Wonderful Town

It's funny, most critics either didn't like this (too thin, boring) or loved it (delicate, tells so much with so little).

I found myself in the middle, understanding both sides.

This gentle, quiet, slow moving romance between a Thai woman who runs a nearly abandoned hotel, and an architect who comes to town to help repair a local beach resort after it was devastated by the Tsunami has moments of great grace and tenderness, and moments that feel either heavy handed, or not-quite earned.

There's an attempt to capture the spooky atmosphere of a town that's been destroyed, leaving behind thousands of ghosts. That works well when it's unspoken and vague, a little less well when it's made concrete in the form of the lead woman's angry rootless bother and her friends, who bring literal violence and danger into the story, in a slightly forced way.

None-the-less, a well made, well acted, well shot, thought provoking first feature.