‘Six Characters’: Busan Review

Dir: M L Bhandevanov Devakula. Thailand. 2022. 128mins

In the century following the premiere of Luigi Pirandello’s groundbreakingly radical 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, there have been numerous attempts to bring it to the big screen — including, quite strenuously, by Pirandello himself. But while his seminal, self-deconstructing piece — a precursor of post-modernism, meta avant la lettre — has been adapted for TV on more than a dozen occasions, Thai writer-director M L Bhandevanov Devakula only now belatedly pulls off a cinema version.

 Lushly-appointed visualisations help to open out what is necessarily and inevitably quite stagy material

Not that Bhandevavov Devakula, known at home by his nickname Mom Noi, had long to savour his pioneering achievement. This well-respected veteran of south-east Asian cinema, best known for his Jan Dara diptych of 2012-3 and 2010’s Rashomon remake The Outrage, died of lung cancer at 69 the day after the picture’s September premiere in Bangkok. Bowing internationally in the newly-minted Jiseok competition at Busan, this is a very classy, handsomely-mounted adaptation — faithful almost to a fault — which could, with proper handling, eke a niche among literature-inclined older audiences at festivals and beyond. 

Appearing just before Italian director Roberto Ando’s dramatisation of the play’s origins —  La Stranezza, with Toni Servillo as Pirandello — Six Characters continues a quite stellar run by DoP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. One of the current rock-stars of world cinematography, Mukdeeprom’s recent credits include Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria, plus Memoria — the latest of his many collaborations with Apichatpong Weerasethakul. 

While Mukdeeprom has become associated with outdoorsy, location-centric work, most of this picture takes place on a modern inner-city sound-stage. Here an unnamed, boyish-looking director (Jan Dara and The Outrage’s Mario Maurer) is about to shoot a supernatural period piece entitled Lust Of The Devil Maiden. His plans interrupted by an exploding generator, the superstitious director attempts to appease the building’s “house spirits” by burning sticks of incense. As he does so, six “characters” make an impromptu appearance, blithely announcing they are quasi-living creations dreamed up by a tormented author and stranded in limbo by his suicide.

What follows is a multi-strand narrative which visualises the luridly soapy, family-based melodrama for which the “characters” were intended, and interpolates them among the real life goings-on supervised by the easily-distracted director. These lushly-appointed visualisations help to open out what is necessarily and inevitably quite stagy material, and provide further showcases for the strikingly opulent art direction and costume-design — longstanding Mom Noi hallmarks — by Nopporn Kirdsilpa.

The antique outfits sported by Lust Of The Devil Maiden’s dramatis personae (who spend most of their time in poised tableau, munching popcorn as a surrogate audience) and by the eponymous six characters are of a Pirandello-era bygone vintage. The director and his assistants sport sleek, biker/fetish-style black leathers for reasons which remain unexplained. Indeed, there is a whiff of missed opportunity here: while writer Pundhevanop Dhewakul changes the “work in progress” text from a play to a film, Six Characters otherwise makes disappointingly little attempt to analyse, engage with or deconstruct its own medium. At times it seems to become ’One Film In Search of a Raison d’Etre’.

With the emotional impact of the narrative(s) automatically reduced and distanced by the repeated acknowledgement of authorial artifice, the interest here chiefly lies in seeing how imaginatively writer Pundhevanop Dhewakul can navigate and juxtapose the enterprise’s various strata and strategems. The answer: not very, and this is one of the reasons why Six Characters lacks the panache and verve of obviously “Pirandellian” films such as Buster Keaton’s silent classic Sherlock Jr and Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Moments of humour are surprisingly few and far between. Some are clearly inadvertent, as when it’s mentioned that a boy is sent to be schooled in England (at an unspecified point pre-WW2) in order to warm up his frosty heart. “Bring the first-aid kit, please!” someone later yelps after one of the “characters” has bloodily shot himself in the head at point-blank range.

Around this time another of the not-quite-alive “characters” expires by drowning. “She had no pulse” is a repeated line of dialogue; for too much of its two-hour-plus running-time the same can be said of this dutiful enterprise.  Whenever vampish beauty Khemanit Jamikorn is on screen as the most vivid and sexually confident of the “characters,” however, vital signs sky-rocket . Like several of the cast here this charismatic actress-model — also known as “Pancake” — enjoys wide renown in Thailand, but she is also popular across China and elsewhere in East Asia. On this evidence, she’s only getting started.