The Christmas Dream Musical Analysis: Thailand's Pioneering Musical in Decades Delivers a Heavy Dose of Heartfelt Pageantry.
Reportedly the initial musical production from Thailand in five decades, The Christmas Dream is directed by British filmmaker Paul Spurrier and offers up a fascinating mixture of the contemporary and the classic. It functions as a modern-day rags-to-riches tale that travels from the northern highlands to the urban sprawl of Bangkok, featuring old-school Technicolor aesthetics and an abundance of heartstring-tugging musical highlights. The music and lyrics are the work of Spurrier, set to an symphonic soundtrack from Mickey Wongsathapornpat.
A Journey of Innocence and Ethics
Exhibiting a steely resolve but in a more diminutive package, Amata Masmalai takes on the role of Lek, a ten-year-old schoolgirl. She is forced to escape after her violent stepfather Nin (played by Vithaya Pansringarm) brutally kills her mother. Venturing forth with only her one-legged doll Bella for companionship, Lek relies on a unyielding sense of right and wrong, directed toward a new home by the ghost of her deceased mother. Her path is peppered with a series of colorful companions who challenge her principles, among them a pampered rich girl in dire need of a companion and a quack doctor hawking dubious miracle cures.
The director's love of the song-and-dance format is abundantly clear – or, to be precise, it is resplendent. The early countryside sequences in particular capture the ruddy glow reminiscent of The Sound of Music.
Dance and Cinematic Flair
The choreography frequently has a lively visual energy. A particular standout breaks out on a corporate business park, which serves as Lek's introduction to the Bangkok rat race. With business executives tumbling in and out of a great clockwork procession, this represents the singular moment where The Christmas Dream approaches the stylized complexity found in classic era musical cinema.
Musical and Narrative Shortcomings
Although richly orchestrated, a lot of the music is too anodyne musically and lyrically. Instead of studding songs at key points in the plot, Spurrier saturates the film with them, seemingly trying to mask a somewhat weak storyline. Substantial adversity is present solely at the beginning and conclusion – with the tragedy of Lek's mother and when her spirits wane in Bangkok – is there enough challenge to balance an overly simple and saccharine narrative arc.
Brief hints of mild class satire, such as when Lek's stroke of luck has avaricious villagers crawling all over her, are unlikely to satisfy more mature viewers. While might embrace the general optimism, the foreign backdrop fails to disguise a underlying narrative blandness.
