Having churned out the overlong though fitfully amusing COUNTRY HOTEL the year prior, director Rattana Pestonji continued his quest to bring sound to Thai cinema with 1958's DARK HEAVEN, a loose reimagining of Frank Borzage's 7TH HEAVEN that sees the director moving out of the confines of a single room and into blazing color - as well as losing about 50 minutes of runtime, which is only for the better.
The plot of DARK HEAVEN is little more than that of a TV episode, dragged out at length to 98 minutes. It might be frustrating if it weren't so soothing. The film finds comely street waif Nien taken in by handsome but dirt-poor garbage collector Choo after trying to steal some food. Taking her home to give her a meal, Choo quickly becomes smitten, and the two are soon living together in his humble shack. When Choo is called away to join the army, Nien promises to wait for him, dressing up as a man to find work, though eventually she falls into the care of a wealthy aristocrat. Finding a happy home life with the woman, Nien is soon being romanced by the family doctor's pretentious though handsome son. But when Choo comes home, blinded from battle, his return threatens to put Nien's allegiance to her newfound life to the test.
The plot moves at a snail's pace, though with a gentle naivete that's refreshing. Stylistically, DARK HEAVEN most readily recalls Hollywood pictures of the early '30s, which were similarly struggling with the new sound format and fighting against stage-bound sets and overly rigid blocking. Most of the set-ups in HEAVEN are exceedingly simple, with characters staged against a plain and obviously artificial background while being blasted with studio light. Nevertheless, there's an earnestness to the leads' performances that overcomes the simplicity of the narrative, and makes you care about their happiness despite the thin sketching of their characters. In its innocent naivety, its almost complete lack of conflict or malice, the film recalled for me Ahn Hung Tran's THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA, another stage-bound film content simply to observe life as it's lived, its comings and goes, highways and byways.
The film is so placid, in fact, that for me its main suspense lay in waiting for it to spring the usual melodrama nonsense, which thankfully rarely happened. Most of the characters are good-hearted, and their intentions pure. It was refreshing to watch a film where the heroine's resolve to wait for her lover never wavered, never became subsumed by melodrama. And if the movie falls into the usual pitfall in the last five minutes of a character randomly turning suicidal to serve the plot, I can forgive that one misstep as a necessity of its genre. All these years later, this is still a refreshing and charming film, stylistically turgid by today's standards but nevertheless weaving a mellow and comforting spell if you give in to it.