Thanks to its lively and quirky social commentary, A Useful Ghost by Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival this week. It was the first time in ten years that Thailand has been represented at the event.
For his first feature-length film, Ratchapoom Bookbunchachoke relies on ghosts who contact humans to comment on several societal and environmental issues – such as deadly air pollution in Bangkok.
The film is full of dark, mischievous humour and operates on several levels, surprising the audience with its unusual twists and turns.
On the surface, it’s a story about a young man, March, who is struggling with grief after the death of his wife, who died due to an air-pollution related illness.
She is reincarnated in the form of a vacuum cleaner, which lends itself to some hilarious scenes.
The couple are able to resume a relationship, but one that is considered "bizarre" and "unnatural" by March’s family.
In order for the ghost to stay among the living, she must accept to help “chase away” the various lost souls who haunt her husband’s family’s electric appliances company in the form of angry fridges and epileptic ventilators.
Nat becomes a kind of "ghostbuster" of the afterlife – in other words, a "useful ghost".
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"Ghosts are very common in Thailand," Boonbunchachoke told RFI from the Cannes Film Festival, admitting that he himself hasn’t been personally haunted, but he has heard many stories.
He explains that ghosts are in integral part of Thai society and accepted.
Unlike in Western cultures, they are not always seen as malevolent – sometimes they simply want to comfort the living, like in the case of Nat and March.
For Boonbunchachoke, the vacuum cleaner as a lead character is a key, as it represents dust, allowing him to address the very serious problem of air pollution in Bangkok, which has reached "shockingly high" levels, he says.
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Dust as powerful metaphor
But on another level, dust has a social and political connotation.
"When you say you are dust, you are people without power, without voice ... You cannot control your life. You are easily swept away, cleaned up, wiped away – wiped out by the ruling class," he explains.
In the film there are entire residential areas being razed to make way for modern highrise buildings and business districts, sweeping the ordinary folks away.
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He goes on to show that these same people have been seen over the years as "subhuman" and therefore expendable in political terms.
To address this, Boonbunchachoke introduces another ghost – a political activist – who falls in love with the man whose house he is haunting.
He pleads with his human host to remember the dissidents of the past who were killed by a zealous regime.
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Red Shirt crackdown
Without referring to it specifically, it is understood that Boonbunchachoke is talking about the crackdown on the the Red Shirt movement in 2010.
At least 90 people were killed when the army brutally broke up protesters who were demanding new elections after former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted in a coup.
The ghost of Nat is also recruited by a shady government minister who brings her in to find and terminate the dissident ghosts and civilians that are haunting his home.
Boonbunchachoke recalls seeing "a lot of debris, mess on the street" after the demonstrations, when the Thai authorities quickly launched a campaign to clean up the city.
People with water and brooms appeared out of nowhere "to cleanse the blood, the dirt ... all the evidence, and I found it pretty weird," he says.
"In Thailand, the state always tries to erase something they don't like".
Telling queer stories
In terms of tackling other forms of discrimination in society, the film also openly embraces queer culture, with several homosexual relationships built into the story.
"In Thailand LGBTQ love or coming-out stories are common," Ratchapoom says, adding that despite a law since January for same-sex marriages, there’s still a way to go.
His film draws a comparison between a "bizarre" or "unnatural" relationship between ghosts and humans and homosexual or non binary relationships considered by society as "taboo".
"We need more diverse queer stories to be told," he maintains.
