The British director Thomas Clay’s controversial — and rather ropey — debut feature, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, established him as an aspiring enfant terrible and a provocateur based on the Gaspar No? model of sexual violence and in-your-face cinematography. His second feature, Soi Cowboy, confirms his arthouse cine-literacy but suggests that he might not know what to do with all the movie references that he spreads liberally through his work. Sharing a Bangkok apartment are a corpulent Danish man and a heavily pregnant Thai woman. Clay focuses on the mundane minutiae of their lives. It’s heavy going, although there’s one amusingly audacious moment in which the doughy Dane asks a bootleg DVD seller: “Do you have a copy of The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael?” Which may be the only time those words have ever been spoken, anywhere.
15, 117mins