection, makes his second visit to the Cannes Festival. The 29-year-old British director was welcomed at Critics' Week in 2005 with his first feature-length film, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael.

Soi Cowboy tells the tale of a strange love affair between a fat European and a pregnant young Thai woman. She is resigned to the need to protect herself and her unborn child, and sees this lover as her best bet. Meanwhile, in the countryside, a young gangster has pledged to deliver his own brother's head...

For Thomas Clay, "Antonioni remains an enduring inspiration, both as a filmmaker and a world citizen. No-one else captured the 20th century with the same degree of precision, insight, texture and depth of feeling and his passing was a sad moment for cinema. There are a couple of scenes in Soi Cowboy that may be accused of homage, although I've tried to exclude anything that is not internally justified by the material."

The director, accompanied on stage by his two producers, Joseph Lang and Tom Waller, described how he arrived in Cannes with his film: “I’m happy to be here this morning. The screenplay for Soi Cowboy was written just over a year ago. The characters and the locations are very close to my heart. We shot the film in three weeks and thanks to the dedication and endurance of our majority Thai crew, we managed to get every shot done for the film. After that I edited and mixed the film on a 12” Powerbook which you will see used in the film as a prop. We sent out some CDs and that was it, until about a month ago when I had a call from Cannes. At that point, we managed to get the money together to finish the film, and since then it has just been a mad rush to get it finished and to get it ready in time. Up to the last minute, so the film you are going to see today, I haven’t seen it myself. So if it’s on backwards, we’ll discover that together. Thank you.”
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Official poster:
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No prize for Soi but Network picked up the UK distribution rights:
Un Certain Regard Awards

Tulpan by Kazakh director Sergey Dvortsevoy was awarded the Un Certain Regard GAN Fondation Prize by the Jury President Fatih Akin at this evening’s awards ceremony.

The Un Certain Regard Jury, presided by Fatih Akin, consisting of José Maria Prado, director of the Spanish national film archive, as well as journalists Anupama Chopra, Catherine Mtsitouridze, and Yasser Moheb, awarded four other prizes: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire garnered the Hope Prize for Johnny Mad Dog, James Toback accepted the KnockOut Prize for Tyson, the Jury Prize went to Kiyoshi Kurosawa for Tokyo Sonata, and Cloud 9 by Andreas Dresen won the One-From-The-Heart Award.
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Short review from a random blog:
SOI COWBOY

A fat Danish man wakes up in his Bangkok apartment next to his Thai Bride, they getup, shower, make breakfast. He goes out to the shops. He comes back. They go away for the weekend to visit a temple. . . This black & white film starts off slowly & builds to a relentlessly slow pace. Half the audience I saw it with were exasperated & walked out! But they missed the 3rd act switch to colour & the surreal Blue Velvet like dénoument.
The slow pace is oddly engaging & even played for laughs in one scene lingering on an old lady with a walker for an interminable duration.
Tough going but intriguing, Thomas Clay's film is for arthouse movie fans & even then may struggle to find an audience with sufficient patience.
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Haha, you've become comically aggressive since Dam gave his peculiar two cents on the DLDB.

So, now that you're here, any news on, well, anything that's happening in the distribution world?
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chainsaw wrote:Haha, you've become comically aggressive since Dam gave his peculiar two cents on the DLDB
do not talk about peoples which are not here, please, this is impolite ;)

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___________________________________________________________________
and give a sandwich to Mr. Brown, please :D
Dam

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Haha, embrace your homosexual urges, T.C., it usually comes part and parcel of being in a "rock band." :roflmao:

Plume Noire:
One recalls The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael as a UFO whose final rape scene shook the Croisette in Cannes in 2005. Since then, Thomas Clay has made a name for himself. He returns with a film about a farang (a term well known to tourists and expats in Thailand which means foreigner) and a young Thai woman about to be married. What does this film, which sounds like a dive into the world of sex tourism, have in store?

Entirely filmed in Thailand, Soi Cowboy takes its title from a red light district of Bangkok. Anyone who has backpacked in this country will recognize the tiny details that punctuate the contemplative shots in which the camera moves, like the old lady moving at a snail's pace with her walker in the shot's ridiculously interminable sequence.

From the opening of the film, Clay poses the shot. He films a country with a thousand colors in black and white to better emphasize the surface of fleeting relationships that foreigners weave with locals who appear so welcoming. The long segment that opens the film presents an American whose obesity makes him the archetype of the West taking his revenge on the complex mysteries that govern relations between men and women. Here, the women come to you. The Thai woman has the power, with your financing, to multiply your sex appeal enough for you to compete with a Brad Pitt or Jude Law. From the first shots, Clay plays on the extremely quiet cohabitation of two antipodal bodies: a tiny Thai and an obese farang. Not a glance, no words exchanged. It's understood that the only loving thing about this relationship is its weigh in cash, contrary to the message of happiness vehiculed by the photo of a couple, on a wall in the backgrounde for happiness.

Clay shows the successive details of a dreary everyday life, shopping at the corner 7 Eleven or in the shopping malls of Siam Square, buying pirated DVDs (a wink to the director when the American asks if the seller has The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael and purchasing Viagra at the pharmacy. The film serves as a pretext for the evocation of a country fantasized about from a Western point of view: getaways to the temples in Ayutthaya by train, tuk-tuk, haggling for the purchase of a jewel whose price will still be out of proportion to its real value, disapproving looks of other foreigners, tears and silence after sex experienced as a chore when the magic of the meeting no longer works… The film manages to draw a rather precise portrait of the illusion of happiness that foreigners buy in Thailand.

Has Clay badly digested the films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul? While the couple is buried in the darkness of Ayutthaya, here he abandons the careful camera movements for a switch in treatment: color, which is more documentary-like, to the rural region of Isan where most Thai sex workers come from. From the emptiness of a romantic relationship, the film moves through the world of the Mafia, where a young man beheads his brother on behalf of a gangster, who wastes no time in getting rid of him by putting a bullet in his head. This eruption of violence in the surreal setting of a tacky dancing studio suddenly turns the movie into a failure. Clay misses his marriage between Eros and Thanatos. Too bad.

Moland Fengkov
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
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I'm sure you don't mind telling some stranger in a French paper what you were up to, why not drop some knowledge on your old web buddies? Is the second act a representation of the script he's working on in the first act? A blurring of the lines between the banal existence and the fantasy he'd like life with a bar girl and a cinematic career to be? Am I shooting in the dark here having seen zero frames of the film (o.k. that's an obvious yes, but I'm basing my theories only on what I've read :mrgreen: )? Anyway, it would be nice and, considering how long some of us have known you, ultimately quite fair to discuss your intentions in a little more detail. We promise we won't tell.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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Explaining it - especially before you've even seen it - would spoil all the fun, don't you think? Besides, TC has a habit of pimping this place vociferously into the google listings.

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klimov wrote:Explaining it - especially before you've even seen it - would spoil all the fun, don't you think? Besides, TC has a habit of pimping this place vociferously into the google listings.
hey, i have no control over what the almighty google spiders and what it doesn't.

except that we do have a private forum if you want to use it for such purposes.

i did not just write that. nothing to see here.

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klimov wrote:Explaining it - especially before you've even seen it - would spoil all the fun, don't you think? Besides, TC has a habit of pimping this place vociferously into the google listings.
Totally understandable. But once most everyone's seen it, I hope you'll open up and discuss your thought process, inspiration and whatnot, if not outright handing over "here's what this scene is supposed to do." There is indeed a fine line between letting the art speak for itself and allowing a bunch of critics to define it in the public eye with easy negativity, no? In other words, when making a difficult piece of art, don't be afraid to explain it a little here and there!
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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There's been a lot of positivity too. Some of the most clued-in reviews aren't online. And I don't see it as a difficult film. Some people are just stupid - and/or politically/personally motivated.

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Just posted this over at the DLDB but an excerpt from the Cannes edition of Sight & Sound:
That Thomas Clay moved from the UK to Thailand in the wake of his debut The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael seems reasonable given how derisively the film was dismissed in most quarters (not least Sight & Sound). It's hardly a surprise, either, that he has now taken on the mildly provocative subject of Thailand's sex trade for his follow-up. One pull quote from Clay in the press book for Soi Cowboy- "Antonioni remains an enduring inspiration, both as a film-maker and a world citizen" - led many critics to sharpen their knives. But Soi Cowboy, though frustratingly derivative, did not follow through its threat to educate us in things we already know. Instead it shows a developing talent learning his chops. The story follows in quotidian detail the life of a young but fat European with his tiny Thai 'lover'. With its grainy black-and-white footage, Soi Cowboy's first half shows the almost mute behaviour between the two in their apartment and on a tourist trip. In this section any number of world directors might ask for their soul back - Moodysson, Fassbinder, Dumont, Tarr, Jarmusch, Weerasethakul. One could go on, especially in the colour-saturated second half, where Wong Kar-Wai and David Lynch borrowings enliven a slow-burn existential gangster outcome concerning our Thai heroine's brother. Hotch-potch it is, but Clay is probably a film-maker to watch.
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The thing is, I've known Nick for 7 years now, way back when Joe and myself were two kids naively hussling around trying to find finance at industry 'networking' events, falling off the stage during Sight & Sound 'Digital or Die' panel discussions, indeed he was the first professional UK film journalist I ever met... and it seems he's never been able to get over the fact that we've come a long way since then, especially (the major faux pas) that I've made both my films outside of the usual industry structures with full creative control.

I mean, how does one even go about being derivative of Fassbinder, ffs? (oh, hang on a minute... Nick's a fan of Todd Haynes...) And I guess black & white + unmotivated dolly movement = (c) Bela Tarr. Moral ambiguity and strained male-female relationships: (c) Bruno Dumont, I'm afraid. And... hold on a minute, there are yellow people in the film?! (c) Wong Kar-Wai, surely.

I found a hilarious review the other day from the online German equivalent of Empire where all three members of their reviewing team walked out after 35 minutes. Sorting out the boys from the men, clearly.