LEKHA SHANKAR

                                    '  PARADOXOCRACY'-  Docu about the 'paradoxes' of Thailand's democratic movement.

      It’s the first time I've seen a near-full house in Bangkok,and that too for an indie film! 

But when the film is controversial, censored, almost banned, and running only for a limited spell, it holds a lot of promise.

 Well-known Thai indie director Penek Ruttunaruang's docu ' Paradoxocracy ' is enjoying that status now. 

It's little more than a series of interviews, better suited for the living room than the movie hall, and this, infact, this will probably be its fate.

The interviewees are not 'named' in the film, but are obviously well-known and recognised Thai individuals,  who vent out the various contradictions and paradoxes of 'democracy', in their country's history. The various coups in the country, they realize, ensure ‘both democracy and political dictatorship’. The coups' ‘third announcement’, they state, is always the most crucial. Exiled Thai PM Thaksin, they discover, is an ‘amazing political marketer’.

Lines are blacked out, political jibes are relished, the royalty is questioned.

Verbally, the film is daring, cinematically, disappointing. Its obvious that the focus of the film are the 'interviews' ,which have been hastily put together, to release the film on the 81st anniversary of the country becoming a constitutional monarchy (24 June).

But at the current moment of political flux in the country, the film has created a big stir.

With rumours that the film may be pulled out before its 2-week run, the young and the old  are flocking to see  it.

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