Chocolate (2008)

A Thai martial arts picture from 2008, directed by Prachya Pinkaew, in which a teenage girl named Zen beats her way through a ledger of debtors to fund her mother's cancer treatment. The cast is Thai and Japanese, which is simply what the story requires, and the lead is a young woman who performs her own stunts with a commitment that borders on the medically inadvisable. There is no messaging here about who should be cast in what. The film exists in Bangkok, and Bangkok shows up.

Zen is autistic, and this is not decoration. Her condition is the engine of the premise: she learns combat by mimicking what she sees, absorbing Bruce Lee and Tony Jaa from the television and Muay Thai from the students downstairs. A rival fighter named Thomas has Tourette's, and his erratic rhythm briefly troubles her before she adapts. The film treats both characters as fighters first and case studies never, which is either admirable restraint or an accident of genre. We will call it restraint. Elsewhere, the pickings are thin. No romance between women, no subtext, no cause. The moneylending and debt collection supply stakes, not a sermon about capital. Nobody lectures. Nobody delivers a speech about the environment. The villains are villains because they are villains.

What remains is a lean, frequently brutal action film with a slushy plot and stunts that have aged better than most of its contemporaries. Quentin Tarantino placed it among his favorites of the century, which tells us something about the man and something about the choreography. It is not trying to improve anyone. It is trying to make a small girl kick a large man through a window, and it succeeds. We respect the clarity of that ambition, even as we note how little there is to classify.