AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

VividSimon Simply Perfect

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

ThurstonHunger You know Chatterley almost sounds like a Thai word. This film offers both the sensual and certainly the sexual; smoke and ice intertwined with darker aspects of sex, dark as in vengeance and darker as in violence.The women are separated pretty strictly into madonnas and whores, and Jun Dara, the product of the most brutal sex act in the film, seems to struggle against his fate. His adoration of his mother, his pure rapture with Hyacinth, and hist relationship with the most interesting character in the film, Aunt Waad. Waad is portrayed amazingly by Wipawee Charoenpura, although I fear she is lost somewhat in the bevy of beauties in the film. All of them with gorgeous great Gatsby hairdos, kudos to the coiffeuse!Charoenpura is attractive, but shows more of her heart than merely her bosom (although a scene with that in it is key to the film). Christy Chung is breathtaking, and while you do see her in flagrante, really the visual and thematic foreplay is even more arousing. Interesting that she is seen as a specifically Western wind blowing through this film, I suspect the book makes more of that.People seem to get hung up on the coitus in this film, but I think the exploitation here that the director wants to explore is equally emotional in nature. Is Jun Dara a sympathetic character or an unsympathetic one. Seeing as we start with him as a child, one could argue for the former, but then the nature of his birth is that supposed to push us towards the latter. Khun Luang is another one that could have been seen more favorably, as the story unravels...but he is not. In a way he nobly rescued a woman in trouble, and he seems to be truly grief-stricken early in the film...Ultimately that's what makes this a fascinating film for me, a sort of shattering of easy good|bad divisions, but as the story revolves so much around the fleshy throes and peccadilloes, the film feels more sordid than I think it wants to be? Plus all the "good" women die or become nuns? The short monologue at the end, trying to paint Jun Dara as an everyman was interesting, but it doesn't work well since we've not seen much of his everyness. Instead innocence comes across as an illusion, or maybe for the characters in this an impossibility.Still a compelling watch, and more than the Asian bodice-ripper it appears to some as. I should say the camera-work was as delicate and teased out as the tresses of the fetching though fatally flawed femmes... I look forward to seeing other films by Nimibutr. I bet they also involve twists of fate...that's a four-letter word that's trickier than a lot of others.6/10

ekammin-1 I had really been looking forward to seeing this film. I had seen several enthusiastic reviews of it, and I had never, as far as I can recall, seen a Thai film before. I even made a wok of Pad Thai to eat while watching it.However, what I got was this confusing little stinker. The main character is a young man who lives in what appears to be a family compound, with includes several large houses. The family members apparently move from one of these houses to another, or from one room to another, for no apparent reason. Most of these members, along with some acquaintances, are a group of attractive women who resemble each other quite a bit, and spend most of their time listlessly having sex with the male characters, or, at least once, each other. Even a World War II air raid doesn't stop them.Neither the male nor the female characters seem to have much else to do, except for the protagonist's father, whose main interest in life appears to be abusing his son.The sex scenes seem to have been filmed by an experienced soft-core pornographer – plenty of backs and thighs, with the just the occasional breast, nothing else. Nothing much here, or in the rest of the action as well, to hold one's interest, once one stops trying to figure out who is doing what to whom.Furthermore, the Pad Thai didn't turn out too well. The author of the cookbook said that, in place of the fresh shrimp, chicken and pork usually used in the West, it would be more authentic to use dried shrimp and very firm tofu, both of which turned out, for my taste, anyway, to be too chewy and somewhat unpleasant. Next time I make Pad Thai, I won't try to be so authentic.Oh, well, perhaps if I had read the original novel, or could have understood the Thai dialog, the film might have seemed less confusing and more interesting.

Simon Booth Whilst the prospect of Christy Chung getting kitless wasn't exactly horrible to me, it was rather the fact that JAN DARA was directed by the consistently excellent Nonzee Nimibutr that landed the DVD in my shopping cart. Poor Jan Dara has a bad start in life - his mother dies in childbirth, and his father hates him thereafter as a result (or maybe just because he's an unpleasant person at heart). Not a great household to be growing up in in the 1920/30/40-ish years in which Jan is a young boy. But as he reaches young man age, the affluent household seemingly full to the brim of luscious females does turn out to have some benefits. The movie is about Jan's early life, and particularly about his early sexual experiences - and the sexual experiences of everyone around him for that matter. This is one of those movies that makes me feel that everybody in the world is having more sex than me (admittedly, every movie from Mary Poppins up has that effect - it's just the movies, right?). The characters here hop into and out of each others beds with such frequency and complexity that it's like they're the pieces in a game of sex-chess or something. Former Miss Hong Kong Christy Chung is just one of a bevy of pretty ladies who end up on their backs for half the movie. But JAN DARA is far from a bedroom farce - Nonzee Nimibutr is a film maker with much more skill, class and brains than that. Actually it's taken from a Thai novel, and it does feel very novelistic - quite high brow (though down-beat). The characters are very well developed and explored, and the period setting is loving realised with great cinematography. Totally excellent soundtrack too. Ultimately JAN DARA is not a happy movie - there's a viciousness in his family environment that leads to basically unhappy people all round most of the time. One can hardly blame them for trying to screw themselves into a coma in search of a little respite from the gloom. Though not happy, it is very enjoyable however - because it's a well written, well directed, well acted and generally very well made piece of film. That and all the sex :))

Peter One of the first Thai movie's I have seen. The story is about the Life of Jan Dara, who's mother dies giving birth to him. He grows up hated by his "family". I've heart that the Thai movie board did not approve of this film until the 3rd time it was send in because of the many "naughty" scenes. Compared to Dutch or French movies this film is really conservative, but for Thailand this is a first. The showing of breast has long been forbidden (as I understand) overall the story is very strong and it is NOT a feel good film, so it does not leave you with a smile on your face.