Summer
is rarely a time for release of serious films with explicit
political agendas. A possible exception might have been Brokedown
Palace, directed by Jonathan Kaplan, whose films have
been twice nominated by the Political Film Society. This film,
however, appears to have started with some good ideas in a
story by Adam Fields that was trashed during screenplay rewrites
by David Arata: Imagine two foolish girls from Ohio, Alice
(played by Claire Danes) and Darlene (played by Kate Beckinsale),
taking a trip abroad as a high school graduation present.
Soon after arriving and seeing the sights, they decide to
go to the top hotel in town for a swim, pretending that they
are hotel guests. Soon, they are charmed by an Australian
named Nick Parks (played by Daniel Lapaine), who offers to
take them to another exotic vacation spot (Hongkong), unaware
that he plans to use them as decoys to draw the police away
from his "mules," that is, paid smugglers on the same flight.
As Alice and Darlene attempt to board the flight, a substantial
amount of heroin is found in Alice’s hand-carried luggage
at the airport. They are both arrested with much fanfare,
cannot defend themselves, and are both sentenced to 33 years
in prison. An American lawyer, "Yankee Hank" (played by Bill
Pullman), milks their parents for a $15,000 retainer but fails
to get them released, and American Embassy officials provide
no help either. Eventually, Alice accepts responsibility for
the crime so convincingly in an audience before the reigning
monarch of the country that he allows Darlene to go free.
However, the film appears spitefully to settle personal scores
regarding a true story (but the story is made up!) rather
than to build a generic case against something needing redress.
First, the girls originally had tickets to Hawai`i but Alice
persuaded Darlene not to go because she perceived it as too
"middle class," which makes one wonder what the director and
writers have against the Aloha State. Then, why vilify Thailand,
the venue for the film, rather than neighboring Malaysia and
Singapore, where the certain penalty is death? Arata even
went to Thailand to interview prisoners, and a daft request
to do the filming in Thailand was denied because of the obvious
dishonor to a proud people and country. In actuality, the
filming transparently is in Manila, which apparently suits
the aim of locating a sleazy, rundown urban environment that
is not at all typical of far more affluent Bangkok. The American
lawyer wavers between being a saint and a shyster, so what
does that prove? Clearly heroin was found in the hand-carried
luggage. The film hints that the hotel porter who loaded the
luggage planted the heroin with instructions from Nick; but
Alice never checked to see why her hand-carried luggage gained
so much weight, so we are also led to believe that Darlene
may have betrayed Alice, although another explanation is that
the heroin was planted by a mule who had never seen the two
girls before while they left their hand-carried luggage unattended
in the boarding lounge. Why should filmviewers sympathize
with cocky girls who lie to their parents, behave like ugly
Americans in the early part of the film, and later protest
their innocence? The Drug Enforcement Agency officer at the
U.S. Embassy (played by Lou Diamond Phillips) is curiously
portrayed as unconcerned with the fate of two fragile teenagers
and even with cracking down on the drug trade. Thai officials
are portrayed as corrupt, crude, dishonest, and untrustworthy
but not brutal, though the king shows compassion. The Thai
prison is seen as overcrowded, but reasonably clean despite
inevitable cockroaches. Parents and friends of the girls prove
to be ineffectual, though upper middle class Darlene and her
parents eventually blame her plight on lower middle class
Alice. Although the story seems to be a collaboration between
admirers of the 1978 film Midnight Express and
last year’s Return to Paradise, the film is
a flawed hybrid about silly girls who are easily outsmarted,
hardly a plot to receive praise from feminists. The title,
which presumably refers to the architecture of the Thai prison,
may be found in a recent novel that tells a very different
tale, which might have made a better film. MH
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want to comment on this film
