Ray Pride

Only recently pulled free of the notorious early 2000s Miramax Shelf of Invisibility, Wisit Sasanatieng's "Tears of the Black Tiger" (Fah Talai Jone, 2000) is a sui generis mashup, a "Raiders of the Lost Archive," a strange, fevered, delirious, 1950s-styled Thai Western-romance melodrama and a singularity of the highest order. Giddy beyond belief, it embodies an era of Thai genre movies, with florid colors and visual devices that out-spaghetti spaghetti Westerns, faded to the turquoise-gold-pink shades of 1940s roto newspaper supplements. The film's major influence could very well be made up: the films of Thai independent filmmaker Rattana Pestonji, who as the press notes describe, is "unknown outside of Thailand [and] largely forgotten at home, where there is no tradition of repertory or archival screenings of vintage films." Apocryphal or not, there is much wry, wild and weird in "Tears," and its invisibility to northern American audiences for half a decade only adds to its allure. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have said their upcoming "Grindhouse" with play with making the movie look like a battered relic; this gentle yet persistent hallucination was way ahead of their game. Designer cowboys with shoulder rocket launchers? Gunshot wounds that can only be called "meaty"? Blood as viscous and sweet-looking as lychee? Textures were created with a pre-digital intermediate process, with a transfer to DigiBeta video, lurid tweaking and then back to 35mm. Look for how many reviews describe this blossoming bruise as "indescribable." 113m.

"Tears of the Black Tiger" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2007-02-27)

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