LOVE AND MONEY (Adjjima Na Patalung, A++++++++++)

LOVE AND MONEY (2009, Adjjima Na Patalung, A++++++++++)

You can find information about this play’s schedule here:
http://www.siamdemocrazy.com/news05.html

SPOILERS ALERT

I went to see LOVE AND MONEY (2009, Adjjima Na Patalung, Thai play, A++++++++++) on Friday, March 6. I love it a lot. It’s much better than I expected. I hadn’t had any expectations for this play at all before I went to see them, because this play bills itself as an anti-capitalist play. And I have lost my interest in anything “anti-capitalist” in Thailand, because the recent events in Thailand show us that the “anti-capitalists” here are “the fascists”, not “the socialists”. That’s why I doubted that this play would be just a very didactic play which teaches us everything we already know, such as “money is evil”, “don’t spend too much money”, “don’t be too greedy”, or “you can’t buy happiness or love”. I would be bored to death to watch a play which teaches us things like this, because I think I have seen 1,000 films which teach us these same things.

However, LOVE AND MONEY is much more than all these boring moral lessons. This play makes me think about the unexplainable mysteries of human being. I love every act in this play. If I remember it correctly, the first act is about a confident businesswoman who starts a relationship with a man who used to help his wife commit suicide. The second act is about a middle-class couple who hurt a richer man indirectly without any appropriate reasons. The couple seems to regard “the richer” as “an enemy”, ignoring the fact that “the richer” is also a human being. The third act is about a man who faces extreme pressure from his ex-lover during his job interview. The fourth act is about a credit card company which views its customers as “numbers” or “amount of money”, not as “human beings” who can suffer. The fifth act is about a fetishistic man and a female employee who loves to causes trouble to her own company. The sixth act is about a senseless killing, a woman who buys too many CDs and her husband who pays more attention to his money than to his wife’s feelings. The seventh act is about a woman who seems to understand the universe and our unimportance to the universe, but she can’t escape the vicious circle of suffering in this world when she starts to raise a family.

I think this play goes far beyond morality, psychology, religion, science, and simplistic lessons about materiality vs spirituality. I think this play is about life and some mysteries of life. It seems to touch something very deep in my heart, but I can’t understand it, explain it, or verbalize it. It’s about the void in our hearts. It’s about the emptiness of our souls, and this emptiness is something which can never be replaced by money or by blind religious faith.This play also reminds me of some absurd theatre + the reverse structure of 5X2 (2004, Francois Ozon, A+) + the topic of CRIMSON GOLD (2003, Jafar Panahi, A+) + the feelings in THE SEVENTH CONTINENT (Michael Haneke, A+). This play is narrative, but I think it is very poetic, especially its lighting. I think this play may be one of my most favorite plays of all time.

One of the most important things why I love this play is because it directly speaks to me. Though I’m very poor and rarely uses my credit card, I have bought too many magazines, books, tapes, videotapes, CDs, VCDs, and DVDs. Why have I bought all these unnecessary things? Why don’t I donate all these money to the poor instead? Watching Rivette’s DVDs make me extremely blissful, but are they really necessary for my life? No. The necessary things for my life and my happiness are good health, enough money, freedom, and being far from the persons who hurt me in the past. Not films, not books, not various kinds of entertainment, not internet.

Somehow LOVE AND MONEY makes me question myself. Are my film-watching, blog-writing, and facebook-using ways to fill the void inside myself? However, though the answer is yes, I still believe it is not wrong to do these activities, as long as I do them moderately and as long as I’m not too much addicted to them.

Things I like in this play include:

1.The husband feels as if there is a stamp on his forehead which indicates that he is POOR, and some luxury shop attendants can see this stamp and look down on him. I also feel like this in my everyday life.

2.The play doesn't portray only greedy people, but it also portrays some people who may be still far from finding true happiness, no matter whether they are greedy or not.

3.The play seems to allow a lot of space for the viewers to think, or allow the viewers to fill in the narrative blanks by themselves. The play doesn’t answer every question.

The questions I have in my mind include all the reasons why the wife commits suicide. Surely she commits suicide to escape her tremendous amount of debts. But is she or her mental state also severely affected by the senseless killing she witnesses and by her husband's ignorance of her feelings? Is her shopaholism the result of being brought up by middle-class parents who extremely envy the rich?

The hero's ex-lover is a very interesing character. She looks like a real mean woman. But is she mean to the hero because her nature is evil? Or is she mean because the hero and his friends did bad things to her in the past? Did they start to hate her after she had been mean? Or did she become a mean person after they had hated her for her religious belief?

4.The various aspects of characters. Some characters may look bad, but they are morally "grey", not totally evil. The husband may look like a bad person because he ignores his wife's feelings, but I think he is forgivable because he suffers a lot in order to earn a living. The credit card company employees may look bad for enticing people to buy too many things, but I think these employees are like many of us who try to earn a living by persuading customers to buy unnecessary things from us. We don't only have voids inside ourselves, but we also try to create voids inside other people too, so that they will keep on buying things from us to fill the voids inside themselves. We tell ourselves that we don't have to care for other people's ways of spending money, because they should be responsible for themselves. We tell ourselves that we should not worry too much about our customers' lives or other people's lives, because what is important is only our own lives and our own income. But in the end, will we be really happy? Will our conscience let us be really happy?


--LOVE AND MONEY indirectly reminds me of a character in LANDSCAPE AFTER THE BATTLE (1970, Andrzej Wajda, A+). In this film, there is an intellectual character who survives the Holocaust and tries to carry many books with him. But maybe his book-loving is just his excuse to use the books to fill the void inside himself.