A thriller, a noir, a love story – Roderick Warich’s Funeral Casino Blues [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Roderick Warich
fiche film] spreads out in many directions, just like the city of Bangkok. At night, people try to make a living or escape their demons. Sometimes, they finally find someone who understands them, like Jen and Wason (Jutamat Lamoon and Wason Dokkathum). We spoke to the German director about his Venice Orizzonti entry.

Cineuropa: In your film, “the foreigners” are the villains. They are nameless and faceless. But you are a foreigner, too!
Roderick Warich: In Europe, we have a lot of “black-tie nihilism” right now. European people, especially rich people, look at themselves in a grotesque way – in the USA, The White Lotus would be a good example. You’re criticising a certain kind of lifestyle, but you’re also representing it by showing people in service jobs as sidekicks. It makes me angry.

We have to stop being so Eurocentric because this kind of satire has no teeth. I don’t give white people a voice, not at all. We just see the backs of their heads and we change them up. I was thinking about William Friedkin’s Cruising – he always changes the killers. When this girl looks directly at us, she says: “You are the perpetrator.”

There’s something scary about so much of the communication here happening via text. You would think it would be scarier to hear somebody scream, but no.
That’s how capitalism works. Somebody decides something about your life, and you read it on your fucking phone. It gives us an illusion of not being alone and at the same time isolates us even more. I’m not very pro-Silicon Valley, let’s put it like that. This weird feeling of digital isolation, of not living in your own body any more, was shown in Personal Shopper [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Artemio Benki
interview : Olivier Assayas
fiche film] or in Ghost in the Shell in the 1990s.

When Personal Shopper came out, many struggled with its combination of the spiritual and the technological. You play with that, too. You play with the supernatural.
I was thinking about “attachments” in Buddhism [the concept of clinging to people or objects]. But when we die, we have to do that alone. This movie changes, and you almost don’t realise it does. Each chapter is a very specific genre, although when you say that, people get scared and say it’s unsellable [laughs]. I wanted the first one to feel like a 1970s-inspired hangout movie. It’s a little bit of Robert Altman, a little bit of Taiwanese New Wave and Edward Yang. I wanted it to feel light and soft, even though the storyline is very dark. The longer it goes on, the more you discover about what’s lying beneath.

You say that mixing genres is “unsellable”, but you have a love story here that’s surprisingly sweet. These two people don’t have to pretend.
I always need a love story or a family story; I need some religion, all of that. It’s like cooking a dish and needing certain ingredients that can sustain you for three years. I thought about that romance because, for my generation, it’s impossible to forget about Mulholland Drive or In the Mood for Love. They are a part of my cinematic landscape. Through love and family, you get to the core of who we are.

At the same time, I talk about sex work, where you have to wear a mask all the time. You are becoming another person – for someone else. When Jen takes off that mask, it’s an important moment. She probably sees something in Wason she recognises, a certain energy that feels like family.

You take thriller and noir, and add in some slow cinema. Weren’t you afraid it would cost you some viewers?
I’m always in between. I want to make horror films and I want to make Tokyo Story. I watched too many movies when I was young, and now, I don’t really believe in spoken words as a way to express feelings. I think about transporting emotions through atmosphere and music, and the nonverbal language of bodies. If you want to get somewhere faster, genre is the way. But there’s a certain energy in slow cinema where you are breathing the same air as the characters. You start to think they are real.

I think we’ve made a movie that's very style-conscious – more vibe cinema than typical slow cinema. There’s a direct quote from a John Huston movie, from The Long Goodbye and even some computer game-y music, things that can make people go: “Oh, it’s not an arthouse movie.” We are baiting the Letterboxd crowd, saying: “Welcome, here’s some nostalgia.” But then we really spend time with these people.

Even though style is such a big part of your film, did you talk to people who’d had similar, often traumatic, experiences?
One person we wanted to cast had to flee to Bangkok because he was in debt. There’s a close proximity to these lifestyles. If you live in a village, your neighbour’s daughter might be a sex worker. We spent a lot of time there; I also read about sex work in Southeast Asia and the socio-economic reality of these people. We were walking around until we knew every little inch of that part of the city. It’s like a spiderweb reaching out in different directions.