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Wonderful Town (2007) Plus avec IMDbPro »

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5 utilisateurs sur 5 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Classic love story with an ominous twist, 6 avril 2008

Auteur : rasecz de Etats-Unis

Somewhere on Thailand's south coast. A sleepy town not too far from the beach. A young architect with business to care of in the area checks in at a shabby hotel for a two months stay. The owner/manager is a young woman. It's love at first sight though the relationship matures slowly.

The bulk of the film plays as a classic love story with a Thai flavor. What's different is the presence of an ominous threat that seems to hang in the air. A relative of the woman does not seem too happy with the developing relationship. It's a shady character. The danger filled atmosphere is enhanced by a nice ethereal music. The ending is a total surprise. It's a metaphorical tsunami with an uncomfortable sense of poetic justice.

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3 utilisateurs sur 3 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
A Fairly Impressive First Film, 21 juillet 2008

Auteur : crossbow0106 de Etats-Unis

This first film from director Aditya Assarat is mostly quiet and absorbing. The film tells of the relationship of Ton (Supphasit Kansen), an architect who is supervising the building of a resort hotel on the beach in southern Thailand, post tsunami, and Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn), a hotel clerk/maid who lives in a town in the mountains of Thailand. Ton stays at the hotel and slowly you see the relationship of these two people evolve,how it ebbs and flows. You see the sweet moments and challenges, including Na being concerned that the townspeople are gossiping about them. The two characters are fairly likable and Na seems to become prettier as the movie goes on. The scenery of the mountains is very nice, the cinematography is very good. This film is slow moving and has an undercurrent of foreboding throughout, but I found the pace to be essential and the acting by the two main actors very good. Even the musical score, mostly an acoustic guitar, is good. Not for everyone due to its slow moving pace, its a must for fans of Asian cinema and anyone who feels they can relate to a story like this. I felt this film was well made and captured the essence of time and place extremely well. A fairly impressive debut for Aditya Assarat.

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4 utilisateurs sur 5 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
Flotsam and jetsam, 12 février 2008

Auteur : richard_sleboe de Allemagne

"Wonderful Town" is like an Alex Garland novel minus the mystery. Set in Southern Thailand, it takes us to the site of the 2004 tsunami. Bangkok-based writer-director Aditya Assarat says he has created the lead character Ton, an architect visiting a small coastal town devastated by the wave, in his own image. Ton falls in love with Na, a young woman working as a chambermaid at his hotel. Before long, he learns the hard way that her family doesn't like the idea of outsiders romancing local girls. Who would have guessed? The storytelling is painfully slow and predictable, and the mood is subdued throughout. One small thing I enjoyed was how Na uses essential oil as a universal remedy, a quirk not unlike Gus Portokalos' obsession with Windex in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding". But even this magic potion can't cure her blues. The fact that local thugs run around wearing printed shirts spelling out "Grand Feeling" or "Importance" only adds to the general sense of loss and despair. You will enjoy "Wonderful Town" if you like slow-paced, melancholic movies. If you're looking for action, stay away.

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8 utilisateurs sur 13 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
A failure to communicate, 9 avril 2008

Auteur : wondercritic de Turquie

It probably does not give too much away to point out that the title is facetious. The "town" depicted in the film consists of a small seaside municipality in Thailand, presumably two or three years after the tsunami of 2004. The town is, for all intents and purposes, dead, but a young architect from Bangkok arrives to supervise construction of a new resort hotel. Evidently, investment in local tourism is just re-starting, but the place is still essentially a ghost town with only one functioning "rest-stop" type hotel inland. The architect starts to flirt with the young woman who works in this hotel, and whose family owns and runs it. A romance begins against the bleak backdrop, a world in which everyone left after the disaster of 2004 knows everyone else. Before long the out-of-towner architect has some unpleasant encounters with a gang of teenage petty hoodlums who ride around the area on little whining motorcycles. The building sense of unease is successfully conveyed, but the reason the film fails on several levels is that it relies too much on the audience's ability to perceive the "telepathy" between the characters, telepathy consistent with Oriental societies. It will not be immediately clear to many why the film ends the way it does, for example, or what the characters actually mean by their gazes and actions. There is a lot of "eye language", the meaning of which will only become clear to the viewer after walking out of the cinema and pondering the movie for a while. This dissipates the immediate effectiveness of the film and its screenplay, since movies — unlike books — cannot communicate thoughts easily. The performances are competent but not otherwise remarkable. Perhaps the film's only unqualified success is that the main character of the film, throughout, is undoubtedly the town itself.

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3 utilisateurs sur 4 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
In the land of the tsuname, love and menace, 3 mai 2008

Auteur : Chris Knipp de Berkeley, California

*** Ce commentaire peut contenir des spoilers ***

Fledgling Thai director Aditya Assarat begins the stunning 'Wonderful Town' with flat, screen-filling images of gentle waves that introduce the locale of southern Thailand hit hard by the 2004 tsunami. This opening heralds the film's strong visual sense as well as a prevailing serenity that is not without edges of menace as time goes on. Convincing performances and lovely visuals serve a subtle, haunting screenplay and the whole shows a strong narrative sense that pays off with the cumulative power of the finale.

This is the story of a young man and woman who come together in a kind of limbo. Their personal stories emerge in bits and pieces as a romance develops between Ton and Na. Ton (Supphasit Kansen) is an architect who comes from Bangkok and stays at a very ordinary hotel where he meets Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn), who seems a clerk and maid, but emerges as the sole member of the owner family who is present to run the place. Ton's work is on a project nearby where luxury resort buildings are under construction near unrestored, perhaps haunted relics of the storm damage. He's volunteered to be here to please the client and in effect just spend a peaceful two months away from the noise of the capital doing not very much. The setting itself, the tsunami town of Takua Pa, is the inspiration for the film.

Ton is interested in Na right away, as he openly reveals when he goes out on a rooftop to help her fold up laundry. He's not so much flirtatious as open and relaxed in a way that shows he wants to be with her. Na is reserved but receptive. A scene where she listens to him singing in the shower shows she's interested too. They go on a little "date," they kiss, they walk together here and there.

There aren't many people around: an older man and woman who work at the hotel; then after a while Wit (Dul Yaambunying) appears, a dicey individual who might be an estranged husband (he's moved out; she asks him to come back), but turns out to be Na's brother, a self-declared reprobate who won't come to help run the hotel.

The romance between Ton and Na is marked by beauty and delicacy. The whole locale seems a place of openness and quiet, despite the noise of the construction site, which Ton has to drive back and forth to. Ton's personal ease is underlined by his tendency to break into little songs. He turns out to have had an earlier life as a musician and his father so disapproved that for five years they've been out of touch.

There's disapproval closer at hand. Four boys on loud motorcycles who circle around and around are the first powerful sign of threat; they're like Cocteau's avenging angels or the hot-rodders in Manuel Pradal's 'Marie baie des anges.' Now Na's warning to Ton that this is a small place and they need to be circumspect makes sense. From then on every scene effortlessly communicates its hints of hostility, perhaps serious danger.

Assarat makes it all seem so simple. The earlier scenes are flat and undeclarative, with the camera often still. The Director of Photography Umpornpol Yugala provides lovely, soft colors and is equally effective in eye-filling closeups of Na's bare skin as with landscapes with figures in the distance. The tight-lipped dialogue keeps the viewer attentive. Zai Kuning and Koichi Shimizu provide delicate guitar backgrounds that hint at uncertainty as well as fill in a sense of calm. Every moment counts. The sense is of a place that's as much traumatized as it is recovering.

Ton's and Na's back stories are a little mysterious. It's not certain what Ton is planning to do at the end.

Aditya Assarat has produced a remarkable film that promises much for the future. It received awards at Las Palmas and Rotterdam and opens in Paris May 7,2008.

Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2008.

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