The New York Asian Film Festival took place between June 29 and July 15 in Manhattan. For more information about films and events, click here.
This year’ s secret screening was Khun Pan.
No, I’d never heard of it either.
That’s kind of the point.
In terms of high risk, high reward gambits, the NYAFF tradition of the Secret Screening is hard to beat. Getting the chance to watch A Hero Never Dies with a captive and captivated audience was one of the highlights of my 2016 festival experience. And having missed last year’s 25th anniversary screening of Naked Killer with special guest Carrie Ng will no doubt haunt me till my dying day.
But those were known quantities, movies that already had iconic status and something of a following.
There’s a whole world of difference between catering to your audience with a crowd pleasing, pre-tested classic and presenting them with something they’ve never seen before and have no frame of reference for.
It’s a risk for audiences, of course. But it’s also a very clear risk for the programmers as well.
When you’re charging full price to a ticket for a secret, mystery movie… how many misfires are you allowed before the audience loses faith in you?
So credit for taking a risk on an untested, unproven property. But the only thing that matters is whether or not it pays off.
Another year, another victory.
The first thing we can say about Khun Pan is that it is a deeply, deeply strange movie.
The other is that is frickin’ moves.
The first hour of the film runs from dark wizardry to the trenches of World War II to an undercover cop movie to a western to what is for all intents and purposes a superhero film (complete with mid-credits scene), all without stopping for breath. The casual clashing of the supernatural elements with the usual cops versus crooks tropes would give one pause if the movie wasn’t so relentless in its forward momentum. In fact, it wasn’t until having to sit down and write this review that it started occurring to me just how odd the entire enterprise is.
The film takes place in 1940, as war hero Khun Pan (Ananda Everingham) is assigned to go undercover to Budo Island, populated entirely by bandits and wayward criminal types, to locate and take down the notorious bandit Alhawee Yahu, a tattooed master killer with magical powers such as invincibility and a luxurious mane of hair. To describe the series of plots and counterplots that unfold between the beginning of the mission and the inevitable final showdown would be both futile and besides the point. But suffice to say, both players invulnerability will be tested to the limit.
(That’s not hyperbole, incidentally: both our main hero and our main villain are literally invulnerable. Exactly how that affects the stakes of the film, I leave it to you to find out…)
So the supernatural element goes a long way towards differentiating the film from other genre fare. But what stands out even more than that is the specific cultural differences and how they manifest in the storytelling.
Pan’s refrained offer to forgive any criminal who renounces his evil ways and becomes a monk (an offer which no one ever takes him up on, to their brief and bloody regret) comes off not as a threat or a sarcastic remark (as it clearly would in an American film), but as a genuine and sincere offer. The movie has no small amount of sympathy for its killers, granting the truly repentant unquestioned absolution and even allowing ruthless Alhawee Yahu a certain righteousness in his violent fury and the hope of betterment.
Really, the only person who is shown no empathy is Master Olarn, the corrupt magistrate who governs Budo Island and is collaborating with the Japanese army. His bureaucratic brand of menace and faithless exploitation of his people are the true evils of the film. Far more than the strangely noble Yahu, Olarn is the one whose comeuppance the audience grows to crave.
Even if he rocks a white suit like no other.
It’s an epic tale (the bombastic score by Terdsak Janpan, whose name hopefully doesn’t sound like I think it sounds, is a dead giveaway), and as such it gives its heroes and villains a mythical feel even above that which the supernatural content already imbues.
All this allows for the action to pass over-the-top and land somewhere in the upper atmosphere; a place where the air is so thin, you start to suspect you’re hallucinating.
Surely you couldn’t have seen what you just saw, could you?
That horse seriously didn’t (SPOILER FOR COMPLETELY INSANE ACTION BEAT REDACTED) on that train, did he?
Director Kongkiat Khomsiri pulls off some truly impressive action, which I’m loathe to spoil, except to say that this is a film to be seen with an audience, if only to confirm that what you’re seeing is real. This was a highly entertaining film, but seeing it with a rabid gang of adventurous film lovers, hooting and hollering at every head shot and super deep stabbing, is one of those grand and singular experiences you so rarely get to experience, and one that everyone should.
The director, as it happens was at the screening, and was supposed to do a Q&A afterwards. But when the lights came up, he was nowhere to be found, having had to leave to catch his plane back home, where he’s currently in the middle of filming Khun Pan 2.
I’ll allow it.
