At the beginning of A Useful Ghost, the debut film from Thai screenwriter-turned-director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, a man has a problem. And that problem is dust. He buys a vacuum cleaner, but the appliance has some issues. At night, the man wakes up to the sound of it coughing dust back up all over the apartment and muttering to itself.
Obviously, your vacuum is haunted, says the repairman. But girl, let me tell you a REAL haunted vacuum story.
One of the most famous ghosts in Thailand is Mae Nak: a housewife who is so spectacularly good at housewifing that her husband refuses to believe the neighborhood gossip that she’s dead. Then, one day, a lime falls off the kitchen counter. Rather than bending down to pick it up, she casually stretches one long, ectoplasmic arm all the way to the ground to reach it.
The Mae Nak canon is deep: There are dozens of Mae Nak movies. There are Mae Nak television shows. There’s a Mae Nak opera. Mae Nak wanders though other stories, as a spooky guest star, appearing in video games and comic books. The closest equivalent to her cultural power in the western canon would be Dracula. Or Batman.
A Useful Ghost gives unto the world Mae Nak as vacuum cleaner. In the repairman’s story-within-a-story, Nat (Davika Hoorne) the daughter-in-law of a wealthy vacuum cleaner manufacturing dynasty, cannot bear to abandon her sad-sack husband, March (Witsarut Himmarat) after she dies. So she haunts a very cute, fresh-off-the-manufacturing-line vacuum (a collaboration between Singaporean industrial designer Sim Hao Jie and several puppeteers) and proceeds to seduce him. Problem solved.
Or problem not solved, because March’s family was not fond of Nat while she was alive (one reason given is that—like Boonbunchachoke— her family are Teo-chew–Hainanese, a Chinese ethnic minority). Now that Nat is a ghost, they really hate her. The central drama of the film explores how far Nat, played by Hoorne as ethereally, terrifyingly bland and obliging, will go to keep her man.
The lengths she goes to are surprisingly political, to the point where many reviewers in English-speaking countries have interpreted A Useful Ghost as an anti-capitalist screed, which doesn’t seem to be what Boonbunchachoke was going for. “For people in the west, I often encountered in reading the reviews how capitalism reduces humans into an object. The key word is capitalism,” Boonbunchachoke said, in a recent interview. “In Thailand, it will be authoritarian, or something like that.”
You know, something like that. At several points I wondered how, in a country where a person can be sentenced to decades in prison for criticizing the monarchy or the government, Boonbunchachoke got this film made, let alone shown in Thailand It’s possible that the rules are different for sexy vacuum cleaner genre film than they are for, say, student activists.
And A Useful Ghost’s genres are many. The tone shifts abruptly from art film to tv sitcom to social realist to horror to Jacques Tati-style whimsey in a way that feels a little like the end of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, when Pee Wee Herman rides his bicycle through a bunch of random movies shooting on a bunch of random soundstages.
At over two hours long, that’s a lot of detour, and the film can really drag. But the genre deck keeps shuffling, and it begins to look like Nat and March’s romance isn’t at the center of this story after all.
“In Thailand, we have had a lot of romantic comedies or romantic dramas about two beautiful boys falling in love with each other,” Boonbunchachoke said in an interview with The Queer Review. He was, he added, very interested in making a movie where the protagonists were complicated, grown-ass adults who just happened to be gay.
By the time A Useful Ghost ends, the complicated gays have complicated everything, as Nat and March, who seem to be getting tired of their own storyline, recede into the distance. It’s not that gays can’t be basic—A Useful Ghost also includes a few of those. But without families to appease or a tidy domestic future to hope for, the complicated queers drive the story into places I never would have imagined.
A Useful Ghost screens as part of Portland Panorama Film Festival at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st, Mon April 13, 7 pm, $15, tickets at portlandpanorama.org. 130 minutes, not rated
