It's not just another movie about human trafficking. Buoyancy, which should have been nominated for Best International Film at the Oscars this year, is a brilliant, searing, and transcendent work about the essential human crisis in a world that values money more than lives. Impressively filmed on location over four weeks with a diverse cast of mostly non-professionals, the film dramatizes the plight of one boy as he is sold into slavery and fights to be free again. But because it is rooted so clearly in real stories and frames itself against the current humanitarian crisis that controls the lives of over 200,000 men in the Thai fishing industry, the film reaches a heightened level of reality and urgency. This isn't just an exposé on modern slavery. We're watching something we shouldn't be seeing, something we all desperately need to see.
We begin with Chakra, a young Cambodian boy, who dreams of a better life. But this isn't the usual coming-of-age story that will of course go wrong due to hubris or naiveté; Chakra wants something better because his life is already doomed. Though free in status, he is a slave to his family, performing backbreaking work during long days in his father's rice paddies. He will not inherit anything, as he is not the eldest boy, and he will live and work here in squalor his entire life. When he hears that factory workers in Thailand can get paid well for their work, he decides to journey there and make a better life. Nevermind that he can't pay to travel, he can always pay his "guide" back out of his first paycheck. And so he's packed into a flatbed on top of several other hopeful workers and smuggled out of the country.
These early scenes display amazing economy from Australian writer-director Rodd Rathjen, who quickly marries minimal dialogue to gorgeous photography of the land and the work. Closeups center our experience on Chakra's amazingly expressive face -- new actor Sarm Heng is fourteen years old -- and we are forced into his headspace as he is quickly sold to a fishing boat that is suddenly miles out in the South China Sea. Though we "know" what's happening to him and he doesn't, we see his gradual disillusionment and feel as horrified as he when he grasps that this is not the future promised to him. Rathjen seemingly effortlessly combines Chakra's drama with the collective experience of his fellow slaves, turning what might be a character-driven chamber piece into an thematic opera of adventure and horror.
The fishing boat, small and utterly isolated on the open ocean, is where we spend almost the entire movie. It does not need to journey back to land and risk losing its labor force; other ships come and go to collect its goods. The captain, Rom Ran, is a leering psychopath, sadistically torturing his slaves through physical abuse and forced starvation (they get a single cup of rice per day). The slaves are forbidden to communicate, though Chakra bonds with an older man who had hoped to make more money for his wife and children back home. This connection is dangerous for them, but helps them keep their sanity under the impossible circumstances; the other slaves are variously ignorant, fearful, vengeful, or brainwashed, and the greatest tragedy of this film lies in watching their journeys coincide with Chakra's. Some are gruesomely killed; perhaps the most memorable attempted escapee is strung up between two boats and pulled apart, one of a series of horrors that spurs Chakra into action.
It's incredibly difficult to watch, but what makes this movie truly amazing is its final act. When Chakra decides he is not a victim, the movie becomes a thrill-a-moment genre game-changer. This is not a movie where a slave can run away or somehow advocate for peaceful resistance. And while some will view Chakra's turn toward violence as a fall from innocence or a poetic device to describe the state of a soul in traumatic crisis, Rathjen works hard to show that violence is, ultimately, the best and even only way to effectively end slavery in the world. Chakra cleverly and, yes, brutally, murders the ship's slavers one by one in the film's climax and takes command of the ship.
I wept at this point -- I was unable to for so much of the movie because it was a little too sad, a little too real -- out of something close to relief that Chakra was able to do what so few other enslaved protagonists in films do. How many slave movies have you seen that end in the righteous, grisly deaths of the slave owners, enacted by the slaves themselves? It's a magnificent and uncommon turn that prepares us for the remarkably unsentimental ending: Chakra returns home, leaving his brainwashed mates on the boat in a confused, despairing stupor, only to find himself unable to go back to his father. Is it because he cannot possibly relate to his family again? Maybe, but I think the ending -- Chakra looking at his father laboring in the paddy, then turning and leaving -- suggests that Chakra is in fact refusing to return to another form of slavery after declaring his own freedom. Heartbreaking, it most certainly is, but profoundly optimistic.
I pray this movie becomes available for general audiences.
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