ONLY RECENTLY FREED of the notorious early 2000s Miramax Shelf of Invisibility, Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah Talai Jone, 2000, ****) is a sui generis mashup, a “Raiders of the Lost Archive,” a strange, fevered, delirious, 1950s-styled Thai western-romance melodrama and a singularity of the highest order. Giddy beyond belief, it embodies an era of Thai genre movies, with florid colors and visual devices that out-spaghetti spaghetti westerns, faded to the turquoise-gold-pink-chartreuse shades of 1940s roto newspaper supplements. The film’s major influence even sounds made up: the films of Thai independent filmmaker Rattana Pestonji, who as the press notes describe, is “unknown outside of Thailand [and] largely forgotten at home, where there is no tradition of repertory or archival screenings of vintage films.” Apocryphal or not, there is much wry, wild and weird in Tears, and its invisibility to northern American audiences for half a decade only adds to its allure. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez have said their upcoming Grindhouse will play with making their work look like a battered relic; this gentle yet persistent hallucination was way ahead of their game. Designer cowboys with shoulder rocket launchers? Gunshot wounds that can only be called “meaty”? Blood as viscous and sweet looking as lychee? Textures were created with a pre-digital intermediate process, with a transfer to DigiBeta video, lurid tweaking and then back to 35mm. Look for how many reviews describe this blossoming bruise as “indescribable.” Over at LA Times, the indispensible Dennis Lim shines a light on Miramax’s past and Sasanatieng’s present. Lim calls it “a delirious pastiche that whizzes through as many incongruous genres as it does implausible plot twists. The movie’s real-life trajectory—from festival star to battle-scarred survivor—Is almost as dramatic and convoluted… [I]t’s one of the most notable victims of the old, overspending Miramax, which in the Weinstein era was notorious for acquiring armloads of festival titles and sometimes allowing them to molder in the vaults indefinitely… Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures [the film’s current US distributor] remembers seeing Tears at its first packed Cannes screening. “The saturated color scheme and the incredibly arch nature of the characters and plot were counterbalanced by a seeming earnestness that just had no precedent for me,” he said… The first rumblings of trouble came when Miramax decided to re-cut the film within months of the Cannes purchase. Sasanatieng said he and his producers had been warned of the Weinsteins’ penchant for meddling. But, he said, “We were too innocent. We believed that they would respect our work. They told us again and again that everybody at Miramax loved the film so much… They didn’t allow me to re-cut it at all,” Sasanatieng said. “They did it by themselves and then sent me the tape. And they changed the ending from tragic to happy. They said that in the time after 9/11, nobody would like to see something sad.” [Quicktime trailer here [graphic violence]; Now playing Cambridge, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Seattle; March 16 Tucson and San Diego; March 23, Hartford, Grand Rapids, and Columbia, South Carolina; March 30, Detroit and University City, Missouri; April 6, Denver, Atlanta and Nashville.]

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