Known pleasures, night skies
Cinema 2002, far and near.

By Chuck Stephens

I'M SITTING IN my apartment in Bangkok, watching a bootleg DVD made in Taiwan, counterfeited from a legitimate DVD made in Japan, of Platform, a film made in China by Jia Zhang-ke. Yesterday I sat here watching a videotape sent from a sales agent in Holland of Ken Park, a film made in California by Larry Clark and Edward Lachman. Last month I sat here reading a book, purchased and sent from Amazon.com's London branch, by French novelist Michel Houellebecq, who lives in Ireland. That book is also called Platform and is set partially in Bangkok, a portion of whose horizons I'll soon be sitting on my balcony admiring as the sky begins to fade from traffic-jam yellow to evening's twinkling black.

Jia's film Platform, made in 2001, is about the ways social uncertainties modulate the lives of musical performers and is one of the most beautiful Chinese movies ever made. Unknown Pleasures, Jia's newest film, is about dead-end kids in a backwater town who dream of freedom but can't afford the gas to hit the recently opened highway to Beijing and is one of the best films I've seen this year. Gorgeously photographed on digital video in a palette of dry-blood reds and plaster-dust complexions by amazing cinematographer Yu Lik-wai, Unknown Pleasures couldn't be more different from Ken Park, another of 2002's finest, except for the fact that Clark and Lachman's cophotographed family album of parent-child dysfunction is also about teenage no-hopers and the roads out that no one seems able to take. In Jia's vision of the hope-I-die-before-I-get-old standard, the kids in the near-Mongolia end zone of Datong loiter around karaoke joints, languidly puff cigarettes, dream of robbing banks and winning the lottery, stuff like that – distinctly pre-postcapitalism. In the Clark-Lachman concatenation, set in suburban Visalia, the kids beat off while strangling themselves, suck one another's dicks, eat their girlfriends' mothers' pussies – all in full-frontal detail – and occasionally blow their brains out, or gut their kin with kitchen knives. Really puts the notion of "most favored nation status" to the test, no?

A week ago I sat on my balcony listening to Stereolab's Sound-Dust, but tonight I'm remembering the words to a song I heard Vic Chesnutt sing in Los Angeles three years ago: "Life is funny, death is coming." It is winter here, 85 degrees Celsius at night, the end of the year the Thai Buddhist calendar refers to as 2545. From my balcony the following visual pleasures unfold: the unorthodox-temple spires of Wat Pasee, the neon hoardings for the Meree Massage complex, the pus-colored water of the canal called Klong Saen Saep, three Thai women on their way to work, three white guys sauntering along behind them wearing T-shirts and shorts, and a little girl of about three sporting brightly colored flip-flops that squeak with each step she takes as she runs after the elephant that's being lead down the soi by a pair of turbaned mahouts. I've just read on the Internet that Mary Hansen, Stereolab's multi-instrumentalist, is dead.

In Houellebecq's long-anticipated but terribly disappointing novel Platform, a follow-up to the brilliant Elementary Particles, a fabulously misanthropic Frenchman whose father has recently been murdered embarks on a plan to reinvent the tourism industry with a chain of sexual service-oriented resorts in southern, beachfront Thailand. He's been to Bangkok once, got his rocks off in a massage parlor, and assumes he's got a feel for the culture. With the encouragement of his paramour, a French travel specialist whom he meets while on his excursion east, he begins a detailed analysis/philosophical treatment of the tourism industry that, when compared with the novel's tedious sex scenes, is clearly the book's most interesting and stimulating aspect. But once the couple return to their ostensible Asian paradise to lay the foundation for their entrepreneurial journey beyond The Beach, Islamic terrorists in turbans suddenly launch an attack on the resort where they've encamped; she dies, he lives, but only with the hope that he'll get to read plenty of news reports about dead Palestinians before he fucks himself to death in the Land of Smiles. It's a lonely planet, indeed.

Houellebecq has had a rough year. Only four of Platform's 400 pages are strewn with the anti-Islam slurs for which four of the largest mosques in France recently took the author to court, suing for racial injustice. Houellebecq, who admitted to having called Islam "the dumbest religion" in a magazine interview, won the case, thereby thwarting the return of the long-banished crime of blasphemy from French jurisprudence. But that doesn't mean he should win in the court of intellectual review: Platform is bogus from beginning to end, and if anyone should take umbrage at its puny outrages, the Thais should get the first spots in the queue. Not that anyone else in Thailand seems to have the slightest interest in the thing; the elephant has left the soi, the little squeaker has been sent off to bed, and the lights at the Meree have dimmed.

Most-inflamed-nation status aside, though, what seemed interesting about Houellebecq's journey from the rigor of The Elementary Particles (also occasionally tinged with anti-Islam bile) to the ridiculousness of Platform was its similarity to French director Gaspar Noé's flameout from the gnawing radiance of I Stand Alone, his gut-dissolving debut, to the dazzling but intellectually adolescent Irreversible. In this scourge of Cannes 2002, Noé, with genuine aplomb (no other film this year can match Irréversible's technical genius, what with its careening and churning camera seemingly mounted on the back of a crack-addled bat), proceeds – in reverse chronology, by entering a club called Le Rectum in its opening scenes, moving through a much reviled central episode of anal rape, and tritely culminating with a parting shot about true love and the way time eventually turns everything to shit – to stick his head up his ass.

In London, where my shipment of Platform (the novel) originated, in October, director Clark disrupted a dinner party with Hamish McAlpine, the head of Metro Tartan, the firm that was to have distributed Ken Park in England, by punching McAlpine in the nose and then throttling him over what Clark described as a series of anti-American slurs regarding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Metro Tartan, and the London Film Festival, promptly – and probably irreversibly – dissociated themselves from Ken Park; U.S. distribution remains unconfirmed, as does American publication of the English-language translation of Houellebecq's novel. Jia's Platform, on the other hand, will be released by New Yorker Films early next year. And from my balcony on the other side of the planet, where darkness persists even as the taxis begin ferrying frolickers home, another year waits to perish, even as, patient as a pachyderm in traffic, the lights on the distant horizon slowly begin threatening to shine.

Chuck Stephens's top 13

1. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

2. Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, France)

3. Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhang-ke, China)

4. Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)

5. Japon (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)

6. Camel(s) (Park Ki-Yong, South Korea)

7. Paradox Lake (Przemyslaw Shemie Reut, USA)

8. Ken Park (Larry Clark and Edward Lachman, USA)

9. Doing Time (Yoichi Sai, Japan)

10. Eliana, eliana (Riri Riza, Indonesia)

11. Mon-rak Transistor (Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Thailand)

12. Lan Yu (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong)

13. The Skywalk Is Gone (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)