It probably does not give too much away to point out that the title is facetious. The "town" depicted in the film consists of a small seaside municipality in Thailand, presumably two or three years after the tsunami of 2004. The town is, for all intents and purposes, dead, but a young architect from Bangkok arrives to supervise construction of a new resort hotel. Evidently, investment in local tourism is just re-starting, but the place is still essentially a ghost town with only one functioning "rest-stop" type hotel inland. The architect starts to flirt with the young woman who works in this hotel, and whose family owns and runs it. A romance begins against the bleak backdrop, a world in which everyone left after the disaster of 2004 knows everyone else. Before long the out-of-towner architect has some unpleasant encounters with a gang of teenage petty hoodlums who ride around the area on little whining motorcycles. The building sense of unease is successfully conveyed, but the reason the film fails on several levels is that it relies too much on the audience's ability to perceive the "telepathy" between the characters, telepathy consistent with Oriental societies. It will not be immediately clear to many why the film ends the way it does, for example, or what the characters actually mean by their gazes and actions. There is a lot of "eye language", the meaning of which will only become clear to the viewer after walking out of the cinema and pondering the movie for a while. This dissipates the immediate effectiveness of the film and its screenplay, since movies unlike books cannot communicate thoughts easily. The performances are competent but not otherwise remarkable. Perhaps the film's only unqualified success is that the main character of the film, throughout, is undoubtedly the town itself.
Review of Wonderful Town
