[MEKONG HOTEL screens Wednesday July 31st at 7:45 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

As in
his previous films, such as TROPICAL MALADY, the filmmaker uses long, static
takes and, likely, non-pro actors, in a plot that's pretty much a weak-linked
chain of vignettes (if even that). At a hotel on a scenic river (the title is a
clue; that much I comprehended), a fellow named Masato finds his faithful dog
(offscreen) a gross, eviscerated drowned corpse, and he believes this is the
work of a "Pob ghost," a sort of vampiric female spirit that feeds
off the entrails of the living. He tells this to a pretty guest at the hotel,
Phon, and they also banter about the way peasant villagers revere the Thai
royal family, especially the princess. Masato and Phon grow pretty fond of each
other. In a hotel room Phon watches TV with her mother, and later the two women
discuss how Thailand handled its influx of Laotian refugees during the
Cambodian crisis.
(most
of the internet kids reading these words probably know more about the Skywalker
family's role in the Clone Wars than they do about Laos and Cambodia. To be
fair, this movie won't exactly fill in any blanks about the latter, while
George Lucas minions will gladly elaborate on the former)
It is
soon shown that Phon's mother is actually the Pob ghost. There even is scene of
her eating human guts, that is about as unexciting and non-explicit as a scene
of a woman eating human guts could ever be. Sorry, guys. Masato gets possessed
by the Pob, if we're supposed to take this literally. Then there are some
long-take sequences of a backhoe at work on the beach, and, later, some
laborers doing some sort of landscaping in the distance.
Oh, and
throughout there’s an improvised guitar solo that constitutes the entire musical
soundtrack. The movie is all over in about an hour, everything but the awards
handed out by international film-festival critics and judges. Critics and
judges too frightened not to hand out awards to this inscrutable thing for fear
of looking like dummies whose knowledge of Thai culture comes mainly from
THE HANGOVER 2. Well, sure, nobody wants that. But I'd be dishonest if I told
you this picture much engaged me on most any level, because it didn't.
Challenged me, maybe. Then again, getting fresh job applications out there is
challenging also, and I think in my scant free time I should go after those
types of challenges instead.
A little research on this thing suggests that it was more or less the fragmentary
results of a project that never quite got off the ground, and that Tilda
Swinton might have been involved at one point. So it’s like outtakes, or a
rough-rough draft? Damn, I wish I could get away with turning in my own book manuscripts
or writing assignments severely unfinished, as “art.” Nice racket.
I am
pulling from memories of some books I read about international exploitation
flicks, but I do think that in the commercial Thai movie industry there have
been homegrown sleazy horror-action pictures that depict Pob ghosts or similar
Indo-Chinese folklore goblins and vampires. I doubt any of them will ever get
art-museum screenings, but they can't be as somnolent and opaque as MEKONG
HOTEL. Can they? (1 1/2 out of 4 stars)
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