The politics of Daeng Bireley

22 June 1997

2499 Untapan Krong Muang (in English: Daeng Bireley) has been more popular and more profitable than any previous Thai film. It kept the columnists and chat-shows occupied for weeks. It has generated fascination, controversy, nostalgia. It has been, in short, an event.

Why has it been so riveting? It is a gangster story with some violence and a little sex. But we have had tons of gangster stories. Most are glamorous fantasies. By contrast, the appeal of 2499 has been its startling realism.

The story is based on real people and real events in Bangkok in the 1950s and 1960s. The author was part of the story. He appears in the film as narrator. Locations, sets and props have been lovingly reproduced (Chang Noi partly grew up in the same area, and felt transported back across decades). The acting is quite unlike the usual likae style of Thai film and TV. The key scenes are dated to suggest true history.

The film is a story of the Bangkok underclass. A group of five youths start out as brawling schoolkids, progress to small-scale protection rackets, graduate to running bars for GIs and gambling dens for the local rich, and then destroy themselves in gang rivalry.

They have no prospects. They get nowhere at school. The hero, Daeng, is urged by his girlfriend to get a job. His response is a blank stare, which she resolves with resignation. "In those days", says the narrator, "it was easier to get a gun than a job". The theme of hopelessness is echoed later about three girls who have been sold into prostitution: "girls like these have only two choices - give in, or die".

Daeng and friends see themselves as social outcasts. Their hero is the James Dean of Rebel Without A Cause. They sport his hair style. Daeng and his girlfriend wear Dean medallions like amulets. Daeng’s rival, Bu, copies Dean’s leather jacket, attitude, and short fuse. Daeng dies like Dean in a car crash.

They live in back-alleys, cramped houses, and spare coffee-shops. The clothes are simple, rooms small, beds narrow. The only jewellery are cheap medallions. Even the weaponry is small scale. There is nothing to match the phallic fantasies of Hollywood - Clint’s Magnum, Sly’s M-16, and Arnie’s absurd bazookas. Daeng’s gang starts off armed with pipes, chains and set-squares, and progresses no farther than small hand-guns. The funeral of the experienced gangster who adopts Daeng is a startlingly meagre affair - a handful of people around a simple open pyre in the grounds of a remote wat.

When they are making money from the GIs, the props and surroundings perk up a bit. Daeng even appears briefly with a red sports car. But this prosperity is as fragile as the glasses smashed when their bar is raided by a rival gang. In the final sequence, Daeng is back in the alley.

They have no family. The only two relatives who appear are single parents. Both are outside the social mainstream. Daeng’s mother is a working prostitute. The narrator Piak’s father is in the monkhood. The gangster’s funeral is attended by just one relative, a lonely-looking mother.

The youths get their surnames from somewhere other than a family - Daeng from the name of his street, Bu from his fondness for tossing Molotov cocktails (Bu Bottle-bomb). Throughout the film, there is no trace of a conventional family. Daeng and friends form their own tight and separate group. In the opening sequence, the camera circles round and round the five youths at the coffee-shop table, like a noose binding them close together and separating them from the rest of the world.

In the book on which the film is based, all this is set in a political context. These youth gangs are pawns in the politics of military dictators and their gangster friends. In the film, this is just hinted at. The gangster who takes Daeng under his wing got his expertise and his hardware from a spell in the army. He can move into managing bars and gambling dens because he knows the "people of influence".

Against this dark background, the film searches for a morality of survival. Daeng is neither hero not anti-hero. He slides down the path to pointless violence. But he knows there is a better way. He urges his friend Piak to stay on at school and improve himself. He bargains with his mother to give up streetwalking. He springs to the defence of the weak, especially the female weak.

Bu becomes Daeng’s rival and also the contrast which defines Daeng’s character. Bu is impulsive, uncontrolled, destructive. He disrupts a dance because he doesn’t get the girl. He starts a bar brawl by mindlessly provoking a GI. He throws bottle bombs for fun.

By contrast, Daeng is controlled, defensive, moral. He resorts to violence only against bad people, and only after they have attacked first. He kills a man who assaults his mother in the alley, the opium-addicted gangster who has had Daeng beaten up, and the Rayong godfather who has smashed up their gambling den.

Bu is the macho predator who enjoys beating up on women. He threatens Daeng’s girlfriend. He pushes a drunk but harmless girl under the snooker table. He provokes the GIs by grabbing and manhandling a girl. He ends the destructive raid on Daeng’s bar by raping one of the staff among the wreckage.

By contrast, Daeng is all honour and chivalry. He springs to the defence of his mother in the alley. He takes pity on a girl harassed by the gang. He flies into a rage at the abuse of the three girls sold into prostitution.

The backbone of the film is Daeng’s ordination into the monkhood. The story is told as a flashback between the tonsure ceremony and the ordination procession. The mother’s repeated requests for Daeng to ordain punctuate the film.

Here the film edges perilously close to a familiar morality - the lost boy rescued and redeemed by the twin powers of motherhood and religion. Here too the film flirts with the glorification of violence. The ambush on the ordination procession is filmed Peckinpah-style with slow-motion grace, swelling music, exploding bullet holes, and heavy religious symbolism.

But we are in for a surprise. As the sounds of battle fade, the narrator chimes in: "So Daeng was not ordained. Maybe the religion just did not want to accept him. After all, he was just another hoodlum." The film has switched suddenly back from high tragedy to its core realism.

The spotlight too has shifted from Daeng to Piak, the author-narrator. Piak is pictured at the start, returning from prison to a life covered with dust. He narrates throughout in a voice that has seen too many lives wasted, including his own. The message of the film’s ending is not death, glory, salvation. Daeng does not die among the shot-up lotuses and blood-spattered monks robes. He goes out later and more prosaically in a car crash. There is no redemption by violence, just the endless wheel of fate.

Daeng Bireley’s popularity can be attributed partly to nostalgia, and partly to the sheer quality of the product. But also to the story and its underlying themes. The film is about the Bangkok of forty years ago. But its appeal comes from the parallels and echoes it evokes between that era and the present.

The film paints a picture of the lost boys (and girls) of the Bangkok underclass. Most of them are the sons and daughters of the Chinese immigrant wave of the mid-war years. The film arrives on the screen as Bangkok is more and more dominated by a new underclass of young migrants from the villages.

The film describes the dark underside of the era of military dictatorship, with its culture of legitimised violence - the official violence of the military, the semi-official violence of "influence", and the ugly but inevitable fringe of street brawls and gangland wars. It arrives at a time when Thailand is marked by godfather ministers, extra-judicial killings, and corrupt police.

Against this dark background, the film searches for a morality of survival in a precarious world. It rejects the middle-class pillars of family, wealth, progress. It plays up the importance of friendship, and the defence of the weak. But most strikingly, it refuses to offer up any easy answers. Daeng and Bu died young. Piak rotted in jail. The corrupt political culture of "influence" and legitimised violence survives until today. In the end, this is the film’s most powerful message.