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Real life kick boxer Nong Toom, Director
Ekachai Uekrongtham and star Asanee Suwan
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Fortunately
life chooses not to imitate fiction on a cold night on Polk Street as I
seek out the small Asian restaurant where Nong Toom is holding court.
In the film of her life a surly, jaded Australian journalist is beaten
near senseless as he follows the fleet footed (even in high heels) Nong
Toom through Bangkok's raucous nightclub district. Once a world class
Thai kickboxer (knocking out 18 of 22 male opponents in the 118 pound
weight class) Nong Toom is now a popular soap opera actress, former
beauty queen, and no doubt Thailand's most celebrated transsexual.
The
brilliant new film, Beautiful Boxer, is drawn from the life
story of an effeminate country bumpkin who uses his skills as champion
Thai kickboxer to change himself into herself. Told in a long
flashback, Nong Toom's tale begins with a frightened kid who is kicked
out a Buddhist monastery for displaying a penchant for lip gloss.
Desperate to lift his family out of a grinding rural poverty and
liberate the girl within, Nong Toom stumbles upon his fistic prowess
accidentally while witnessing his brother fail a kickboxing tryout.
The
real life Nong Toom is quite the lady in public. Perhaps the only thing
that would raise a stir in these parts is the dead animal skin
delicately covering her shoulders, offset by two lovely strings of
costume pearls and a conservative cut dress displaying very little
cleavage. Speaking through an interpreter (Beautiful Boxer's
director Ekachai Uekrongtham) Nong Toom explains that as a very young
boy, she always felt attracted to things that little girls liked to
play with. Nong Toom is herself a bit puzzled as to how this ancient
Thai martial arts discipline (borrowed in equal measure from Japanese
karate, Korean tae kwon do and Western boxing) would prove her ticket
out of rural poverty. In the translator's words, "She says perhaps she
got better and better because a lot of people looked down upon her, so
she tried harder to outfight her male peers."
Former
kickboxer and first time actor Asanee Suwan is Beautiful Boxer's
Nong Toom, suspending our disbelief about a young man, demurely shy and
too modest to be naked with his fellow boxers, who nevertheless
devastates opponents with an acrobatic flurry of kicks and uppercuts.
Through the same translator, Suwan, who is kickstarting with his
astonishing performance a career as a big screen martial arts actor,
confesses why he opted for the part of Nong Toom -- second in
difficulty only to Gael Garcia Bernal's nimble gender blending in Bad
Education. "It (was) very challenging because Nong Toom is still alive
and it's really about making people believe that he's a character with
a woman's heart."
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Suwan
explains that the film's fights were as much as possible like the real
thing. "He says it was exciting to do the kickboxing because the film
incorporated a number of ancient moves that are hardly (ever) performed
that he actually had to learn." The director/translator adds gravely,
"Those moves are very lethal. You really have to do them in a split
second, or you (will) either kill the other person or the other person
can hit you back and you're dead." Ironically one of the first scenes
was so real that an opponent was literally knocked out by a kick to the
neck thrown by Suwan as Nong Toom. The downed fighter took a few
minutes to regain his senses leaving the cast and crew with a few
anxious moments.
Director
Ekachai Uekrongtham underplays the operatic excesses inherent in the
material to deliver a convincing portrait of a man driven to pursue his
sex change against all odds, combined with the aesthetic beauty and
grace of this most brutal of sports. Nong Toom is torn between avoiding
being viewed as a freak -- his handlers promote him as a transvestite
"Raging Pussy" -- while initiating the female hormone treatments that
will weaken him as a fighter. A haunting scene (filmed in surreal style
that is a mix between Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull and a boxing film
by Kurosawa) unfolds as a gorgeously photographed slow motion dance
between Nong Toom and a handsome but treacherous opponent he's had a
crush on.
"Nong
Toom says that the film reminds her of when she fought with a guy she
had some feelings for. She held back, but that person never did,
hitting her as hard as he could. She felt betrayed. It's like, 'I gave
you some heart, but you didn't repay.'"
Actor
Suwan says it was hard to stage a fight where the character begins by
going easy on the other fighter and winds up fighting as hard as she
can to knock out her opponent, in a driving rain storm, in a ring
emptied of spectators. "Suwan says it took from 6 o'clock in the
evening to 6 o'clock the next morning to shoot -- a lot of water and it
(was) cold. - it (was) doubly difficult because he had a lot of
feelings, but he couldn't show them (or) let his kickboxing teacher
know he was going to rig the fight."
Suwan,
who in real life is conventionally butch and slightly shorter than his
now good friend, Nong Toom, says Beautiful Boxer made him a lot
less uptight. "Before this film he didn't have gay or transsexual
friends, but he now feels it's important not to judge people by their
appearances, but to try and look into their hearts."
Nong
Toom says her transformation has relaxed her fears about pursuing hunky
guys but some of the old inhibitions die hard. Explaining that the
mostly Buddhist Thais actually tolerate gender dissonance because they
feel that gays, transvestites and transsexuals are suffering from bad
karma from a past life, Noog Toom says that before her sex change "it
was inappropriate for someone like her to be liking a man because it's
not proper for two men to be doing something like that. She says she
still finds herself unable to walk up to a guy and say, 'Hey, I like
you,' or express herself openly. She prefers that the man make the
first move."
