Dang Bireley's and the Young Gangsters

Dang (nicknamed 'Bireley's' after his favourite soda-pop) was a real-life 'hero' of the Pra-Nakorn slums in the late 1950s, and Nonzee Nimibutr's knockout film is drawn from a biographical memoir written by one of his associates. It sees him as a young man fixated on James Dean and Elvis, and hung up on the fact that his mother had to prostitute herself to raise him; he became a legendary figure in the capital's underworld until the 1961 coup d'étât imposed martial law and drove criminals out into the sticks. Given the limited resources of the Thai film industry, this could never have made a fetish of period accuracy. But the limitations were shrewdly turned to the film's advantage. The rhapsodic presentation of Dang's Americanised tastes and influences underlines the chasm between US and Thai society; despite the 'cultural cringe', both the character and the film are irreducibly Thai. (T.R.)