VIFF 2011: HI-SO Review

Hi-So opens with a beautiful young woman being escorted into an exclusive high-end resort in Thailand, then abruptly cuts to a man walking down a hall in a shambles. His head and his wrist are bandaged and he is more than a little bit haggard. Right away you think see the social contradiction that Hi-So, Thai slang for high society, is setting up. That is until the man walks down the hall and right onto a movie set. Gotcha! Aditya Assarat's second feature film eschews such overt allegories by shrugging off judgment almost as quickly as it shows its face. Although Assarat's glossy 20-something anti-drama is certainly concerned about aspects of social depravity, it is also very sympathetic to the plight of the privileged that populate his film.

After attending college in the US, Ananda has returned home to Thailand to try his hand at acting. While shooting, his American girlfriend, Zoe, comes to visit in what will be the first cultural schism Ananda will butt heads with. Ananda and Zoe both take a certain amount of decadence, freedom and slackerdom for granted, but Zoe tires of the exotic nature of her boyfriend and setting as she becomes increasingly ostracized by language, culture and status. She wallows in Ananda's ability to speak his native language (amazing!) but not enough to make a concerted effort to learn. But don't attempt to try and cage that in anti-Americanism. The converse is true later in the film when Ananda's Thai girlfriend simply wants to hear him read headlines from the Bangkok Post in English, having no idea what he is saying. Caught between his Americanization and his homeland, Ananda is a stranger in a strange land, part farang and part native, but spoiled by compulsory inertia in his deteriorating global village.

Many have remarked that Hi-So evokes the cinema of Hong Sang-soo because of its diptych narrative reflected through two different love affairs. Beyond this structural comparison, the connection is slight at best--Hi-So's themes are a little more obvious and a little less personal than the films of Hong's. Where Hong's characters are psychologically rich and emotionally complex (even if they are self-absorbed), those in Hi-So are, for better or for worse, vacant and superficial.  

But dismissing that association is not necessarily a bad thing. Assarat is working on his own visual niche, and in Hi-So he subsumes a slick indie feel within a physical atmosphere of transition and decay. The film Ananda is working on in the beginning of the narrative is about a man who has lost his memory after the 2004 Tsunami, and they are shooting on location at a resort, destroyed by the disaster but left to the elements--a modern temple of the recent past. Similarly back in Bangkok, Ananda takes up residence in a dilapidated high rise owned by his family that was once the pinnacle of luxury living. The façade on one side of the complex has been completely ravaged, but the structure still stands, empty except for Ananda and a few paid staff members. Both settings have and edge of contemporary surreality right on the cusp of transformation. The structures are not so different from Ananda--empty vessels stuck between two realms.

For Assarat, Hi-So probably riffs off of his own experiences. Aditya Assarat was born in Bangkok but left at the age of 15 to be educated in the US. Unfortunately, the gravity of his experiences, whatever they were, does not translate to his film. The characters are impassive performers ready for their close up, but not for anything very emotional engaging. Ananda's silent moments never reads as anything more contemplative than possibly pondering whom his next girlfriend will be.