By Brian Hu

Dubbed by the distributor as the "Holy Grail for a lot of film fans," Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger finally emerges uncut from the Miramax cages, seven years after its heralded 2000 debut.

After Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon made Sony Pictures Classics the standard-bearer for Asian action in the United States, Miramax (then headed by the Weinstein Brothers) famously went on a buying spree for anything and everything with even the remotest chance for box office success. In a short amount of time in 2001, Tsui Hark's The Legend of Zu, Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse all became Miramax properties, as did Wisit Sasanatieng's acclaimed Tears of the Black Tiger, which like Pulse screened at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

That Miramax had no real plans to release the films they bought was unimportant to the company, for whom this massive buyout was above all a pre-emptive strike against its competitors. As they did with the Jackie Chan library, Miramax recut and/or re-dubbed the acquisitions, which then screened poorly with local audiences. With Shaolin Soccer, they grudgingly un-dubbed it and put it in very limited release three years after everyone who wanted to see it had already gotten a bootleg version. The Legend of Zu was eventually released straight to video. The artier Pulse and Tears of the Black Tiger took it hardest. As Wasanatieng tells me in an email, "I understand that Miramax had given up releasing Tears of the Black Tiger since they edited the whole movie until it couldn't be watched at all. The screening test didn't satisfy them so they took away the film [from the market]."

And in the Miramax vaults, they sat. Although the films were released in Asia and Europe in theaters and DVD, American audiences could not legally watch them without Miramax's permission, resulting in a form of market censorship where audiences aren't prohibited for political or moral reasons, but because seeing the film would compromise another party's ability to make money.

After the Weinsteins left Miramax, some good people at Magnolia Pictures bought the distribution rights to Pulse and Tears of the Black Tiger with the actual intention of releasing the films. Pulse emerged first and proved to be perhaps the best of the recent wave of Japanese horror. Tears of the Black Tiger ended up being more of an elusive religious relic than an actual film. After its showings at Vancouver in 2000 and Cannes in 2001, Wasanatieng's colorful ode to Thai melodramas of the 1950s was built up as the ultimate in genre excess, as well as the jewel in the crown of a Thai cinema on the verge of emergence on the international stage. That nobody stateside was allowed to see it only built up the Tears of the Black Tiger legend. A single production still came to dominate the film's image in the mainstream press: two gunslingers face-off in a golden field, while above the sun shoots out rays in drugged out pastels of yellow and turquoise. Consequently, the film became known as the campiest and most visually opulent Western since its heyday.

Seeing Tears of the Black Tiger, finally, on the big screen in 2007, was as trippy an experience as that image had promised, but not in the way I'd expected. Yes, the visuals were mind-blowing -- from the over-saturated red lipstick to the river overcome by the crimson blood of heartache. However, my feeling of dislocation wasn't visual or generic, but temporal. I retroactively watched a film that itself was a retroactive homage; in other words, seeing the film six years after I was supposed to has made me nostalgic for the nostalgia of another time.

Above all, this is because in the years following 2000, so much has happened, not only to Thai filmmaking and the "global film" scene, but to global politics. I'm speaking of course of 9/11, and to a lesser extent the recent coup in Thailand. Like so many westerns and Asian action films, Tears of the Black Tiger is about revenge, an act that today can no longer be divorced from the implications of terrorism and war. Since 2000, there have been other stylish genre films that assume hybridized, retro forms: Kill Bill, Far From Heaven, House of Flying Daggers, Sin City, 2046. Meanwhile, Thai cinema -- led by art house auteurs Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Nonzee Nimibutr, the Pang Brothers, and Pen-ek Ratanaruang -- has become one of the most visible cinemas in the international film festival circuit. When Tears of the Black Tiger was first released, Chuck Stephens wrote an important article in Film Comment about the emerging Thai cinema, and succinctly called Sasanatieng's film "an oddly nostalgic projection of what Thai filmmaking has the potential to become." But today, Tears' odd nostalgic projection has become all the odder, displaced in time, arriving on the scene after its promise has already been fulfilled.

When it was made, Tears of the Black Tiger was not alone in its nostalgia for Thailand 1950s and 60s, incidentally the years of Thailand's last golden age of cinema. Many of these young mavericks kick-started their careers by looking to the past. Nimibutr's incredible 1997 debut Dang Birely and the Young Gangsters centers around no-luck hoods who become local gang-lords in the 50s and 60s. Pen-ek Ratanaruang's third film, Mon-rak Transistor, made two years before his international breakthrough Last Life in the Universe in 2003, similarly showed the weight of popular culture -- in this case music -- on the psyches of a nation's youth. Likewise, Tears of the Black Tiger glances back lovingly on the heroic melodrama traditions of 1960s Thai cinema and music. As Sasanatieng tells it, it was an era before "everything was going down: morality, culture, and taste." Like Stephens argues, this film looks to the future by preserving the past. Sasanatieng again: "I don't feel any beauty left at all. All perfection has gone and has never come back, and that's why I tried to put everything in the 1950s."

There's a sincerity there in Sasanatieng's words that perfectly captures the tone of Tears of the Black Tiger. Most surprising for me was how heartfelt the film's emotions felt. Despite the self-conscious nostalgia and the stylistic distanciation, the themes of lost love rang true. It makes little sense, as Edward Buscombe does in Sight and Sound, to write about the film solely in terms of a post-modernist style. Sure the film resembles Kill Bill, but unlike Tarantino's films, its infatuation for past cultural forms does not surpass its love for its characters. In this way, Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven is the better comparison; both are films which make a dying genre hip, not simply to resurrect old styles, but to resurrect seemingly old emotions that the films prove are not antithetical to the present.

When I asked Sasanatieng if, in the years following 2000, his thoughts on the film have changed, he responded, "this film might not be the best of me, but it's the last to express my feeling of an old age that will never come back again -- the happiness hiding somewhere in a corner that I can enjoy, no matter how much time has passed." Unfazed by world events, unethical distribution practices, and the whims of world cinema, nostalgia, it seems, has yet to run its course, even if it now belongs to another time.

Tears of the Black Tiger is already released in New York and Austin, and opens in Los Angeles, Chicago, Cambridge, Minneapolis, and Seattle on March 2. Click here for Magnolia Pictures' official website, which includes the schedule for the film's rollout throughout March and April.

For another nostalgic genre film by Wisit Sasanatieng, see APA's capsule review for The Unseeable.

Published: Friday, March 2, 2007