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Kick & makeup
Thai producer Ekachai Uekrongtham has made this film, a biopic of the effeminate Muay Thai fighter Parinya "Nong Toom" Charoenphol.
Movies featuring homosexual characters are not new in Siamese cinema, but what Ekachai, a seasoned play director, set out to accomplish was a theatrical challenge of a baffling degree _ a challenge posed on himself, on his lead actor, and on the image of the person on whom the story is based. "Nong Toom is not a man who thinks of himself as a katoy," Ekachai says, riding on his poetic license. "He is a man who thinks of himself as a woman. That's a fundamental difference."
Transsexuals occupy an explicit position in Thai pop culture as arm-flapping clowns: their aberration becomes viewer-friendly when it's made simply into a tomfoolery. Even though most films wear a humanist face by recognising that it's OK to be gay in Thai society, hardly any picture portrays gay stories as a cultural reflection, and even less as a serious human story. Hit flick Satree Lex, (Iron Ladies) based on a true account of gay volleyball players, though sincere in its portrayal, still capitalises on the image of homosexuals as a surefire comic relief.
When Nong Toom's story broke out in 1999, the media fervour acquired a tone of amused objectivity. Red-lipped Parinya Charoenphol, a young man from the North, wore heavy makeup and lipstick while thrashing his opponents like a hungry tiger with deadly Muay Thai moves in the packed Lumpini stadium. A dramatic detail blew up the story to an international sensation: Nong Toom fought because he had to take care of his mother, and especially since he wanted to save money for a sex change operation, which he underwent in 2001.
A movie, not a documentary: Ekachai spent six months polishing the script, trying to capture the essence of Nong Toom's peregrination from a young boy in a poverty-stricken family, to the early realisation that she's a woman in a wrong body, her apprenticeship in a testosterone-choked boxing camp, to her adrenaline-pumping matches in Bangkok and Tokyo. "Yet I had to move around some details, and construct scenes and characters that could tell the story more aptly," says the director. "I don't want to just show what Nong Toom does, but what she feels, because that's what people haven't really known."
Casting a man who'd play Nong Toom was a mini battle of its own, too. Ekachai's scouting squad virtually scoured the whole country for a potential replica, preferably a boxer who could be coached to act rather than an actor who could be trained to box. After many months they found Assanee Suwan, a gentle-faced (straight) professional Muay Thai fighter, and Ekachai subjected him to a series of "weird theatre routines", from softening his personality, enrolling him in a traditional likay course as well as ballet, and most essentially, teaching him to walk and live and eat and think, not like Nong Toom, but like a woman.
"I didn't tell him to imitate Nong Toom, but to create a character," the director says. "It'd be annoying if the viewers see this actor trying to act like Nong Toom, to convince us that he is her. Assanee is a boxer, and boxers are usually trained not to show their emotions. It was difficult to fix that.
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