Tears of the Black Tiger draws its story material from the kind of films made in the fifties by pioneer Thai director Rattana Pestonji, whose work Sasanatieng both parodies and pays tribute to. It tells the story of Rumpoey, a wealthy Bangkok girl evacuated to the country during the Pacific War, and a poor country boy called Dum. We first see them when they are still children, and a bond is established between them when Dum saves Rumpoey’s life. But their parents make further contact all but impossible.

Nine years later, however, they meet as students in Bangkok, and the bond develops into a romance. Knowing that her father will oppose marriage, Rumpoey promises to meet Dum at the sala (a traditional Thai shelter) by the river which they visited as children - a building which comes with its own legend of a poor woodcutter who loved a rich girl.

the ‘retro’ poster for Black Tiger

But when Dum returns to his village, he finds his father dying after an attack by a local bandit who wants to be village chieftain. Determined to avenge his father, Dum joins the gang headed by the ruthless Fai and his jealous second-in-command, Mahesuan, whose life Dum saves. Rising quickly within the gang’s ranks, the young man soon comes to be known as ‘Seua Dum’, or Black Tiger.

And so the events escalate, becoming more and more complicated, as Dum fails to meet Rumpoey at the sala, and the latter reluctantly agrees to marry Captain Kumjorn, the police officer summoned by her father, now the local governor, to rid the area of Fai and his bandits. But one last encounter will ensure Rumpoey and Black Tiger a place of their own in legend…

“I watched as many old movies as I could,” Sasanatieng told Rayns in a recent interview. “Most people nowadays look down on old Thai movies, but I was knocked out by what I found. I thought it should be possible to combine retro elements - faithful to the old styles of movie-making - with more modern pacing and film language.”

Iron Ladies

Painting buildings and sets in the bright, clashing colours of Thailand, Sasanatieng also heightened the colours in the film itself by transferring what he had shot onto Betacam tape and enhancing it digitally. “Almost every shot in the film was ‘treated’ in some way,” he says, “either by tweaking the colour grading or by repainting the colours themselves. And, when it was finished, we transferred the film back onto 35mm film for release.”

With Tears selected for Cannes, meanwhile, producer Nonzee Nimibutr recently wrapped his third film as a director, a lavish tale of sex, guilt and retribution called Jan Dara. Based on one of the most controversial Thai novels of the 20th century, it tells the story of a young man who returns to wreak vengeance on the father who mistreated and banished him. But he ends up sexually torn between the three women who live in his father’s house: his sophisticated, Westernised stepmother; his manipulative stepsister, whom he is supposed to marry; and the virginal local girl he fell in love with as a schoolboy.

Christy Chung in Nonzee Nimibutr’s Jan Dara.

Symptomatic of the changes sweeping through South-East Asian cinema, Jan Dara is a co-production with Hong Kong’s Applause Pictures, the company launched last year by Peter Ho-Sun Chan, who directed DreamWorks’ The Love Letter a couple of years back. Another of his films, Comrades: Almost a Love Story, was a major critical success in Hong Kong in 1997 and even made it on to Time Magazine’s Ten Best Movies list.

With Jan Dara, Chan is evidently hoping to bring that blend of local story and international elements decisively to Thailand, replicating the approach that established many of South-East Asia’s other film-makers as international talents. And Sasanatieng for one recognises the need. “We have not made many innovative films for the festival circuit yet,” he says. “We’ve only just started.”

Tears of the Black Tiger and, in its wake, Jan Dara should take the Thai New Wave quite a long way in that direction.