6IXTYNIN9 (RUANG TALOK 69)
Chale Nafus
Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
When God hands you a gift, He also hands you a whip…. – Truman Capote
At the beginning of 6IXTYNIN9, a group of professionally dressed women stand in the finance company boss’s office. He has called them together to announce that three will be fired that day. It is the late 90s and the “Asian boom” has entered a periodic “bust.” But instead of choosing who must leave, the boss turns their fate over to Chinese fortune sticks. Each woman must take the container and shake it until one wooden stick stands above the rest or falls out. Many perform a Buddhist prayer. One crosses herself. Others just let fate take its course without ritual. When all have their fortune sticks in hand, the boss reads out the fatal numbers: 7, 3, and 9.
Tum, who holds #9, is in a state of shock as she clears out her cubicle and rides silently home on the bus. Even her elderly neighbor on the street realizes something is the matter when she doesn’t greet him. An overly friendly young stranger accompanies her to the door of her apartment, where she adjusts the metal number from “9” to “6.” With just one nail holding it, the “6” is continually flipping down into a “9,” the number Tum got from the fortune sticks and the number which will cause her fate to radically change over the course of the next few days. Ironies, accidents, coincidence, misunderstandings, and idiocy all work together to change Tum’s fate far beyond simply losing her job in the big city.
6IXTYNIN9 is the second film made by native-born Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. His life has been quite colorful and full of experiences, which opened his mind to possibilities in life, fateful or otherwise. Born in Bangkok in 1962, he spent his final high school years in the United States, after being dismissed from a private boarding school in Bangkok for burning down a “disagreeable” teacher’s home. All he really wanted to set on fire was a mattress inside the house, but one flame led to another. Raised by his grandmother while his parents lived in London (father working for BBC), Pen-Ek must have been a bit of a handful.
After his high school experience in a small town in Pennsylvania, a place in which Pen-Ek was not only the sole Asian, but also the only “foreigner,” he moved to New York to go to the Pratt Institute where he studied art history. Not yet ready to return to Thailand, he stayed on in New York as a freelance illustrator and designer for a design company. It was an exciting time to be in New York with the early 80s explosion of punk, new wave, and performance art. He was energized by the works of David Byrne, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Barbara Krueger, and Laurie Anderson.
But after three years he decided to visit Thailand for a few months. There he began to realize how hard his life was in New York. He discovered that he could live more comfortably and cheaply in Thailand, where the “quality of life was really great.” He was determined to move back home even without a job. But after closing up his life in New York, he visited Berlin, where he stayed with his sister for six months. It was yet another place he fell in love with. He went to coffee shops, watched people, played chess, and wrote. He especially loved the architecture in Berlin and the Bauhaus Museum.
He finally decided to return home to work in a refugee camp for Cambodians in Thailand, but he was persuaded by a friend to come work in advertising. For four years he served as an art director for print media and especially enjoyed “working with colors and forms.” Then he was lured over to a production house that shot commercials. Through 30-second commercials, he became a prize-winning director, but he felt that something was still missing from his life.
Even though filmmaking had never been a childhood dream, not even while in college or during his early jobs, he had definitely grown to love films in New York. In fact, it was the poster for a rerun of Fellini’s 8 ½ (with its Baroquely designed “8”) that drew Pen-Ek into a theater to see a film he knew nothing about by a director he had never heard of. He remembers, “… at the end of the film I was completely blown away. I didn’t understand shit, I didn’t understand at all “what is this?” … but it was so sexy to me. It was so attractive.” A search for other Fellini films led inexorably onward to Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Fassbinder, and the other gods of cinema of the 60s and 70s. “And, so I discovered this art cinema that I found really to my taste. Like I really like this! And half of them I don’t understand. It’s a big mystery that you don’t even understand it but you find it so seductive, so beautiful. So in a way I sort of caught the cinema virus there. But of course I never had the idea that I want to do this. I couldn’t.”
Yet, by the time he was directing commercials, he began to see that he was doing on a minor scale what feature directors did on a grander scale: “You’re handling cameras and you’re using dolly tracks, and you’re shooting people, you have to direct people. You have to say, “do this, do this, no, do it slower, no, do this”. At night he would watch pirated videos of films. But this rash – this need to make his own feature film – just wouldn’t go away.
So, to assuage the “itch,” he wrote a script, not for a short, but for a feature film. Apparently making the commercials was enough training. By Western standards he was “starting late” with his desire to direct feature films, but as Pen-Ek points out in interviews, the Asian production model is quite different from that of the “West.” An aspiring director in the past often had to work as apprentice and assistant to a more established director. But Pen-Ek didn’t even bother with the apprenticeship. He explains, “… in Asian film, intelligence and cleverness doesn’t count. You have to be a bit more mature. It’s about emotions, and it’s about what life is about. That’s what our kind of films are about.” And that requires some living and experiences, all of which he had certainly had in the US, Berlin, and back home in Thailand.
Some producers read this first script, listened to his ideas, and said, “Yes, we’ll pay for this.” The result was FUN BAR KARAOKE (1997), about a young woman who falls in love with the man hired to kill her father who has been having an affair with a mobster’s girlfriend. When Pen-Ek started filming this first feature, he mainly wanted to see if he could do it or even if he enjoyed the process. He swears that even if his first film had been successful at the box office, if he had not enjoyed making it, he would have walked away. Fortunately he did enjoy the process of filmmaking and was determined to continue in his new venture. Even though FUN BAR KARAOKE didn’t do well in Thailand nor win any international awards, it was still considered successful enough for the producers to pay for his next film, RUANG TALOK 69 (literally A FUNNY STORY ABOUT 6 AND 9), which did win awards in Berlin and Hong Kong. It was also Thailand’s official entry for “Best Foreign Language Film” at the Academy Awards in 2000. With his mixture of comedy and violence, Pen-Ek inevitably gained the nickname “the Thai Tarantino.”
When he showed 6IXTYNIN9 at Toronto in the “Midnight Madness” section, Pen-Ek talked with critic Ray Privett. In discussing the origins of the premise of the film, Pen-Ek said, “I suppose half came from my imagination, and half from the front page of the local news. In Bangkok, all sorts of wild things happen, and you could make two fantastic films of surreal magnitude just by adapting the material everyday. Parts of this story came from the front page, but they were often modified and put together in different ways. My memory must have collected the characters, events, and so forth. When I started writing, they just popped out.”
Perhaps unconsciously thinking of Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, the director says, “The original idea was that I wanted to make a thriller where the heroine suddenly finds a lot of money, and then all sorts of things happen after that.” He also “wanted to make a film in which, for the first twenty minutes, the heroine doesn't speak,” as in some films by Peter Greenaway, Jim Jarmusch, and Takeshi Kitano.
So wrapped up in the structure of his film, Pen-Ek originally didn’t think of 6IXTYNIN9 as a comedy: “I didn't think it was all that funny. But everywhere I go the film gets the same reaction, so I guess it is a comedy now. I knew there were jokes here and there, but I didn't think it would be laugh after laugh. When I was writing, I thought these things would seem natural. If I were in her position, what would I do? Then what would I do next? And next? I wrote the film a little like how the Coen brothers write their films. They don't have a full story in their heads; they just write. I started from scene one and just went. I found myself writing myself into a corner, then having to write myself out of it. Perhaps that has to do with why, to me, some parts feel contrived. But the film moves fast enough that people usually don't have time to question it.”
Avoiding the touristy, “exotic” images of Thailand (Bangkok, in particular), Pen-Ek wanting to burrow down more deeply into the Thai psyche: “Bangkok is a great place to observe. I think it's one of the great cities of the world. The surface is very Westernized. We have McDonalds and 7-11s, and people dress Westernized. … But on the other hand we are still Thai. The same people who drive BMWs and own high-rise buildings go to the fortune-teller every week. I know people who, when they buy a new car, have to go to the fortune-teller to decide what color it should be.”
With his insider/outsider view of Bangkok and its inhabitants, he saw how the evolving architecture affected people’s states of mind: “You seem to be more calm and relaxed when you live in a house with a pond down on the ground, whereas if you live in a high rise you are more restless. For me, the [apartment] is a more Western idea of living. You're off the ground. Everyone who lives in this flat where the heroine lives is very nice, but they're also very superficial. There is all this shooting, but no one comes to find out what is going on. When someone actually does show up, they come at the wrong time, and they want something. The woman from downstairs wants the fish sauce. The police officer wants to go out on the fire escape so he can catch the drug dealers and be in the newspaper the next day. These nice people live together, but they don't communicate unless they want something. On the other hand, you have all the people in the mafia, who are bad according to the laws, but they are still kind of cute, and they are very dedicated to each other. They live on the ground, in a Thai house that holds a Thai boxing academy. The boss loves the underlings, and the underlings love the boss. They're very loyal to one another. They are "criminals" because the law considers what they do criminal activities. That has nothing to do with what they are like inside.”
After his first few films Pen-Ek Ratanaruang has continued in the industry, so he obviously still enjoys the process. His LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (2003) is particularly outstanding and involves accidents, chance meetings, the dilemma of hiding corpses in an apartment, and flight. It has won various international awards. INVISIBLE WAVES (2006) deals with accidental murder and a guilt-ridden escape, while his most recent film, PLOY (2007), is apparently a less humorous take on the “seven year itch,” which causes a husband’s eyes and mind to wander to other possibilities. Despite Pen-Ek’s international reputation, only 6IXTYNIN9 and LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE are available on DVD. Perhaps distributors simply don’t know how to classify his works, which is one of the charms of his films: “The way I make films is purely out of curiosities. That’s the only thing that drives me. I don’t plan my career. I don’t have a career. Each project that I work on is just a combination of what I want to say at the time, what question I have in life, what I’m obsessed with at the time, plus, things that are forced upon me. And then I combine them, and see what I come up with. And that’s the way I make films.”
Sources:
• Alexis A. Tioseco, “A Conversation with Pen-Ek Ratanaruang ,” Criticine (an excellent website dedicated to “elevating discourse on Southeast Asian cinema”):
• Film Brain
• Ray Privett, interview with Pen-Ek Ratanaruang , Toronto Film Festival,
• Chale Nafus, program notes for LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
• BBC article on Pen-Ek
• Wikipedia entry on Pen-Ek
• IMDB.com
• 6IXTYNIN9, Palm Pictures DVD
