THE LAST SONG
ANGUISHED LOVE
** (Worth seeing)
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From Thailand come The Last Song (1986) and its sequel, Anguished Love (1987), directed and written by Pisan Akarasainee. This soap-opera saga tells of a hunky young hick, nicely named Boontherm Long Stem, who leaves his rural home to seek his fortune in the big city. The city-country dichotomy is expressed right at the film’s beginning, when shots of a female impersonator, Somying, lip- synching disco tunes in a nightclub are intercut with scenes of Boontherm plowing his farm. It doesn’t take long before Boontherm is plowing other fields: he’s picked up by Somying and enlisted into the glittery, upscale world of Somying’s home turf, the Tiffany Club. Boontherm is dazzled by his new companions, whose sophistication is a far cry from his own family life (“Mom’s dead,” he explains, “and Dad’s a monk”). Somying is entranced by Boontherm’s naive simplicity (his vulgar taste for sticky rice and fish sauce is a running joke), his brick-shit- house physique, and perhaps more than anything the envy he arouses in Somying’s friends, a gaggle of some of the tackiest queens God ever put in a drag bar. With Somying’s tutelage and financing, Boontherm becomes a singing star in the Tiffany Club’s gala revues, floating around in a silver lame jumpsuit in front of the mostly female audiences who express their adoration by bringing him flowers and even their children to kiss.
But heartbreak is in the offing. Unnerved by Somying’s emotional and sexual demands and his own erotic ambivalence, Boontherm finds himself attracted to Orn, a pretty, young rich girl who just happens to be the girlfriend of Somying’s lesbian pop- singer pal Praew; when Praew is driven to a suicide attempt by Orn’s infidelity, Somying saves her. Faced with the faithlessness of his own “husband,” Somying takes to the Tiffany stage for one last song, ritually cutting off his long hair and stripping off his gown before blowing his brains out in front of his adoring fans.
Like The Last Song’s Boontherm, Pol is a country kid come to the city to make his fortune. Having discovered he can earn money by allowing American soldiers to sexually service him, Pol thinks he’s ready for big-time hustling in the sex pits of Manila. A hometown friend takes him to Mama Charlie’s, where naked young men perform onstage as erotically explicit go-go boys and offstage as prostitutes. Pretty, pouty-lipped Pol is soon befriended by Noel, a muscular lad with eager eyes and a ready smile. Though Noel’s psychic mask is a pose of noncommitment and pansexual appetite, he finds himself falling in love with Pol. But Pol is basically straight; though the two youths have sex onstage in the nightly shower-dance ritual, Pol never opens his pouty lips when he kisses and keeps to his own mat in the dumpy apartment the boys call home. But even after Pol enters into his affair with Bambi, for whom he readily opens his lips, he’s a loyal friend when Noel sets out to find his younger sister, who’s become enslaved in the prostitution industry run by Kid, a corrupt cop. Heartbreak is in the offing . . .
