As the Western world’s exemplar of an exotic and fantastical Orient, the city of Bangkok has fashioned itself into a locale of permissivity where sin and indulgence are self-consciously flaunted. To Western eyes, they bespeak the privilege of skin and socio-economic status; for locals, the farang types — whether expats or shadier middlemen — have ingratiated themselves with the city’s lifeblood, becoming one with its frequently contradictory ecosystem of pious devotion and seedy tolerance. There is also the sense of battered cynicism within its denizens: not a sorely embittered one, but a frank reckoning with the realities that capitalism and globalization have molded and determined for them. German director Roderick Warich’s Funeral Casino Blues captures this cynicism wonderfully, its roving prismatic lens accompanied by a plangent and uneasy score, setting in motion a woozy and nocturnal love story amid the underbelly of the 21st century.
The film shrouds us in a neon-lit glow from the get-go, its enigmatic register bolstered by its emphasis on mood. Lush, sensual, and noirish, Bangkok’s atmosphere lays little bare, not even the daily encounters of its sleazier side. While Wason (Wason Dokkathum), a bartender for one of the city’s many nightlife haunts, dodges a rising pile of debt, his acquaintance with Jen (Jutamat Lamoon) quickly blossoms into a close-knit and possibly romantic bond. Her line of work is less clear but accordingly more flexible. Every few nights or so, phone in hand, she rendezvouses with strange Caucasian men for dinner or dance; when they behave threateningly, Jen enlists Wason’s help to chaperone her around. The tenderness between the two approaches a state of serenity, the ongoing world outside be damned, and the film meanders along accordingly, immersed in their delights, worries, and gentle companionship.
Having directed 2017’s 2557, a leaner and more jejune version of his present work set also in the Asian city of angels, Warich now adapts the former film’s oneiric obsessions more rigorously into an aching portrait of lives moored to the helpless shores of capitalism. Retaining 2557’s ghostly penchant for dissolves and fade-outs, Funeral Casino Blues portends an even more devastating universe of alienation, with phone screens (and now translation apps!) as pervasive markers of the communication among Jen, her friends, and her clients. As cinematographer Roland Stuprich dabs each frame in electric hues of golden brown and blue, the city slowly metamorphoses into a thrilling, throbbing mass of sex, vice, and surveillance, mediated by an equally amorphous interplay of genres. In stark contrast with Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Human Resource, also premiering in Venice’s Orizzonti section, Warich’s Bangkok eschews the yearnings of a relatively cocooned salaried class and renounces the gloomy homogeneity of a 9-to-5 for an incandescent and candid ethnography of the working class. Funereal though reality often is, the dreamy lives of his characters are not.
When Jen goes missing around halfway through the film, Wason sets out to find her, along with Pim (Jutarat Burinok), Jen’s good-natured flatmate. Inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni — in particular L’Avventura — among others, Funeral Casino Blues here ventures into supernatural territory, evoking a persistent dread and mystery it doesn’t try to placate. Shuttling between the city and the provinces, and coming close to the Cambodian border, Wason and Pim encounter gangs and ghosts amid a twilight of resplendent beauty. The monied classes, the bullies: Warich, perhaps consciously, does not glamorize their presence, preferring the loose and faceless monikers they themselves have chosen to adopt. If Only God Forgives (2013), Nicolas Winding Refn’s mythical tale of retribution, foregrounded the swirling evil of Bangkok’s exploiters, the likes of Jen’s companions are comparatively muted, their symbolic figures (and the film’s) more reminiscent of those of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Cribbing its title from the rural phenomenon of “funeral casinos,” in which the rituals of mourning co-exist with practices of drinking and gambling, Funeral Casino Blues proffers an unsettling and dark reality tinged with lonely romanticism. With it, Thailand becomes a nocturne, and its ghosts the reveries within.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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