Tears of the Black Tiger marks director/writer Wisit Sasanatieng’s return to those "heroic years of Thai genre cinema." The first of that nation’s films ever accepted for Cannes, this work is both homage and parody -- and parody of such heroic years movies that were in the first place unselfconscious parodies of Hollywood’s golden era output. Humorously dipping into kitsch ‘thirties-‘forties cowboy fare, with equal spoonfuls of cinema romance melodrama, strained through national cultural adaptations of the original Hollywoodiana, topped with gangster-as-rebel seasoning, the pastiche needs some tighter editing and may bewilder and soon bore audiences here. For the patient few, however, this affectionate movie is a throwback pleasure.

The two essential stories, of love and of outlawry, are an hourglass figure connected in the middle by reference back to an opening pergola, or sala, itself linked with two black-and-white headshot photos and associated with a retold legend of the standard doomed poor boy-rich girl romance. Universal fairy tale, this is a core around which revolve impossibly disparate parts, a decade’s worth of separate paths, familiar yet untoward fates, encounters and separations, tenderness and violence, loyalty and betrayal. That these pieces are somewhat chronologically confusing is no detriment, for the thread does emerge, and, in any case, all is united by the spirit of the thing.

There are echoes from old Asian renditions of old American soapers and oaters; and heavy retro devices include superimposition and fringed supersaturated color (transferred to video tape, heightened, than back to 35 mm), painted backdrops, an iris circle-out shot and tongue-in-cheek wipes, a Morriconi-clone score, and loud hammy dialogue mostly by actors with no prior feature experience -- plus some modern bright spurting blood, severed limbs, slow-motion bullets.

All this of course for fun, in fond nostalgia, but it must finally be at the service of story, for playful technique and reflections alone do not make a movie. Here, too, TBT goes back to comfortable stock-in-trade. Poor, respectful, brave, impetuous and barefoot, the boy Seua Dum (Suwinit Panjamawat) toils for his father Kamnan Dua (Kanchit Kwanpracha), headman for a wealthy former hoodlum. Visiting from school, rich little only daughter Rumpoey Rajassena bullies him into taking her rowing, on which adventure she tells him of the city and ocean shore. He in turn recounts the Sala raw nang legend, “Awaiting the Maiden,” and, defending them both against immodest advances from young Koh and two others, receives a crescent wound that will scar and rescues her from a canal red with blood. Father canes him unconscious for endangering the Young Miss, but, gratefully repentant before returning to Bangkok, she leaves him a handkerchief containing (we will learn) a harmonica and vows childish love.

Years later the two meet again at university, where, conscious of the social gulf, Dum (Chartchai Ngamsan) denies his identity, then again defends grown Rumpoey’s honor against grown Koh and two others, for which he is expelled. Coaxing out his identity and love, she has them chauffeured to the shore, where they make plans to be together forever despite parents’ opposition.

Dum returns home to find the household slaughtered by a bandit who aspires to be headman. Pursuing the killers, he bites off too much, is surrounded and about to kill himself but saved by rebel-bandit Fai (Sombati Medhanee, Guiness record-holder for his over six hundred films), who recognizes the rifle he had given the dead father. The hero joins Fai’s Tigers, among whom, in hokey cowboy duds, he becomes the feared number one gunslinger. In an opening shoot-out now explained, he guns down the rival gang with the sole help of stage-mustached Mahesuan (Supakorn Kitsuwon), the jealous ex-right hand who is to prove as treacherous as any of the other baddies-in-black.

Meanwhile, back in the garish yellow governor’s palace, her father has risen to be Supanbori’s governor and betrothes her to ambitious new straight-arrow Police Captain Kumjorn (Arawat Ruangvuth), who is sent to wipe out the outlaws. Though the framed photo of his fiancée inspires Dum to spare his life, the Captain will prove ungrateful and, worse, nasty with his bride; Mahesuan, too, shows his true colors though Dum has saved him, as well.

Kept from hanging herself by loyal Nurse (Naiyana Shiwanun), Rumpoey glumly goes to face the wedding music. Fai, however, has selected the nuptial night for his grand attack, while a thinly disguised Dum appears to warn and then save his true love. The above is a straightening out of the film’s difficult chronology, but all ends in a fitting Raberd poa, Khaow pao kratom, “Bomb the mountain, Burn the huts” 1960s genre finale. There can be no other way, for sweet “life is just a long sadness.”

Disdaining to subtitle the Thai credits, with doses of Leone sardonicism Tears of the Black Tiger is at the same time serious parody and loving tribute, the sincerest flattery. 

(Released by Magnolia Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)