Just saw this film, based on the true story of Billy Moore -- an English man who was jailed in prison in Thailand and became a successful Muay Thai boxer for the prison's team.
It's a powerful, disturbing, and visceral film that is intensely focused on bodies. Controlling one's body through violence, or losing control to addiction. It's also about healing, how we can put the power of our bodies towards healing ourselves and others. There's as many close ups of violence (against the self, and others) as there are of bodies healing (the athletes massaging each other, other forms of intimacy, and an amazing scene of someone getting tattooed).
This is all to say, there's almost no dialogue. And much of the dialogue we hear is in untranslated Thai. As a writer, it was fascinating to watch. Trying to ascertain how much of the story and what ended up on screen to the actual screenwriters. My initial take is that they carefully calibrated a sort of montage, blurred narrative, of scenes that make up the film - in which Billy's internal state of mind is rarely clear, but his physical actions define who he is. When he commits violence for drugs, violence to protect a friend or himself, when violence drives him to take drugs, etc. It'd be a brilliant and difficult writing exercise: tell the full story of a protagonist with no dialogue, with no internal translation of their state of mind on the page - how attached can we get? Turns out, potentially, it can be very affecting - and very brutal. Of course it's heavily director-dependent, but the way Sauvaire utilized close ups in combat, established a jarring rhythm with the sound dynamics (when things are muted vs. blaring, music vs. quiet) -- it all adds up to an incredibly intimate and involving experience. If you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend!
