‘Blue Again’: Busan Review

Dir/scr: Thapanee Loosuwan. Thailand. 2022. 190mins

An indigo-fixated fashion student finds she has no time to dye in Blue Again, Thai writer-director Thapanee Loosuwan’s feature debut. Premiering in Busan New Currents, this film follows protagonist Ay (Tawan Jariyapornrung) over the course of four middlingly uneventful years’ study in Bangkok, punctuated by trips back home to the rural northern province of Sakon Nakhon. The film’s biggest challenge is to understand why Loosuwan, her producers, and editor Chonlasit Upanigkit felt 190 minutes were necessary in order to relate this story, and while protracted running-times are not unusual in Southeast Asian cinema, this epic-sized canvas inadvertently accentuates Loosuwan’s deficiencies rather than her strengths.

When the film concentrates on the arcane intricacies of indigo it does hold considerable interest

Further festival exposure isn’t out of the question given the unusual nature of the enterprise, and such chances would be boosted by a drastic recut. There is at least a reasonably solid spine buried inside Loosuwan’s diffuse screenplay, concerning the volatile friendship between Ay and Pair (Asamaporn Samakphan). The duo meet up during their first days as a freshmen, while suffering the indignities of hazing rituals perpetrated by seniors designed to prod them into conformity (“Rule breakers must first learn the rules!” barks one budding authoritarian.)

Chalk-and-cheese both physically (Pair is petite, Ay tall and ungainly) and personality-wise (Pair is perkily outgoing, Ay a natural introvert), the young women nevertheless quickly form a productive, supportive bond. This connection will be sorely tested in the next few years as Ay struggles to reconcile her considerable personal ambition with the teamwork required by institutional fashion-study.

As with Last Night In Soho, Edgar Wright’s more phantasmagoric recent foray into this particular educational turf, petty rivalries and jealousies have a tendency to blow up into noisy emotional frictions of fashion school. On this Bangkok campus, such conflicts seem to be exclusively among females: the handful of male students are presented as being more focussed and professional, and remain largely peripheral figures.

Back home in Sakon Nakhon, however, female solidarity prevails. With her non-Thai father long since out of the picture — in this ethnicity-conscious nation, Ay’s racial status makes her stand out — the family’s dye-making business is a multi-generational collaboration between Ay, her mother and grandmother. When the film concentrates on the arcane intricacies of indigo (which is constantly referred to as a living, feminine presence) it does hold considerable interest.

Eschewing modern industrial bastardisations, Ay’s family grows indigo seeds and mulches them into precious dye using traditional pots known as vats — a long process which is heavily reliant on the seasons and the weather: “Vat dye is authentic,” we’re told. “It requires patience.” These unpredictable idiosyncracies cause a major problem for Ay when her end-of-third-year show is imperilled by frustrating delays in dye delivery, this segment providing a rare injection of tension and narrative urgency.

When the focus moves to Ay’s relationship with teen-era boyfriend Sumeth (Sarunmes Rattanapong), however, the picture becomes much more slow-burning and conventional. Sumeth’s domestic problems and his impulsive decision to become a Buddhist monk — in an area where Christianity, the religion followed by Ay’s family, is visibly prominent — are tangents which occupy too much screen-time, helping push Blue Again to the three-hour mark and beyond.

Upanigkit’s cinematography is disappointingly straightforward, especially in a film which revolves around very specific colour shades — his previous credits are as editor-only, including Baz Poonpiriya’s surprise international breakout Bad Genius (2017).

Stylistically unremarkable throughout (dialogue scenes tend to be shot/reverse-shot alternations) this material could plausibly be refashioned as a small-screen miniseries where the minor characters could be more satisfactorily fleshed out. Prime among these is Ay’s glamorous senior tutor Yok (Chatrawee Sentanissak), a “fashion rockstar” who participated in 2010’s anti-government demonstrations. “I can still smell the blood on the streets,” she muses, but Loosuwan seems cautiously reluctant to dig into thorny political matters.

As things stand, MVP is emphatically Samakphan, who chiefly works as an editor but whose winsome buoyancy gives Blue Again a vital spark of screen-presence whenever she appears. Maybe they should have let her loose on the cutting, too.