6ixty-nin9

(Ruang rak noi nid mahasan) (Thai, 1999) I loved this little film! Every once in a while you discover a gem that no one has heard of, and this is one. It is a crazy mixture of Hitchcock, the Coen Brothers, the Marx Brothers, and maybe just a little bit of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If there’s any one film it reminds me of it’s Blood Simple. Tum, a secretary in a financial company, is laid off. She goes home and thinks about suicide, then someone drops off a package at her door, and it’s full of money. She’s in Apartment 6, but the numeral is held on with only one screw and sometimes flips over to become a 9. That’s where the package was supposed to go. (The Thai title translates as “A Funny Story About Six and Nine.” Even funnier, when you realize Thais use different symbols for numbers in their language, but not on apartment doors.) Gangsters show up and she kills two of them. Then the bodies start to pile up, to the point Tum is having a real problem disposing of them. Mistaken identities, confusion, mistakes, near misses, good luck and bad luck accumulate, and it is all hilarious. Lee and I were a wee bit disappointed in the ending, but that’s a small complaint. The editing is masterful, the shot composition is imaginative, and the music is dark and haunting. I recommend it.