Tears of the Black Tiger feels like a movie made a hundred years from now, when filmmakers have only the vaguest notion of the boundaries we in the past recognized between genres. It's one part Rebel Without a Cause, one part bloody Peckinpah, one part early Sam Raimi, and one part Bollywood-style frivolity with a Thai twist. Despite the love and enormous amount of work that obviously went into the making of it, I can't honestly say the film works. It's too eager to please, too overconfident in its ability to impress, and generally too over-the-top to make for a good experience. The press materials claim that Tears of the Black Tiger "offers nostalgia as future shock." I don't know what that means, frankly, but I guess it has something to do with the fact that one minute the film can be presenting itself as a serious western, and the next minute it is showing us animated bullets knocking against each other in mid-air like something out of a Tex Avery cartoon.

Written and directed by Wisit Sasanatieng, the film is the story of Sera Dum (Chartchai Ngamsan), a poor peasant who falls in love with Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi) a girl who lives in a giant, antebellum-style mansion and has little to do but lounge around all day in gazebos and wait for someone to come along and throw her over their shoulder. The murder of Dum's father causes him to descend into an outlaw circuit, where he soon distinguishes himself as "Black Tiger" a straight-shooting gunslinger who can actually direct the ricochet of a bullet to its intended target. (uh-huh) By the time Black Tiger has blown enough holes through people to work his way back to Rumpoey's world, she is already betrothed to a slimy police captain who has no intention of giving up any ground. It's The Departed, only with bad humor instead of good, an unnecessary Pulp Fiction-style time jumble, and a palpable absence of seriousness that makes us care very little whether the good guy or the bad guy gets the girl.

The film's press kit goes to great trouble to explain that certain scenes will have resonance only to those who are steeped in Thai folklore, which you can take for whatever it's worth. One scene in particular involves a confrontation between Black Tiger and Mahesuan, a potential friend/potential rival. For this scene, the film suddenly shifts to a garish, painted backdrop. A snake is about to drop down from a hanging branch onto Mahesuan, when Black Tiger shoots it clean away, saving the other man's life and incurring some kind of vague life debt. This is supposedly a variant of Likay, a kind of performance art that goes on in county fairs all in Thailand. The film's insistence on bright, unlikely color schemes -- Rumpoey's mansion is painted in hot pink -- is also confounding to an audience member who is expected to guess the reasoning behind this over-stylization. Then again, the over-saturated color scheme sometimes keeps the attention focused when the film would otherwise lag, so it's not all bad.

In fact, the patently false atmospheres created for each scene can sometimes be quite beautiful -- I'm thinking in particular of a scene in which a young Dum and Rumpoey row through a pea-green swamp which is peppered with giant green lily pads. The color contrast makes what was formerly a putrid swamp seem like a river snaking through the middle of a primeval garden. The young couple's relaxing row will be interrupted by a group of bullies, in a scene that seems very reminiscent of Stand by Me, where you are successfully drawn in enough to never consider that these are just a bunch of young punks who pose no real threat to anyone. From a kid's point of view, bullies can represent the ultimate in negative authority. Later in the film, grown-up Dum, now christened Black Tiger, will have the chance to run into the same group of bullies again, who have found nothing to do in the intervening years but continue walking around in a pack, bullying people they find up and down the river.

I'm not sure if Tears of the Black Tiger could be mined for an American remake; the deliberate style contrasts would require a huge departure from the source material. The scene-to-scene mix of parody and straight story-telling would also not work in an American film, where audiences demand to at least know what movie they are supposed to be watching. Other scenes in the film, such as one in which Dum and Mahesuan undergo a bizarre bonding ritual that involves a lot of dancing and a lot of blood, would be chucked entirely. With that in mind, my guess is that this is one film that will be left untouched by the remake virus. Whether or not you enjoy the film may depend heavily on your knowledge and love of traditional Thai cinema, the extent to which you like to see genres, color schemes and timelines thrown to the wind, and whether you can handle a film that is one minute drenched in blood and the next minute drenched in saccharine.