By Chuck Stephens

I HAVE TO begin with a confession: I have not seen The Legend of Suriyothai, the film that I am ostensibly writing about. A strange place for a piece of film criticism to begin, no doubt, but then The Legend of Suriyothai – or simply Suriyothai, the title of the original release of this epic about a legendary 16th-century queen who sacrificed herself in battle to preserve her husband and his reign – comes to you by strange means.

The most expensive Thai film ever produced, and the country's all-time high grosser, Suriyothai – a film I do know well – comes from my current home town, Bangkok, and from deep within the history and soul of Thailand. Financed, and indeed conceptually nurtured from its nascence, by current Thai queen Sirikit, Suriyothai was more than just a movie when originally released; it was, as film critic Kong Rithdee has explained, "a gravitational centre for the whole country. Like a divine elephant desired by ancient kings, Suriyothai forever changed the people's perception towards the idea and potential of Thai cinema." Yet, even in its original version, the film wasn't simply a product of Thailand: it was partially completed in Napa Valley, sound-designed and mixed at Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope hideaway. And it is now Coppola – an old college buddy of the film's director, Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol – who has recut the film from its original-release length of some three hours, down to the 140-some-minute version that opens in San Francisco this week.

There are of course ontological problems involved with my reviewing The Legend of Suriyothai (as this new cut is called), since much of what I liked about the original may or may not still be in the current version: dying kings covered in smallpox pustules, the ritual execution of a whimpering eight-year-old child-king, a wrongly accused kitchen maid cowering bare-breasted, beaten, and in trembling contemplation of her eminent beheading in a skull-adorned prison cell. These may or may not be the sorts of ingredients Coppola found most agreeable for export. If not, there are still plenty of scenes of elegant royals – royally plotting and conniving for power, or valiantly battling for the honor of the few who aren't – to choose from, not to mention the many, many handsomely financed court-life tableaux and blood-soaked battle vistas of the film's 70 main actors, 2,000 extras, 80 elephants, and 70 horses, all of them loosely woven into a fabric five years in the researching and two years in the shooting. Siam-o-philes can rest assured, impoverishment of historically accurate embellishment is not one of Suriyothai's faults.

Lack of dramaturgical oomph, unfortunately, is – and it seems unlikely that even as powerful an editor as Coppola, whose filmography includes some of the most celebrated examples of American montage of the last 50 years, could splice enough life back into this sub-soap operatic waxworks. Indeed, what Suriyothai needed – even in its three-hour version, reportedly itself a fraction of the film's legendary rough-cut duration of some eight hours – was more room for the characters to breathe, not breezier exposition of their exploits. The film was designed both as a vehicle for national pride in the form of lush, picture-book history palatable for family viewing, not to mention entirely unobjectionable to a nation very sensitive about images of its royal lineage, and a vast marketing exercise, not only at home, where collectible cans of beer featured images of its major characters, but also abroad, to promote Thailand's cultural heritage in the form of art-house cine-prestige. On its own terms, then, Suriyothai was a success. As cinema, though, it's strictly an exercise in lumbering toward the elephant's graveyard.

What makes Suriyothai particularly disappointing to those with a real interest in Thai cinema, though, is that Prince Chatri wasn't always so concerned with royal pomp and circumstance. In the turbulent Thailand of the 1970s, when student pro-democracy demonstrations were repeatedly met with overkill response from the military and police until briefly, from 1974 to 1976, a period of cultural liberation flourished, the prince firmly declared himself a man of the people and directed some of the hardest-hitting, most politically loaded exploitation flicks Thai cinema has ever known. His masterpiece, 1974's Thep Thida Rong Raem (Hotel Angel), is far and away the boldest statement about Thailand's prostitution industry ever attempted, not to mention a face-smashing example of dialectical montage that even Sam Fuller might have envied: its centerpiece is a sequence during which the titular angel, Malee, repeatedly opens her blouse to an endless parade of customers until the prince finally cuts to a shot of Malee's father, somewhere upcountry, opening the window shutters of the new house he's built – built, that smash cut insists, with the money his daughter made working on her back.

Until a traveling retrospective of Prince Chatri's brilliant '70s films is assembled (hello, Pacific Film Archive?), Suriyothai suffices mainly as a peek into something or other Thai – teak palaces, gorgeous concubines clad in silken sabai – with only the faintest whiff of dialectical thinking about royal history. Still, with Prince Chatri at the helm, it's at least the kind of thinking that recognizes the sorts of sacrifices Thai women have long been making for Thai patriarchy, and the criminal infrequency with which it offers them anything back.