Agrarian Utopia

Directed by Uruphong Raksasad. 2009.  121 minutes.
In Thai with English subtitles

Study areas: Geography, Human Rights, Contemporary Issues, Farming,

Five minutes into Thai-director Uruphong Raksasad’s fictional, documentary-style film Agrarian Utopia, we find ourselves watching a 2007 rally of the People’s Power Party, a party allied with former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.  The male heads of the two farming households on which the film focuses for its two hours sit and listen.  One of them loses interest quickly and walks off, just as People’s Power Party leader Samak Sundaravej comes to the podium.  As we follow the farmer winding his way out of the crowd, Samak laments that Thailand has suffered from a coup, despite having crafted a constitution in 1997 that he says was “among the world’s most democratic.”  He refers to the 2006 coup that removed Thaksin from office. 

Having found himself under a mountain of debt, the main character already has decided to take his family to the countryside and farm with his friend.  The remainder of the film follows the two families through two seasons of the rice crop, the first ending in a disappointing payout from the middleman that is mostly claimed by the landlord who needs to pay back a car loan of his own, and the second ending prematurely with the landowner announcing that he has sold the land and needs the farmers to vacate it for the new owners.  We watch through the two seasons as the families plant and harvest rice, struggle to train a water buffalo to plow the field, and scrounge for any available food source: snakes and rats from the fields, beehives that they find in trees and on the nearby temple.  We watch as their children bathe in rain puddles and split their time between helpful contributions to the families’ tasks and play.  The slow scenes of what A.O. Scott in the New York Times called the “weary endurance” of the farmers test the endurance of the modern film-watcher but also succeed in transporting the viewers to the wet-rice agricultural life that remains common to so many rural citizens of Southeast Asia.

Thaksin Shinawatra’s political success is attributed to the rural populations of Thailand voting for him and later for his sister Yingluck in support of their populist policies; from this, one might think that Agrarian Utopia would depict some of that pro-Thaksin sentiment among the farmers on which it focuses.  However, the discussion of politics returns only once in the middle of the film.  “The opposition and the government, it's like they're acting in a movie with us as the audience: they're making a movie for us to watch,” declares one of the farmers during a dinner, juxtaposing our experience of watching this non-dramatic, non-climactic film against the real-life drama of Thai street politics in Bangkok.  Referring to the Electoral Commission, one of his interlocutors says, “They must at least believe in something,” only to be told, “These people have absolutely no principles.” 

At the end of the film, their attempt at farming having failed because of local and international market forces over which they have no control, the farmers find themselves back in Bangkok.  Far from the dark nighttime and wide-open fields of the countryside, the main character walks through competing protests from the anti-Thaksin and anti-Samak People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) and anti-PAD groups that call for PAD leader Sondhi Limthongkul to be skinned alive.  As we watch him walk alone through some abandoned steel pillars, the credits roll.

Director Uruphong Raksasad was born in northern Thailand to a farming family.  In the mid-1990s, he went to Bangkok and studied film and photography, working for five years on feature films after he graduated.  In the mid-2000s, he returned to the countryside and began working on the “rice trilogy” that began with Stories from the North and concluded with last year’s The Songs of Rice.  On the one hand, there seems little utopian about the quest for day-to-day survival that drives the characters to contemplate defiling a temple to get at a beehive or to shoot at a wild dog in hope of securing dinner.  On the other hand, the endless (and seemingly senseless) name-calling and protesting that concludes the film reminds us that the most utopian thing imaginable may be small groups of people working together in harmony for small but concrete ends.

 
Matthew S. Winters is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.  His research interests include the political economy of foreign aid and voter attitudes toward corruption.  He has conducted research in Indonesia, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Uganda.  He has published articles in Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, World Development, and World Politics, among other outlets. 

Agrarian Utopia is distrubuted in the U.S. by Alexander Street Press.

Last Updated: January 28, 2016