6ixtynin9

I much prefer the title as it appears in subtitled version I saw: A Funny Story about 6 and 9. This is sort of a Hitchcockian Thai film from the same director as Last Life in the Universe. It's interesting to note some similarities (dead bodies, bizarre conversations) but it's also a very different film, a dry witted observation of mounting panic rather than modern loneliness. Our heroine's problem isn't loneliness but the fact that no one will leave her alone. Her apartment because a sort of death trap for the hapless criminals and cops who come into her life, and (almost) none of it is her fault. I think there is something being said about the economic collapse of Asia in the late 90s but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is. Still, it's a fun film and I can even say my mother wholeheartedly endorses it despite the very dark humor. The most charming aspect of the film are some very strange dialogues that do a nice job of pointing the absurd things people say all the time without hitting us over the head with comedic beats and dead-pan looks. It just shows people engaging in the kind of casual exaggeration that makes conversation interesting. When informed by her hostage taker that his mother died of an infection in her fingernails somehow picked up in a nail salon, the heroine pauses for a moment of sympathy but then, with only the slightest look of concern on her face immediately asks "which nail salon?" The funny and violent plot holds many such little pleasures.