The Thai based-on-a-true-story transvestite sports hero movie is developing into a unique mini-genre, with the Iron Ladies films, which covered the rise of Thailand's champion cross-dressing voleyball team, and now Beautiful Boxer, which looks at the life of flamboyant kick boxer Parinya Charoenphol, nicknamed Nong Toom.
Nong rose from rural beginnings to become a star attraction at Bangkok's Lumpini Stadium, where he attracted screaming crowds, massive paychecks and offers to rig matches. Somehere along the line, he started to indluge his passion for cosmetics and entered the ring in full kabuki makeup, much to the horror of his macho opponents, who he regularly knocked out. On live TV interviews, he readily confided that he was boxing his way to enough savings to be able to afford a sex-change operation.
Handsome Asanee Suwan--a professional kick boxer and first-time actor--plays Nong with sensitivity and passion. Suwan took lessons from Thai beauty queens, studied opera and the traditional Thai street opera of Likay as preparation for the role, and deservedly won the Thai Best Actor Oscar for hs efforts. Suwan is a charismatic performer and he carries off Nong's steady transition, which could have looked quite ridiculous, with grace. There's a tantalising hint of romantic sexuality in Suwan's Nong, but unfortunately the film's rather simplistic script doesn't allow him to delve too far.
Like Million Dollar Baby, the film is a string of fight scenes which show the boxer rising up the ranks and taking on increasingly savage opponents and richer purses. But unlike Million Dollar Baby, there just isn't character development and subtlety of theme sandwiched between the action, and Beautiful Boxer becomes a bit circular, a bit repeptitive. Banal dialogue mantras ("if you want to fight with make up, you should" and "the more make up I wear, the harder they kick - then I kick them harder back!") keep telling us the same thing and beyond Nong's wearing of make-up and increasingly feminine deportment we don't ever learn a thing about his sense of gender identity or his sexuality. Supporting characters are reduced to facial expressions and the occasional slogan, Nong's father, for example, gets to look at the floor a couple of times and weigh up his feelings for his effeminate son before imploring a surgeon to do a good sex-change job.
Tension is defused left right and centre with Nong's journey a string of open doors - his coach spots his early talent, welcomes him into the training camp, supports his transsexual evolution without a single question, coaches him all the way to the top, and so on.
But the film excites with its throbbing evening scenes of Bangkok and Tokyo, and the fight scenes are well-choreographed. Boxing matches in tropical rainstorms, unfolding lotus blossoms and gaudy neon marketplaces stuff the film with abundant visual attractions. Director Ekachai Uekrongtham has a music theatre background, and worked for Cameron Macintosh productions in Singapore. This story would transfer profitably to the stage, with its colorful and operatic heroine and her rags to riches story giving some young actor or actress the role of a lifetime (cue Tony Award), and the milieu of all-boy boxing camps and Asian street scapes providing opportunities galore for spectacularly staged, rowdy ensemble scenes.
