Cannes Report: Ploy Review
When early word of Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's latest picture -- Ploy -- began to circulate the speculation was immediate that the film would represent a return to the Thai auteur's old form, a return to more straightforward storytelling. It's a reasonable assumption to make since the film does reunite the director with the star of his crime caper 6ixtynin9, but it is also completely and totally incorrect. Ploy represents Ratanaruang's continued evolution. It is another step further down the road he began to chart with Last Life in the Universe. Though there is a crime element to it, as there is in every one of Ratanaruang's films, the film far more resembles the work of his countryman Apichatpong Weerasethakul than it does Tarantino -- to whom his early films drew frequent comparisons -- while also inviting a re-evaluation of his previous film, Invisible Waves, as a necessary step taken to arrive here. And, yes, it is very good.
Ploy is essentially a lucid dream, a film that takes place in that odd in-between state when you cannot be sure whether you are sleeping or awake and there are seemingly sure pointers that would have you believe both. It is a film about people dislocated and relationships formed while others are breaking down badly.
Set in a Phuket hotel the core story revolves around Wit and Dang, a married professional couple just returned home to attend a funeral. There may have been love in the relationship once but it has gone cold now, Dang turning to drugs and alcohol for support while Wit simply ignores her. An early morning trip to the hotel bar for cigarettes leads to a chance encounter between Wit and Ploy, a teenage girl waiting for her mother to arrive from Stockholm. When Wit realizes that she is simply sitting and waiting in the hotel bar and must continue to do so for the next five hours, he invites Ploy up to use his room to nap, shower and freshen up -- a situation which infuriates Dang, who resents that Ploy is receiving the type of attention Wit withholds from her. She eventually storms out and has a chance encounter of her own, one that turns potentially deadly. Also present in the hotel are the overnight barman -- played by Shutter's Ananda Everingham, who is suddenly ubiquitous in Thai film -- and a maid having a role-playing affair in the hotel's vacant rooms using clothing stolen from the in-house dry cleaners.
With the body of the film set between the hours of five and ten AM and all of the characters suffering from some severe sleep deprivation, Ploy moves with a slow, hazy pace. While things appear straightforward in the early going it soon becomes clear that some sequences are in fact dreams had by some characters about the others and the lines between what is real and what is imagined becomes deeply and irrevocably blurred. And this is very likely the entire point of the film. Ploy isn't really a film about what is so much as it is a film about what might be. It is a film about the different paths a relationship might take, about how we may choose to either support or destroy one another. Both paths are equally valid, both are equally likely, and so Ratanaruang simply leaves it up to you to decide which you choose to follow and label truth and which you choose to label fantasy. The choice, ultimately, is up to you.
Beautifully shot and very well performed Ploy will very likely have difficulty finding widespread acceptance in Thailand thanks to its scenes of explicit -- at least by Thai standards, it would likely be a soft R in America -- sex. Thailand is notorious for the uneven application of its censorship laws but graphic nudity is pretty much always frowned upon and with equally acclaimed countryman Weerasethakul having just had his most recent film confiscated it seems unlikely that Ratanaruang can rely on his reputation to leave the film intact at home. This is purely Thailand's loss. Ploy is a beautiful, thoughtful, meditative film, one that requires more effort from its audience than does Last Life in the Universe but one that the patient will find no less rewarding.
