In 2007 Spectra and I were in Argentina where we saw Babel in the movie theater (but only after doing a great many other more Argentine things, I swear). If you’ve never seen it, aren’t familiar with it, or have forgotten, Babel is multiple, unconnected stories in Japan, Morocco, Mexico and the US each one ending in or revolving around a calamity created by people failing to understand each other. It starred Brad Pitt, among others, and was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores perros). We chose to see it for all those reasons and because it was subtitled. It turned out those subtitles were in Spanish (retrospectively: duh), which Spectra speaks and reads but I do not.
Thanks to locations around the world the characters spoke English, Spanish, Arabic (or perhaps Berber), and Japanese. Accordingly I could only understand about a 1/3 of the dialog. Spectra whispered translations of the Spanish subtitles but I quickly stopped her both because I could largely follow it without them and because it was the perfect movie to only understand a third of considering it’s about how people don’t understand each other. I’ve never seen Babel again but I think I liked it.
Flash forward seven years.
On Saturday I had my first official Thai friend outing (with people who don’t work for Ashoka). Ning, Belle, Mamwng—aka the Thai Trinity—and I were going to a movie together. What movie? I had no idea because we were going to see whatever was playing at a free film festival organized by Bangkok University. If you read that last sentence and thought “uh oh” then you’ve been to a free university film festival but before I get there I have to get there.
Mamwng came up with this idea and Belle and Ning quickly accepted. So did I even though I couldn’t figure out where it was. When I used Google maps, which may as well be Apple Maps 1.0 in Thailand, it said Bangkok University Gallery (BUG) was either just outside of central Bangkok or 22 kilometers north of my home and would require an hour and half bus ride. I assumed it has to be the former. Why would we go 22 kilometres north just to see a free, old movie on DVD?
If I had to quickly define what the difference is between visiting a place and living there it would be “figuring out what’s normal.” When you visit you don’t necessarily ever figure out what’s normal for the people who live there. You stay in certain areas, eat at certain kinds of places, use certain modes of transportation, and generally speaking overpay for everything. Same goes for your behavior. Even when you’re trying to follow local norms and customs you’re going to make mistakes, but the longer you’re there the less acceptable your gaffs become. When you live someplace you eventually have to figure out what’s normal because you can’t be a foreigner forever.
So when I asked Mamwng for location verification and it turned out to be 22 kilometers north of me I thought, “I guess this is normal for them.” Mamwang and Ning live in southern Bangkok so the trip was more like 35 kilometers for them and they’d be taking trains and buses meaning a 2-plus hour trip. For a free old movie? Maybe I would have done that in high school or university when I had radically more time than money but as an adult? No way. I seriously considered offering to pay for all four of us to see a move in central Bangkok but didn’t both because Spectra would have given me the face and because I didn’t want to trample on any potential social customs so early in my nascent friendship with the Thai Trinity (longstanding friends will note this restraint is temporary). So I shrugged off my reservations and committed to an hour and a half bus ride that struck me as crazy.
The bus ride was interesting for a variety of reasons that I journaled, and may blog about later, but for now all that matters is the ride took 50 minutes instead of 90. GOOGLE! How can it be so bad with the world’s most visited city in 2013, according to Forbes. Google, if you’re reading this—and we know you are—get your act together in Thailand.
Anyway, so I was early, which was actually nice because that Bangkok University campus (there are others) is beautiful in the way university and college campuses often are in the US. If you took Macalester and crossed it with the University of Minnesota that’s what it felt like. So I got to stroll and then lounge around contemplating what it says about me that the two places I’m most comfortable outside of the United States are shopping malls and universities. As I’ve said on many occasions, in most ways I am exactly what you think I should be based on who it appears I’d be.
Ning ended up backing out at the last second because she had a big project due. For work? No, for university. Because Ning is in university. What? You thought I’d befriend people “my age”? Of course you didn’t because of course I didn’t. Belle and Mamwng, neither of whom have homework anymore, both eventually showed up and very quickly it became clear neither one of them had ever been to the campus we were strolling through.
After a few questions about how we’d found ourselves 24-kilometers north of the nearest metro station, Mamwng, whose idea this had been in the first place, shrugged his shoulders and said, “I thought it would be at the other campus.” That would be the one in south-central Bangkok, near Mamwng’s neighborhood, perhaps 2-kilometers from a metro station.
I asked if once he figured where the movie actually was whether he thought it was crazy that we’d all travel so far to see a free, old movie. “Oh, yes,” he confirmed. “This is crazy.”
Belle burst into laughter and vigorously nodded.
So we were in accord afterall. All three of us thought it was completely nuts to have traveled so far just to see an unknown, free, old movie. It was not normal by any of our standards and yet there we were. At this point you might be thinking I’m going to circle back to bring Bable into this but no. I’m not there yet.
The movie we saw turned out to be Certified Copy from 2010 and there were 4 or 5 other people in the 100-ish seat theater/classroom. The movie is way too good to spoil for any of you who may stumble upon it some day or have been meaning to see it so all I’m going to say is it’s about a French woman living in Italy who spends the day with an Englishman. It’s a quintessentially “European” movie in many senses but the three most germane here are:
- It’s verbal. Virtually every scene is two people talking about things like authenticity, art, or relationships. Honestly, I can only think of one scene that isn’t two people talking and that scene is four people talking.
- It’s deliberately opaque. Opaque in small ways like the main character is a woman whose name we never learn; in big ways like a man professes not to speak Italian, which causes a kerfuffle, and a couple scenes later he speaks Italian and it’s never commented on.
- It's open-ended. To say you leave the movie with more questions than you arrive with is putting it mildly. If you like the idea of watching a movie twice because you’re sure the second time through answers will emerge through recontextualization, this is a movie for you.
Certified Copy is told in three languages—English, French, and Italian—and it was subtitled in Thai and Thai alone. I understood even less of it than Babel because Certified Copy is probably 25% English but slides off into 0% for critical stretches. My French is good enough to follow along when people are ordering bread or asking where the toilet is, it’s considerably less functional when people are slipping into and out of critiques of art, authenticity, and relationship philosophies. Even so, I could more or less follow along most of the time.
I’m going to be oblique on this part because I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a point where a relationship in the movie shifts in a confusing fashion that calls into question everything else you thought you knew about the movie. Right after that the English passages quickly decline so I was left trying to make sense of what was going on primarily through “toilet, where?” level French. Of course Belle and Mamwng had the benefit of Thai subtitles so I assumed they’d be able to fill in the gaps.
After the movie ended—in quintessentially “European” art film fashion—Belle and Mamwng were silent. I had no idea why at first because I didn’t know what the normal reaction in Thailand would be to that movie. I wondered if maybe they were processing it in the same way I once processed Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer after Sosuke mailed me a “video disk” version in 2001. I’d never seen anything like it and I pummelled Sosuke with endless questions about, what's essentially, a crowd pleasing slapstick-action-comedy.
Were Belle and Mamwng mulling Certified Copy over? Were they allowing its evident if confusing majesty to wash over them? Were they silently registering their discontent? I had no idea and after a couple moments I asked the most obvious question, one that’s central to making sense of the movie, “So were the man and woman ________?” [I’m not filling in the blank because it would ruin an initial viewing of the movie.] I honestly wasn’t sure and assumed it would have been clear through the subtitles.
Belle and Mamwng slumped into the body language of exasperated confusion and said they had no idea. They found the entire movie mystifying. It turned out Belle had seen one European movie in her life, Amelie (aka America’s favorite “European film”) but fell asleep. Mamwng had perhaps never seen a European movie and fell asleep in Certified Copy after about five minutes. Belle confessed she wanted to sleep but was afraid to because then she’d miss out on the conversation after the movie. Their reactions, it should be noted, would be normal for the vast majority of Americans too (it was never widely released in the US, only playing on 57 screens at its peak and grossed $1.3 million, so the vast majority of Americans didn’t take the opportunity to share in their bafflement).
Certified Copy is pretty much exactly the kind of movie I went to university to study. {insert joke here about my choices of major and minor} This does not make me smarter or a greater intellectual. It just means I had a lot of experience with movies like Certified Copy. One of my favorite feelings is realizing immediately after a movie ends that I must see it again because it’s prompted so many questions that I’m sure a second viewing would answer and Certified Copy is very much that kind of movie.
Belle, Mamwng, and I spent the next 30 to 45 minutes talking about Certified Copy. I clarified as much as I could and then conjectured about what it all meant. Here’s a sample, “If the narrative of the film is a long slow transition from artifice to reality, it’s possible that character X (seen in the flesh, walking and talking early in the movie) was dead in ‘reality’ because of this, that, and the other.” Cue Belle and Mamwng narrowing their eyes in thought for a moment or two before dropping their jaws at the (potential) accuracy of my hypothesis.
Normally the guy who only understood a quarter of the dialog doesn’t explain a movie to his companions who understood all of it. Normally people don’t travel 22-kilometers (on an un-air conditioned bus in 90-degree heat) to see a free screening in a university classroom of a 2010 DVD they’ve never heard of. In the midst of my struggle to sort out and be normal in Thailand, this is where I found myself.
In Bable the inability of people to understand each other resulted in one calamity after another. While more understanding is generally a good thing, sometimes the inability to understand each other results in circumventing what would otherwise normal. If I’d lived in Bangkok for a year and spoke the language a bit there’s no way Belle, Mamwng, and I would have gone all the way up to BUG to watch an old DVD in a classroom. I would have told them it was nuts, they would have agreed, and it’s possible my life would be worse for it.
After the movie discussion we took a sweat soaked, un-airconditioned bus ride where I enlisted my Thai friends to force strangers clearly watching me out of the corners of their eyes (perhaps thinking “why the hell is a farang riding an un-airconditioned bus all the way up here”) into our conversation. Then we ate at an outdoor restaurant that Spectra and I had been dying to try but were intimidated by. Then we walked around JJ Market, then a weird un-airconditioned shopping mall so Belle could get her watch fixed, and finally they took me to a night market selling everything from the customary t-shirts to spare motorcycle parts where we also ate and had a beer. Seeing an unknown, free, DVD beyond the outskirts of Bangkok spiraled into a sweaty 10-hour journey certifying Belle and Mamwng as friends of mine.
Would that have happened without the three of us inadvertently priming ourselves for an outing of punishing dimensions? Had I cajoled everyone into seeing a movie in central Bangkok for 100 baht that left us in the convenience of shopping mall land would we have opted to trek so far for so long? I have no idea, I’m thrilled I don’t, and I owe it all to misunderstanding and being totally out of touch with normal.
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| Completely normal. |
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