The Iron Ladies (2000, Thailand)

The Iron Ladies tells the based-on-true story of a Thai male volleyball team that competed in the national championships in 1996.

The story starts out with a local volleyball team, when Mon gets thrown out of the team because he is gay and the coach is prejudiced. However there is a change of coach, and Bee, a lesbian woman, takes over. Bee is determined to make some changes, but this results in most of the players leaving anyway. Meanwhile Jung, a rather exuberant transsexual and her friend Mon, are toying with the idea of taking up the sport, and the upshot is a team consisting of them and their friends.

Everything goes well, and eventually they get to the national championship in Bangkok. This stage in a film about a sporting competition is always quite difficult, because the script has to avoid an obvious and predictable outcome, and this is handled quite well here. The team do exceptionally well in the first round, but they go wild on the town that evening, and the excellent team captain resigns over the team's squabbling. They play on, but wait! The final is on national television live, and Wit, one of the team members, hasn't come out to his parents.

This is a well put together film which avoids many of the pitfalls of its genre; it reminds me strongly of Priscilla. It did exceptionally well at the box office in Thailand, and I recommend it.

Some of the cast are described as drag queens in media comment. Without getting into the politics of labels, I would say that categorising the characters in Western terms is quite difficult; Jung is quite feminine, but exhibits a camp and overblown manner and voice. The others are more ambiguous, including the gay men who have no transgender dimension. They all seem content with the team title (Iron Ladies) and so far as I could make out, they all use Sawadee Kha as the "hello" greeting. [In the Thai language, men say Sawadee Khrap].

The Thai title of the film is Sa Tree Lex.

HF March 2002

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