Midnight My Love

I have never seen another film quite like this one. It radiates a wealth of understated and complex emotion, and manages to combine a strong sense of nostalgia for a better world long gone with the sense of a different world entirely, where a McDonalds burger is exotic and luxurious and a five-year-old Nokia mobile phone is seen as a top-notch status symbol.

Petchtai Wongkamlao is wonderful as the sweet, shy, endearing taxi driver Bati, a man living in a world dominated by the golden oldies show he listens to on his night shifts driving around Bangkok. His shy, uncertain smile alone tells you everything you need to know about his character, and he endears himself more with every stilted, unsure mannerism and expression. His relationship with the young novice prostitute he drives home every night is a joy, their feelings expressed through looks and smiles and never with words. Her attempts to bring him into the wider world are met equally with his revelations to her of the joys to be found by looking into the past. The film is also peppered with hilarious asides filmed in the style of the melodramatic sixties-era soaps that Bati loves so much. It is a neat way for Bati, so unemotional and inscrutable on the outside, can show us viewers his closely-guarded finer feelings.

Of course, as always seems to be the case with shy, quiet types, Bati has a dark side and a history that goes a long way towards justifying his desperate desire to go back to a simpler and more innocent age. It is in his expression of this dark side that the film loses its footing somewhat, straying into uncertain and slightly bizarre territory in the middle of the third act. However it manages to tilt back into place and the end is bitter-sweet and drawn-out, as with every fade I was sure the lovers were going to be left bereft and unsatisfied, right up until the true ending was revealed, and then I was neither satisfied nor disappointed.

An exceptionally lovely and thought-provoking movie, it should not be missed by fans of unconventional and heart-rending love stories.