‘Regretfully At Dawn’: Busan Review

Dir/scr: Sivaroj Kongsakul. Thailand/Singapore 2024. 116mins

An old man comes to terms with a troubled past; a young girl looks forward to a brighter future. This simple, even schematic opposition structures Thai drama Regretfully At Dawn, but it is one that writer-director Sivaroj Kongsakul handles with elegance and well-placed touches of stylistic surprise. The long-gestating second feature from Kongsakul, a seasoned stalwart of advertising and Thai TV and the maker of 2011 Rotterdam Golden Tiger winner Eternity, this is a gently simmering, coolly crafted piece.

Stylistic affinities with auteur compatriot Apichatpong Weerasethakul are evident, if downplayed

Stylistic affinities with auteur compatriot Apichatpong Weerasethakul are evident, if downplayed. While Regretfully is likely too low-key to make major ripples, it should be well received wherever there is a taste for introspective, oblique Asian cinema of the sort represented both by Apichatpong and recent Vietnamese critical hit Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell. 

Slipping unpredictably between present and past – sometimes within a single shot – the film maps the existence of Yong (Surachai Juntimatorn), an elderly ex-soldier who now spends his days cultivating roses and devotedly raising an 11-year-old girl, Pattra (known as Xiang), played by Machida Suttikulphanich. She addresses him (in the subtitles, at least) as ‘Dad’, although he is her grandfather – her real father being Apai (Pramod Sangsorn), the wayward son from whom Yong has long been estranged. Yong and Xiang share a fairly idyllic life together in the country, together with elderly black-and-grey dog Bo (short for RamBo, played with shambling, melancholic charm by a canine named O-Liang). The girl’s intellectual abilities are further stimulated by her teacher Mary, real name Odile (Sikharin Langkulsen), a polyglot young cosmopolitan from Paris. 

Sparely deployed moments of high drama interrupt the gentle flow of the opening scenes. One is a confrontation with an aggrieved Apai, starkly handled in two extended takes in which Yong barely moves, and the camera not at all (Kongsakul favours locked camera, making his rare mobile shots all the more striking). Another is the first shift into flashback mode, with an explosion taking us unawares and leading us to Yong’s younger self in wartime. In the present, he also visits an elderly woman with dementia – the widow of his army comrade Chia, whose youthful photo spurs Yong’s, and the film’s, reflections on memory and lost time. 

The quietly imposing Juntimatorn keeps our attention throughout. Detached as he often is, the actor has a wonderful rapport with the young Suttikulphanich, whose exuberant ease in their scenes together suggest a rare degree of bonding across generations. The young actress registers as totally relaxed, not least when her character practises a dance for school, to songs with an overt theme of Thai patriotism. Indeed, vexed questions of national and cultural identity run throughout the film, not least in the glimpses of Yong’s past: assuming the character is in his 70s, we can assume that the wartime flashbacks take place in the 1970s or 80s, a period when Thailand was engaged in various conflicts within and beyond its borders.

Meanwhile, a new range of cultural possibilities is opened up for the girl by Mary, an adoring mentor who imparts her own linguistic knowledge (Pattra is practising Chinese, English and French), and who teaches her the importance of “finding where you belong in the world” – and that might not necessarily be only one place.

The film benefits from withholding backstory – for example about the girl’s mother, or the full reasons for Yong’s estrangement from his son. In an otherwise restrained film, a sequence in which Yong and Chia’s widow share a rapturous fantasy reunion, to lyrical flute music,is  the only point at which the film crosses into sentimentality. Otherwise, a generally deadpan canine performance from O-Liang (notwithstanding the odd jump and an opening snarl to camera) helps keep over-emotiveness neatly in check.