A night at the movies.

In a town called Monywa, I went to a movie at the Moonlight Cinema. From the outside, it looked like a charmingly past-its-prime old movie hall. Inside, it had more of an apocalyptic ambience. It honestly looked it hadn’t been touched in decades and had just been left to rot. Huge panels on the ceiling were either missing or water-damaged and hanging perilously. The dust was so thick I could taste it in the back of my throat. And there were bats. Bats swooping around my head.

At first I had the theater to myself, though only the balcony was open; the entire orchestra level, composed of long wooden pews, was closed, probably for safety reasons. A teen boy & girl came in right before the movie started. I heard her popping gum for a while, then it stopped, but I didn’t turn around to see if they were making out.

The evening’s program began with a slide show of various announcements, military propaganda posters and an ad or two, all so damaged they looked like they had been recovered from a shipwreck. There was a short shot of the Burmese flag waving and some martial music, and then the movie commenced.

The film (I don’t know the title) was also in terrible shape–so many lines on the screen it was like watching it through a comb. The credit sequence was a music montage of a bunch of guys wearing masks and leather greaser jackets cruising around splashing people with water and getting sprayed by hoses at Thingyan, the Burmese version of Songkran. It had a strange, experimental-movie vibe; I was wondering for a second if I had stumbled across the Burmese Scorpio Rising.

Abruptly, the main character sees his mom, or maybe she’s his sister, walking down the street carrying groceries and he rushes over to help her. There are one or two lines of dialogue, then another music montage shows him doing chores around the house; clearly he is of outstanding virtue. I can’t tell how old he is; he looks to be a man playing a younger role, like the “teenagers” in Reefer Madness or 90210. I realize I can hardly tell how old anyone is in this film or even what decade it was made in.

A bit more dialogue, and then another montage: This time our hero is cooking up a storm, in fast-motion, and making a big mess. The movie’s been playing for 15 minutes and there have been about ten lines of dialogue and three music sequences.

The next day comes, and our man is off to work with a spring in his step, carrying one of those multi-tiered steel lunch boxes that workers use in SE Asia. He looks down at it and pats it a few times–clearly it contains what he was working so hard on in the kitchen last night.

Our hero enters the medical clinic where he works (as a janitor, maybe? He doesn’t look like a doctor) and we get to the crux of the movie: he sees the pretty (ish) nurse-receptionist whom he’s in love with. He stops in the doorway and steps back into the shadows to watch her, like a total creep. Nurse Love Interest is on the telephone and has a big lunchpail on her desk, much bigger than the one he’s carrying–which he’s obviously brought to give to her, because he looks crestfallen.

The guy on the other end of the line is either the nurse’s sugar daddy or her real daddy. I can’t tell if she’s really saying romantic things to him, or, Three’s Company-style, our hero is only hearing one half of the conversation and completely misinterpreting. Whichever it is, she’s obviously thanking this man for the gigantic lunch. Our hero’s really upset now. He’s got tears in his eyes and he looks down at his own measly lunchbox like he hates it.

At this point the power went out in the theater and I decided to escape before the bats killed me or the balcony collapsed.

PS The jilted shnook is the star of almost 100 percent of the folk/upcountry music videos I’ve seen in SE Asia. Seemingly every single video ends with a guy looking down teary-eyed at the ring he’s saved up for months to buy, or finally working up the courage to talk to the girl he secretly has a crush on, only to see her walking off hand-in-hand with her rich, handsome fiancé.