Timing is, indeed, everything. When the outlandish Thai film Tears of the Black Tiger premiered at Cannes in 2001, its zonked-out kaleidoscope of genre homage must have felt like some kind of visionary triumph. Maybe that's why Miramax snatched it up with great fanfare at the time, but it doesn't quite explain why, like so many other Asian films, it wound up gathering dust on the studio's shelf for years, until the plucky Magnolia Films decided to buy it recently and give it a proper theatrical release. Wisit Sasanatieng's film is still a wondrously inventive and entertaining romp, but it's hard not to feel that the last few years of endless experimentation coming from Asia has dulled a bit of its edge.
The story (which actually has strange overtones of The Princess Bride) focuses on the doomed love between a rich girl and a peasant boy, whose relationship is kindled anew after years spent apart, during which time he has become the titular bandit. She, however, has been promised to a slimy police captain. Much candy-colored carnage ensues, in a film that, while officially billed as an homage to '50s Thai Westerns, also references everyone from Sergio Leone to Douglas Sirk to Sam Raimi along the way.
Watching Black Tiger, I imagine this is what rolling down a hill trapped inside a giant paint can must feel like. That might in fact be the best way to enjoy this garish, hallucinatory oddity. Screw the story, and screw even the hip referentiality: on an aesthetic level, with its swirling pastel colors, its mad soundtrack, its dizzying close-ups, Tears of the Black Tiger is pure cinema, for better and for worse. — Bilge Ebiri