Doi Boy (2023) And Dark Nights of The Souls
Dark is the night for Sorn when he is seized from the temple to become a soldier, preparing to fight with the Myanmar army, to bleed and to die for an idea he does not believe in. To be something one does not wish to be is a sin. To kill oneself in a way, to suppress all desire, to end one’s life, one’s potential, the life one wishes to live, and the things one believes in. Such is the case of Sorn (Ud Awat) in Doi Boy (Nontawat Numbenchapol, 2023), a film that briefly became a sensation on Netflix and a topic of conversation among certain affluent Bangkokians in Bangkok, Thailand.
Dark was the night when I was too arrogant to start small in a place I didn’t believe in, cutting myself off from loved ones and friends. Seeing some of my friends pivot to their new realities, building their careers, I started to build up my career and planned to climb the corporate ladder as well. Dark is the money. The 20,000 baht that soon would have to be paid for his passport. Similarly to those Thai immigrants who pay a price for their visas and permanent residents in the countries of their choices and dreams. A price for freedom, for the agency to choose. Dark is the night when Sorn discussed with his friend before leaving. His friend chooses to stay and to continue a life as a soldier, fighting for what he has little or no interest in, becoming someone he doesn’t know, all because he doesn’t want to flee to a land he doesn’t know yet. “What to eat? Where to sleep? I won’t go with you.”
Bright is the hope in Sorn’s heart when he decides to turn his back on his homeland and head towards a new land, a life that he also has no idea how it would be — a food, a place, a job, an occupation, and all the things that are unknown and one doesn’t want to know. It would have been better for me too when I was in London, or more recently in Milan, to move with me certain areas such as Charoenkrung, where food, places, and people I knew were with me while I could navigate a new life, a life that has something to respond to what I could dream about.
Bright is the hope, and dark is the hopelessness. One morning, after working as a boy prostitute, trading his liberty. If you would like to borrow from Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, that body somehow is our freedom. “Would you do top or bottom tonight?” Sorn asks Ji, a police officer who escapes his formal life to his deep reality as a gay person in the place where Sorn works. And so after the night, in the morning, Sorn goes to pay for his passport, a document that will give him the same agency when he leaves his homeland. Now he wants the same thing in Thailand that will allow him to fulfill his dream of flying over the skies to the beach, to see the world.
I remember one of the brightest dawns of my soul. I was sitting in the yard outside the granary house, which was home to Central Saint Martins art college. It was April 2018, and daisies were blooming all over the green grass. I sat there like countless other Londoners, turned my face towards the sun, and took a selfie. I had struggled every inch of the way to be there. I was always shy about my gummy smile, yet I couldn’t help but smile widely, showing my gums, my teeth, and my extraordinary hype mood. A friend commented on my post, saying how strongly happiness was visible in the photograph and that he wished he could smile as genuinely and happily as I did, at least once in his life.
Looking back, I learned that it was the first period in my life where I had the agency to live my own life. Living in an old flat share in Camden Town, I was so poor that I only bought things from Lidl. Yet, the freedom I had was incomparable. Little successes, such as gaining a place in a foundation acting course at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School or watching Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke at Almeida Theatre, made me feel happy like nothing else could. Nothing indeed. Had I ventured down that path, something might have worked out. But I wasn’t ready for it.
“Why would you be here?” “Why would you want to work in this career?” “You have spent some time in theatre, haven’t you?” “Why would you change?” “Is it not good to be different, to feel different?” “To be different is a good thing, isn’t it?” I was asked these questions when I wanted to change from being an artist to entering the corporate world in a foreign territory. Sorn would also feel that he is different, that he wasn’t accepted, that he would have to do certain things just to be able to be there, to stand there, to live there. Well, it might just be an illusion. Sorn could stay there forever without the passport. But to feel at home, mentally and physically, can be important. I wanted to have it too. I guess that’s why I decided I wanted to have a business degree. Another one just to be able to say I am qualified for this. It’s a tool for oppression; it’s something that, if I don’t have it, my boss can always say I am just a creative type and have no right to work on the management side of things. Similarly, Sorn would be asked to show his passport by the authorities, and if he doesn’t have it, he would be fined to go about his life. Just to be himself, at that time, and live the life he wishes to live. Why are there so many conditions to be fulfilled?
But someone who says, “Why would you do something else that is not you?” would be right too. Their essentialist idea would sit perfectly well with Joan Didion’s final line in her famous essay “Self-Respect”: “Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” Why would one change for something else when one is oneself? Sorn still remains himself as he decides to flee his homeland. Yes, the work would take away some bit of his sexuality. Yet, it doesn’t take away his freedom. He can still choose what to do with his life and what ideas he would like to believe in. And as he goes back to his homeland, dips himself naked into the pond. He can still discover himself there and know that he still needs a home, different from Ji or Wut.
Dark is Ji’s life. He spends most of his time hiding his identity — a police officer, the law, the perceived right side of society.(But not in the reality of perception.) There is something psychological here. Sex is one of the deepest desires, and sexual orientation, getting naked in front of one another physically and emotionally, can make Sorn a sort of rescuing part of Ji’s life. Ji trusts Sorn, probably more than most people in his life. The fact that he needs to hunt down Wut (a gay activist who can only find peace by continuing to disclose matters of human trafficking like his murdered boyfriend did) is the core knot of Ji’s character. Probably because his wife is pregnant with his own baby, he wants to wash his hands clean, at least during this time. Now, Ji is facing freedom, the one defined by Jean-Paul Sartre: “You are your choices” and “Freedom is what you do with what is done to you.” He chooses to have freedom this time by choosing not to kill Wut but to force his disappearance, bringing Wut to hide in a rural temple on the Myanmar side instead.
I remember when I heard about my loved one getting Alzheimer’s. My decision to change paths came about, to stop an unstable artistic path and to start a traditional career to seek a stable source of income. Just in case my loved one completely forgets me, her soul would still make peace with the fact that I am saved. It wasn’t reasonable. Rather, it was a bit whimsical and not logical. But that, I guess, is the way humans seek solace when facing important changes. They want a sense of control. I wanted a sense of control in the face of losing my most beloved figure to dementia. And I wasn’t ready for it.
Dark was the memory. One morning at a film school in London, I was sitting in a lecture, completely out of my depth. One reason was that the lecture was so theoretical that it wasn’t practical. And something practical was very important to me at the time when I learned that I had lost my singing teacher, the most important art mentor in my life, the one who taught me the incomparable technique to pay attention to my singing, my art, my practice. What if I lost others? How could I remain sane? How could I still call my name and remember who I was and what I had been?
Such is the case for Wut (Aelm Thavornsiri, whose performance I completely disagree with for the most part). Wut is someone who is completely out of his depth and needs to do something repeatedly, insanely, madly, deeply to remind himself who he was. The absence of his boyfriend is the destruction of his existence, the meaning which he had woven through the relationship and held dear throughout the years. Now, everything has disappeared completely. The character, although volatile and sensitive, summons so much courage to continue doing what he is doing to remain sane — very active, not passive, as Aelm’s delivery suggests. Every line is anger, is courage, not sadness or lamentation.
These three characters stumble upon each other’s knots. Yet, the plot is somewhat too conservative for me. Compared to Triangle of Sadness, which has something similar, take, for instance, the relationship revolving around each character’s power. Freedom and agency — having a say in one’s own life and others. Moving from the town to the jungle, from one setting to another, the status actually changes, and the situation can become less character-driven and give more power to the plot, utilizing it to emphasize the film’s theme. Realizing one’s freedom or learning more about what one could become relies so much on places and the change of places.
Like one of my favorite writers, Susan Sontag, writes, “I took a trip to see beautiful things, change of scenery, change of heart.” Sorn has traveled to Chiang Rai to change his life. And in the dark night of his soul, when he sat in the car with Wut and Ji, asking them, but more like asking himself, “What are his choices?” “Can he really choose?” The audience on the other side of the screen would need to whisper to themselves their own answers. Because no one really knows. And there wouldn’t be the only right answer. It wouldn’t be an answer, in fact, just a change of heart, a change of questions longing to be explored in a different scenery.
But the film can step further into that void. It is as if the film has its own preset answer to the central dramatic question it posed. Black and white, when Ji is finally killed. Wut seeks refuge in religion. And Sorn gains his passport eventually and goes back to his “girl.” Not much changes internally for these characters. Did they learn something? The film is pretty “camp,” as Susan Sontag once put it about camp aesthetics: “The storytelling emphasizing much more on the external aesthetics it wants to introduce with little to no development.” We see Ud’s and Aelm’s bodies in the pond in a Merchant & Ivory fashion. Throughout the film, the dark footages, somewhat cool and beautiful simulteneously are presented for the most part. Yet, we don’t know how much these characters learn about their freedom, and neither do we.
I remember moving to Milan. Taking decision to move forward for whatever it might be waiting for me. I didn’t care much. I was just wondering if Europe and Business School is for me. Perhaps 10 years ago when I chose to study theatre and forge my artist’s path was a wrong choice spawned from self-ignorance,
I went to Milan and realized that I was still so mentally engaged with life in Bangkok that the day I left, I cried. Unlike Sorn, who didn’t regret leaving his home, nothing made him want to stay. There was a force that drove him forward, and there was also a force that drove me. All this depends on the degree of freedom and how much one possesses the “Livingness.”
For me, after returning from London to Bangkok in 2020, I gained the agency to choose and the confidence to navigate the uncertainty of my life. For instance, I did many different things in those three years, like going to the beach in Phuket and Samui. It was a life that I felt I had truly lived. I didn’t like the food or the close-mindedness in Italy. My weight decreased by at least five kilograms. Unlike Britain or France, Italy is not very diverse. It’s all about Prada, Armani, and La Dolce Vita. But I want a life of Jean-Paul Sartre and George Orwell.
I couldn’t accept life in business school either. Frameworks made education feel like a factory. We went to lectures, did group projects, and sat through exams. We were just products of this production process. In liberal arts, education is much more than that. The first thing one should be trained to do is not to obey but to challenge, to think outside one’s depth for oneself, and to be able to criticize the world to engage in it better as a human being.
Then, I realized that my choice was driven by fear — fear of freedom’s dizziness. So I took the path like most people to seek security. Like Ji, I soon realized it’s not so much security. A large part of it is to obey, or face detrimental consequences. Business entities want us to obey their CEOs, to give up our time and energy completely to grow their profits. A woke voice on LinkedIn about sustainability is but a way to distinguish oneself, to moralize one’s dark ambitions, to align closely with industry trends, buying for you for them (for the company’s maximized profits).
From this experience, I learned that these characters might have learned at some point that killing is a sin. Killing others or, as we do every day, killing ourselves, our essence, our own distinctive voices that help figuring out our own authentic way to live.
