Postcards from hell

One thing about being on a long-distance flight: you get to check out a lot of movies that won’t be making it to your local cineplex.

Wish You Were Here is one of those movies, a 2012 Australian thriller written and directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith that asks: What happens to a bunch of foreigners who head to a Southeast Asian paradise as a quartet, but return home as a trio?

Or, spun another way, Wish You Were Here is Hangover II remade as a horror movie.

We open on Alice (Felicity Price, who vaguely resembles a blonde Minnie Driver) enjoying a sunset view of a Cambodian beach with Jeremy (Antony Starr), who’s dating Alice’s younger sister Steph (Teresa Palmer). They marvel at the unspoiled beauty that Asia has to offer. So you know something horrible is about to happen.

No, not a tsunami. Cut to Alice’s husband Dave (Joel Edgerton, who vaguely resembles Conan O’Brien) wandering through an early-dawn wasteland, shirtless, hollow-eyed, a starved-looking dog crossing his path as he tries to find his way home.

What happened to Dave? Wish You Were Here unfolds in the modern style of nonlinearity, so clues from the past emerge slowly: Steph has coaxed Alice, who’s pregnant, into taking a vacation with her in Cambodia, since she’ll be tied down with another baby soon enough; Alice convinces hubby Dave, who’s reluctant because he wants to save up for home improvements, to come along. Steph is going to Cambodia on the invite of her Aussie boyfriend Jeremy, a hotshot young importer/exporter who has “business ties” in Cambodia.

Beach party bonfires are usually a prerequisite for mindless abandon leading to disaster in movies like Wish You Were Here.

Already this Jeremy sounds a little dodgy. As it becomes clear that, at some point during the vacation, Jeremy has gone missing, the trio head back to Australia and try to piece together what happened.

What happened, as in a slew of movies like this, is that Westerners fall for the exotic beauty of Southeast Asia, loosen up just a little bit, and are then punished in very, very bad ways.

We’ve seen the genre unfold over the past decade or so, as foreign audiences have begun to take notice of Southeast Asia. It’s a cinematic condition I call Southeast Asian Whiplash. You’ll find it everywhere from Claire Danes in Brokedown Palace and Vince Vaughan in Return to Paradise to Leo DiCaprio in The Beach, and of course, the Hangover movies: it starts with Westerners catching a whiff of local culture, starting to enjoy the smiling, happy faces, despite the poverty, and interacting with the beer-swilling locals; cue scenes of shopping at local bazaars, awkwardly haggling over prices and then giving in to laughter; segue to a beautiful beach at sunset, a sense of deep relaxation and contentment beginning to wash over the overstressed Westerners… Perhaps a bonfire beach party at night, where someone’s passing around little pink pills… Next thing you know, people are dancing blissfully, long blonde hair whipping around in slow motion, lots of disturbing jump cuts… And then…

Boom! You’ve got a bad case of Southeast Asian Whiplash — as in looking back over your shoulder, shuddering in horror, and bleating: “Gah! What did I do last night? Where are my clothes? And how did this tattoo get here!??”

Cut to dazed Westerners waking the next morning, wondering where their passport and wallet went, their hotel keys, their spouse…

In a way, this is an age-old genre, the idea of Paradise Lost, Eden Interrupted, etc. The formula applies just as easily to the Domestic Thriller, such as Fatal Attraction, Pacific Heights or Unlawful Entry, and even Teen Slasher flicks such as Friday the 13th, Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street. You can bask in paradise as long as you want, these movies seem to say, as long as you don’t cross the line.

Suffice to say, three of the four characters in Wish You Were Here cross the line, and much misery and punishment ensues. Dave becomes paranoid back in Australia, imagining that someone is following him around. Other secrets gradually emerge, and director Darcy-Smith has a style and pacing that the plane’s movie synopsis accurately described as “taut.” No wonder the film was an audience hit at 2012’s Sundance Festival.

Posing with tarantulas: one more reason why it’s more fun in Southeast Asia.

But in a way, it’s disturbing that Western cinema still tends to regard Asia — and particularly Southeast Asia — as a place that’s full of wonder and exotic beauty, yet also fraught with peril and danger at every other turn. I mean, a whole generation has been backpacking Southeast Asia and blogging the hell out of it. They must have learned a few things by now — such as don’t accept little pills at the beach from strangers. True, the occasional Aussie or foreigner still gets caught drug smuggling and sometimes does get executed, but one might argue that, if you play the game, you surely must know the rules.

The other lesson one takes away from Wish You Were Here is that grim tales of Southeast Asian Whiplash hardly do great box office. Check the combined grosses of the above films in the genre (Brokedown Palace, Return to Paradise, and this one) and then compare them to the weekend grosses for Hangover II, which is set in Thailand and features fairly stereotypical cultural entanglements and yet is played for laughs, and you’ll see what does boffo box office. Apparently, the key is to make light of the situation. And make sure someone takes pictures, so you can remember what happened the night before.