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Suwan fights like a man to become a woman in Boxer.
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Beautiful Boxer
Runs Fri., Feb. 11–Thurs., Feb. 17, at Varsity
You'll want to give Thai director Ekachai Uekrongtham's debut feature a great deal of credit for its photography, its affable sense of humor, and its compassionate attempt to tangle with the complexities of gender confusion, a subject too little explored and even less frequently understood. You'll want to acknowledge all of that, unfortunately, without actually having to sit through the entire movie. By the end, when the titular sportsman has transformed himself into an elegant lady who benevolently advises a would-be little boxer to fight from the heart, the sentimental goo of Million Dollar Baby resembles cinema vérité.
No question about whether the film has a helluva true-life story on its hands. Parinya Charoenphol, nicknamed Nong Toom, was a heralded Thai kickboxer who spent his life struggling with the intense belief that he was meant to be a woman and who, at the peak of his abilities, finally retired from the sport to become one. And in depicting the tale, Uekrongtham matches eye-catching visuals—Choochart Nantitanyatada's plush cinematography drips invitingly both in the sweat-infused boxing matches and out in the verdant Thai countryside—with a physically striking cast, including real-life kickboxing champion Asanee Suwan in the lead. (He's great in the fights; outside the ropes, however, he doesn't display much beyond a beleaguered pout.)
But what is lovely to look at, to paraphrase the old song, is not always delightful to know. Beginning with a prologue that features a high-heeled Nong Toom rescuing a reporter from a gang of thugs, it's evident that the film plans to work in veeeeery broad strokes. It's initially sort of charming in a big, crowd-pleasing way; the movie knows what's funny about Nong Toom's lifelong fascination with makeup without condescending to it. Too soon, however, the whole affair turns into the most endlessly derivative of bathetic biopics, right down to the inevitable training scenes when a gruff, dying coach decides to take the effeminate lad under his tutelage (this is to say nothing of an impoverished childhood straight out of silent-movie melodramas). The young boxer's ascent to an ass-kicking icon controversially sporting lipstick and powder in the ring only makes you long for a documentary account of the real Nong Toom's uncommon bravery. (NR) STEVE WIECKING
Bride & Prejudice
Opens Fri., Feb. 11, at Egyptian
Gurinder Chadha's Bollywood transposition of 19th-century Jane Austen into a 21st-century global tunefest may beguile you for at least some of its running time. This patchy English-language film remains true to the spirit of both Austen's tale of hard-won love and the grinning, giddy, sometimes garish conventions of Indian musical epics.
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are here relocated to modern-day India, where generation gaps and Western presumptuousness do much to enrich the nuances of Austen's original story. The Bennet girls become the middle-class Bakshi sisters, whom their comically desperate mother (Nadira Babbar) would like to see married off as quickly, traditionally, and wealthily as possible. But Lalita (Aishwarya Rai), the eldest, can't settle her differences with arrogant visiting American Will Darcy (Martin Henderson of The Ring remake), and then brings the roguish Wickham (Daniel Gillies) into the home to further upset the romantic balance.
Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) elaborates all this in a vibrant milieu that roams from India to London to California and back again, calling for characters to occasionally burst into song-and-dance in an even more random fashion than we've grown accustomed to in Hollywood classics. The colorfully kitschy numbers are faithful to Bollywood fashion, though they're not staged in a particularly accomplished manner. Contrary to the airy, nomadic wanderings of the rest of the picture, they feel a little crowded, never really cutting loose.
Beautiful Rai, a huge star in her native India, has sunny charm, but she's stuck between the bland beauty of Henderson's Darcy and the Abercrombie & Fitch wiles of Gillies' Wickham. Naveen Andrews, Juliette Binoche's love in The English Patient and a castaway on TV's Lost, brings life to his role as the on-again, off-again suitor of Jaya Bakshi (Namrata Shirodkar), though Chadha is too focused on trying to pump life into the inert main affair to make that subplot truly engaging.
Chadha clearly has a huge heart on her sleeve in a filmmaking era that too often rewards slick misanthropy. Bride isn't really very good, but it's a cheerful film. Few will complain on a rainy Saturday afternoon if it doesn't live up to its clever ambitions. (PG-13) STEVE WIECKING
Donkey Skin
Runs Fri., Feb. 11–Thurs., Feb. 17, at Varsity
Jacques Demy died of AIDS in 1990 and came back to life big-time in 1996, when his widow, the revered director Agnès Varda, unveiled the restored version of his 1964 masterpiece, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. There was nobody like Demy in the French new wave, nor anyplace else in film history—he was a one-man wave, hanging 10 on his own weirdly childlike imagination, surfing a sea of lollipop fauve colors and endless Michel Legrand recitative.
He was never weirder, nor more childlike, than in this homage to Jean Cocteau, the twee 1970 fairy tale Donkey Skin, newly restored under Varda's hawklike eye. In the film's dreamy demesne, Demy reteams with Legrand and his favorite bland blond beauty, Catherine Deneuve, and plunges once more into that crazy-bright palette he loved.
