Ploy

A couple married for seven years check into a Bangkok hotel early in the morning after a long flight. The husband cannot sleep, goes downstairs, and while smoking at the bar meets a young woman called Ploy. When she says she has nowhere to go, he brings her up to the room. When his wife wakes and finds a stranger beside the bed, everything that has been accumulating under seven years of marriage comes out at once in that one room. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang builds the film almost in a single location, with a sense of time made heavy by sleeplessness and heat. Jealousy here is not an event but the name of something that has been sitting there a long while. The narrative leaves the boundary between waking and dreaming undefined; a second line running through the hotel, between the chambermaid and the barman, unfolds without it being clear how much of it happens. The film screened in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2007.