Beautiful Boxer, the feature film debut of the Thai theatrical director Ekachai Uekrongtham, tells the true story of Parinya Charoenphol, nicknamed Nong Toom, a cross-dressing kick boxer from a poor family who saved his championship winnings to undergo a sex-change operation at the age of 19.
In flashbacks, the child Nong Toom dresses as a female dancer to amuse his family, later he smuggles lip gloss into the Buddhist monastery where he is briefly interned. But when, as a teenager, he wins a kickboxing match at a local fair, Nong Toom sees a way to help his family and finally realize his dream of becoming a woman. He enrolls in an elite training camp run by a tough coach, Pi Chart (Sorapong Chatree), and soon begins winning local matches across the country.
When Nong Toom's trainer catches his young charge playing with makeup, he matter-of-factly decides to mine the boy's eccentricity as a publicity stunt, and soon Nong Toom is winning matches dressed in drag, greeting his opponents with a lipsticked kiss on the cheek.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BESTMOVIE
Beautiful Boxer at times feels repetitive and haltingly paced, but its blazing emotional core is the real-life boxer Asanee Suwan's joyously physical performance as Nong Toom. Whether lifting weights with his teeth or engaging in a delicate ritual dance before each match, Suwan paints the character's simultaneous sweetness and toughness with a subtlety that confounds the traditional categories of "masculine" and "feminine." The intricately choreographed fight scenes are breathtaking, and if the exposition between them occasionally sags, the slack is soon picked up by yet another balletic action sequence.
With its essentially sunny view of gender reassignment surgery as a means of self-fulfillment, the film shows a refreshing refusal to indulge in the stereotype of the tragic drag queen. Unfortunately, it falls victim to other cliches straight from the Hollywood canon, including the inevitable training-montage sequence common to every sports film since Rocky (and ably parodied in last year's Team America).
But moving performances from Suwan (who won the Thai equivalent of a Best Actor Oscar) and from a former Miss Thailand, Orn-Anong Panyawong, who plays his dubious but eventually tolerant mother, make Beautiful Boxer a rare hybrid: an underdog sports picture that's also a transgender fairy tale.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50