IF this sounds like an article for Halloween, be consoled: it’s not. Besides, there is really nothing horrifying in manta rays. We marvel at the sight of these creatures, although the film that carries that title has nothing to do with marine life and its abundance.
What Manta Ray has an abundance of is an air of mystery rarely seen unintellectualized in any film. Silence pervades this Thai film in a manner that doesn’t call to the poetry of those pauses and gaps.
The story’s simple: A fisherman rescues a man from the swamp near the sea and brings him to his shack. The fisherman is naturally selfless as he nurtures back the wounded man to health. The man doesn’t have a name, which prompts the fisherman to give him the name of a popular Thai singer, Thongchai. It’s the conceit and strategy of this film that Thongchai would turn out to be mute, a
condition that would not allow us to get to know more about him. As the story unfolds and untangles, however, we get this sense that we will have more chances to get to know more about Thongchai than the fisherman. The filmic condition sets this stage at that point when the mute guy has a name while the fisherman will not have one.
An exciting ploy happens also when, as the fisherman begins to ask Thongchai even after the discovery that the man indeed is mute, we start to listen to the fisherman talking more about himself. It seems the presence of a man who can’t talk and understand many things encourages the fisherman to tell the little world around them about himself.
A strange bond forms between the two men.
The fisherman had a wife before who left him for another man. He tells Thongchai how the other man, a military, came to fetch his wife while he hid in his room. Thongchai looks intently at the fisherman. Without the capacity to talk, he has no ability to tell the fisherman anything, much less to judge him. The mute man assures us as he assures the fisherman in stillness.
Everyday, Thongchai waits for the fisherman to come home from the sea. They are almost like lovers. It’s not only the fisherman that shows the power of tenderness to the other man; Thongchai also returns that caring. Do we call that love? The film is darkly timid about any of that possibility. Even when the two are seen sleeping beside each other, we can only guess where this brotherhood, this togetherness and warmth will lead to.
One day, the fisherman disappears and Thongchai in his quiet way is seen distraught as he waits each day, hoping that his friend will be back once more. The fisherman doesn’t come home. Another person does come home: it is Saijai, the wife of the fisherman. Saijai has no place to go.
The former wife of the fisherman and Thongchai live together in that home. Set in the southern part of Thailand, close to the boundaries that the country maintains with other territories, Manta Ray is a political film that adeptly hides its politics with the bounty of its poetry.
Unspoken greatly is the crisis of the Rohingya Muslims, save for their mention at the dedicatory space at the beginning of the film.
What becomes critical in the narrative is the loss—not even the search—of identities. From the perspective of the stranger, a foreigner (a Thai fisherman) gives him a name. That name comes
with the song of the real Thongchai “Bird”
McIntyre. The fisherman sings this as the naming takes place, this song about “the beach, the sea, the wind and the two of us.”
Indeed, there’s “the two of us” located in the film. The fisherman brings home multicolored lights and wraps the line around the ceiling of the small hut.
He plugs it and a reflection of shimmering rainbows fills the abode, lighting up the dreariness framing them. Then the fisherman and Thongchai start to dance close to each other without touching, their eyes closed. We wait for that embrace, for lust and physicality to take over the loneliness of these two men but they never come. We get no relief and no romance in this sad space.
Those lights will come back again, to haunt perhaps and to hunt men without names. In the forest near the swamp, the fisherman brings Thongchai to show the latter what he searches for in the shadow. Gems of different colors and worth are in that marshy and tepid area. Legendary, in fact, are the gems of Burma, what is now Myanmar. Legendary is the corruption that comes with the search for those stones. The film doesn’t talk about these political facts. What the film does is to make us feel about how territories can be contested and how swamps can be deathly glorious amid the resources and treasures they hide.
In the swamp, a man with gun is ready to shoot and kill. In that swamp run the refugees who have nowhere to go. The gems they violate are the reasons they are killed.
Back in their home, the two men shine on each other the same lights that the gems in the swamp radiate. Isolation and namelessness happen at home and out there where people are killed and gems are discovered.
As Saijai, Rasmee Wayrana has a brief appearance as the wife who runs away. But from the moment her face is shown up-close, with one eye smaller than the other, we know we have a presence. She is like an interlocutor to the answers proposed quietly by the two men in her life.
I always say this: Woe to us that we are never familiar with the Asian actors around us. This film, Manta Ray, vets that lament once more. As Thongchai, Aphisit Hama has a very arresting muteness: it is never forced or dramatized. Being a man with strong features, this inability to create speech makes his person compelling in poignancy.
For those who have watched the film (I tried to watch this in Busan but I was luckier in the recently concluded QC International Film Festival), they will vouch for the character and grit of this actor named Wanlop Rungkamjad. His hair is dyed blonde. We ignore that until the wife comes back and, after showing her love for Thongchai, dyes the hair of the mute man—her other man—blond. We cannot ignore still this fisherman who is lonely as he sits by the beach and whistles to call the manta rays. He throws the gems he collects into the waves because he believes the manta rays are attracted to their color. We believe his stories as we believe how the days can turn his sadness into sensualities, and the elegy of this film into a violent protest.
Manta Ray is the first feature film from Phuttiphong Aroonpheng but it already won for him the Orizzonti (Horizon) Prize from the 2018 Venice Film Festival. It is the same award won by Lav Diaz for Melancholia in 2008 and Pepe Diokno for Engkwentro in 2009.
The film is a Thailand-France-China coproduction venture. This is another lesson learned in Busan: Asian countries are actively engaging in coproduction ventures with European film productions.