Yami no kodomo-tachi

This film has depicted one of the darkest themes of human brutality and perversion. A theme highly complex in a film whose length, more than two hours, seems to do it justice. However, more than two hours of this film doesn't resolve anything it poses as questions. It ends much like where it starts: a state of conundrum. I follow this film faithfully along the long ride, and become quite frustrated at the end. It opens with an evil network in Thailand, the country I myself come from, and no explanation on the why side of the story. Some good characters depicted in this film are naive and ultimately useless. It tells us about how sexually perverse some Japanese and other foreign sex clients can be, and it tells almost nothing about the origin of such evil, especially with that twist at the end. The pace of the film is unnatural, frustrating, and lacking of creativity. There is a great lesson to learn about film making or screen writing: do not introduce so many issues, conflicts, and contradictions and fail to address them at the end or to a point of the viewers' satisfaction. I feel I have spent so much time and got back very little. With a few characters in both nationals, we should have learned a lot more cross-culturally. The negative feeling a Thai social worker having towards her Japanese colleague, for example, never gets resolved or deepened significantly. The issue is simply left hanging. So are the many more issues and angles presented. This film is one great effort to tackle a very important issue of humanity. This is why it gets my 6. The deducted marks are of a film forgetting to entertain and a script not so well-streamlined and the lack of coherence.

I can't find one thing not to like in this film. With the exception of its subject matter. But it is, undoubtedly, the most daring film ever to cover children exploitation. Daniel Auteil and Nastassja Kinski, superbly directed by Chris Menges did a great job to tell the world about this sordid issue in "The Lost Son" in the 90's. But this is WAY ahead of what we were told then.

This film goes all the way down to hunt one of the most terrible crimes and sins in our existence. The setting is actual Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). Everything is seen through the eyes of a professional writer for the Tokyo Times living in Bangkok, a naive Japanese bachelor just arrived from the West, a NGO officer, and some very dark characters with their own nightmares to be revealed.

As the news reporter tries to pry open a monstrous operation going on in Bangkok that smuggles children from Myanmar and collects some more in Thailand to sell their bodies to sexual tourism, he discovers that this is just but the tip of the iceberg. Organ trading is routine between a prominent physician in a prestigious hospital in Bangkok and a secret mafia that operates in Chiangrai, but here, the story takes a turn with no escape and the plot (as in the original novel by Sogil Yan) gets as dark as it can get.

I never spoil the show by recounting the film, so just be aware that this is a Japan-Thailand joint effort, and that the novel it is based on is Japanese. All in all, a totally Asian film. Brutal, convincing, horrifying, and extremely sad. Shot on real locations that transpire the hardships, smells and anxieties of a theme that is the rotten soul of the darkest secrets and the brightest light of humankind. If you're American, this film may bore you... or shock you. Not made for Hollywood fans.