Nontawat Numbenchapol | ดอยบอย (Doi Boy) / 2023

dangers of love

by Douglas Messserli

 

Homsap Chanchana, Prasongsom Koonsombat, Prakit Laemluang, Nakorn Phopairoj, and Nontawat Numbenchapol (screenplay), Nontawat Numbenchapol (director) ดอยบอย (Doi Boy) / 2023

 

Documentary filmmaker Nontawat Numberchapol worked for 5 years on his 2023 film Doi Boy, now distributed by Netflix. Surely one of the reasons it took so long to make were the varying layers of significance that his film reveals.

  On one level it is yet another glimpse into the sex worker network in Thailand. The central figure in this film, Sorn (Awat Ratanapintha), is a citizen originally of Myanmar, who has gone AWOL from his enforced military service. Originally a monk, the Myanmar government entered their shrine, conscripting all to join in the government’s long-standing war with the ethnic Shan tribe in eastern Myanmar. Without a steady job or passport to obtain one, Sorn finds it easiest to make money and keep below the police radar by working as a dancer and masseur in the Doi Boy Club in Chiang Mai.

     One of his major customers, strangely enough is Ji (Arak Amornsupasiri), who works as a police officer. Although both men are in sexual relationships with women, Ji’s wife being pregnant, their massage sessions are also highly sexual with, at each session, them determining who wants to be the top and who the bottom. Indeed, Sorn seems quite popular at the club but still does not make enough to survive, relying on his girlfriend, also a sex worker, to pay the electricity, etc. He and his friend, however, spend some of the rent money on attempting to get passports which they are certain will allow them better paying jobs.

 

     Despite the sexual focus of the first part of this film, however, Doi Boy quickly morphs into a dark political adventure tale as the clubs are closed down during the Covid pandemic and Ji enlists his unwilling sexual partner to help him enter Myanmar in order to fulfill an assignment of tracking down a young man, Wuth, a political activist who with his gay lover Bhoom has long been speaking out about both their own government and the Thai police force who work together to silence activists such as themselves.

      Ji promises Sorn a passport and money if he will help get him across the border and help him find and silence Wuth.

     Bhoom, Wuth’s lover, has already been killed by Ji by the time Sorn becomes unwillingly involved. But Ji, tired of being forced into such dirty deeds this time wants to help the young Wuth, by forcing him to disappear into a Buddhist shrine instead of killing him as well.

      But when are all arrested by a former monk now working for the military, their voyage becomes, as one my imagine, a kind of journey into hell where no one can be trusted, friend or enemy, and each of them are forced to align themselves in variously different configurations of friendship just in order to survive. At one point Ji must disavow any connection with Sorn and Wuth, at another moment Sorn and Wuth attempt escape Ji’s control over them, and at year other moments Sorn must join up with Ji in order to help the always suspicious and wary Wuth.

     As Hugo Hamon writes in Asian Movie Pulse:

 

“The movie encompasses a fluidity in everything. Ultimately, identities, nationalities, states, boundaries, relationships, values, friendships appear as arbitrary constructions, and in the midst of this jungle without any absolutes, anyone can be anything and everyone could represent a danger. The transition between scenes is executed with delicate grace, seamlessly navigating even the harshest realities.

    Doi Boy features numerous plot twists, with many scenes allowing the complexities of each character to unfold and reshape our emotional investment in them. Our empathy varies greatly throughout the viewing. Initially, we adopt the perspective of the cop and develop empathy for him. However, as he proves to be violent and as the film takes on a thriller tone, we become much closer to Sorn and activist Wuth, creating an especially intense contrast.”

     By film’s end each of the three central characters have gone their own direction. Wuth ends up safe, in nothing else, as a monk with nowhere else to go. Ji returns home to his pregnant wife only to disappear again, probably a victim of his own police force for not having properly disposed of Wuth.

     Sorn’s girlfriend, not knowing where he has disappeared to and even if he is still alive, takes of the offer of a wealthy customer and escapes with him to a promised life of well-being.

      The last we see of Sorn, now with passport in hand, is as he seems to be trudging through the jungle in hope of escaping once more into Thailand. We realize, however, that he will perhaps be no better off this time. And he has already lost the two beings who most lived him. Whether or not he may return to sex work, his future is bleak. And he now surely realizes in this world in which everything is constantly changing that he can no longer trust anyone. As director Nontawat Numbenchapol makes clear, and as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul also hinted in his Blissfully Yours (2002), life for Myanmar immigrants in Thailand is dire.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).