User Reviews

Before studying film in Bangkok, Uruphong Raksasad spent his childhood in a rural village and Raksasad carries a strong affinity for the now-disappearing cooperative, rural lifeways he remembers from childhood. "Agrarian Utopia" is, at first glance, documentary - the actors nonprofessional, and the style of filmmaking so bare-bones that it seems immediate and real. Watching it (at first unaware of the setup) raised questions about the ethics of documentary film. Though i later learned the characters and plot are fictional, Raksasad's method is journalistic; in those scenes where the characters are filmed at actual political rallies, genre distinctions become nonexistent.

The surround-sound chorus of frogs, the calls of birds, and night punctuated by crickets stirred something deep inside. I felt so much closer to Raksasad's characters than to the engineering and business students around me every day; i craved the feel of wind, rain on my back, the splash of mud. The film brought back so many afternoons of work under the open sky - it put me in touch with dreams that i found, as the characters did, untenable in the industrialized world.

CAUTION: SPOILERS. What unfolds in 122 minutes is an austere story to say the least. Two families, forced by debt to leave their own land, begin to work as sharecroppers in a distant village. The yearly cycle of rice farming is depicted in exquisite detail, and the paddies' ecology is itself a character in the film; paddy birds become dinner, as do snakes, rats, ant eggs, and wild honey. Duen and Nuek train a water buffalo to pull the plow while their sons frolic in the paddy pools. Sparse dialogue drives home every source of tension that can be had - a child's materialism, a spouse's stubborn silence. The local landscape is more than setting; it provides an immediate sense of place anchored topographically and psychically by a Buddhist shrine. The shrine stands on a distant hillside throughout the film, at last becoming the center of a scene pitting sacred space against necessity, to emphasize Duen's desperation.

Time-lapse images - monsoon clouds; the whirling dome of stars inlaid with passing electrical storms - add a much-needed visual punch and contribute to the film's documentary style. Wisely, the strongest visuals occur near the end of the film, supporting a deliberate narrative arc. After planting the second year's rice, the young men are informed that their landlord has defaulted on a car loan and has to sell, leaving them no choice but to find work in the city. Well, there is one choice - when eccentric old bachelor Prom offers to let them farm his ample lands - on the condition they use no chemicals. Prom is more than a subtle tip of the hat to eco-farming pioneer Masonobu Fukuoka, describing a "one-straw revolution" method of rice growing. But the young men decide that "...he is one kind of crazy fool - and we are another kind." To quote the film's tag line, how can we dream of utopia while our stomach is still grumbling?

By any standards a long film, the pace of "Agrarian Utopia" would be too slow for many viewers. But that pace follows directly from Raksasad's rural upbringing, and from his documentary style; it is the pace of nature, of handmade life. Never have i seen a film which so completely captured a sense of place.

Near the beginning and end of Agrarian Utopia, there are scenes of political rallies. In between these brief and seemingly tangential scenes, Uruphong Raksasad's film is about the plight of the landowners and hired laborers on small farms. Their hardscrabble way of life provides a sharp contrast to the idyllic beauty that surrounds them. Every one of these farmers is negatively affected by city dwellers, who offer them easy loans during the long times between harvest which prove impossible to pay back due to high interest rates. Inevitably, this means that their way of life comes to an end as they're forced to sell their land in order to get out of debt and then search for increasingly scarce (and decreasingly lucrative) hired laborer spots or move on to less pleasant manual labor in the city. It becomes increasingly clear that the greedy city folk are ruining the traditional way of life of rural Thailand for their own gain, which in turn provides a new perspective on those political rallies. It's clear from these rallies that the situation is no more pleasant for the urban population than it is for the rural. The blame for all this seems to be traceable back to the move away from a traditional way of life. Thus, Agrarian Utopia is a deeply conservative film, though its politics have little in common with western conservatism.

Agrarian Utopia is more than just an ideological platform for Raksasad, however: it's also a film that's quite interesting visually, particularly when it focuses on landscapes. Raksasad tends to keep his camera moving and he also relies heavily on zooms, which are particularly good at moving back and forth between the life or death immediacy of the farmers' lives and the unchanging timelessness of the landscape, the latter of which is emphasized even more by a particularly stunning time-lapse look at the cosmos. Based on this film, Raksasad seems to be a filmmaker to watch.