A USEFUL GHOST FILLS A VACUUM AT CANNES

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke talks about his endearingly wacky satire, the only Thai film at the festival this year

- STORY: KONG RITHDEE

What begins as comedy sometimes ends as horror.

Or maybe: What begins as comedy sometimes ends as tragicomedy. Last Saturday, writer-director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke presented Pee Chai Dai Kha (A Useful Ghost) at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, the sole Thai title in the festival.

Zany, offbeat, nutty, quirky, wacky: international critics exhausted the vocabulary of that register to describe this comedy. For us Thais, allow me to invoke the privilege of our common tongue and describe it, proudly, unapologetically, as baa baa bor bor kha! (don't skip the final particle kha).

This is a compliment, of course. A Useful Ghost feels like a very original film that came out of our cinematic tradition — the ghost film, the comedy — filtered through the mind of a filmmaker keenly aware of the cinephilic currents of world cinema.

The pitch is a winner: The ghost of a dead wife returns to her husband by possessing a vacuum cleaner, and when the husband's family disapproves of the unholy reunion, the ghost-wife — inside the poltergeist hoover — must prove her usefulness to them, and not just by sucking dirt off the floor.

The sheer nonsense of the plot is a ploy. Ratchapoom wants his film to be both "silly and serious", since his goal is not just to pull off an eccentric romantic comedy but also to make a political satire of the ghost of Thailand past. For all its bizarre setup, irrelevant humour and queer joy worthy of Joao Pedro Rodriguez, A Useful Ghost is a commentary on the state of contemporary Thailand, from the scourge of PM2.5 to political disappearances and labour abuse. "The ideal audience for this film," he told me, "is the Thai people."