In One For the Road, two old friends share a last drink before heading home.
Baz Poonpiraya’s road journey, One For the Road, opens vividly in a bar of the same name as smooth operator Boss (Tor Thanapob) shakes cocktails and mixes with the ladies that perpetually surround him in his seemingly charmed big city existence. When old friend Aood (Ice Natara) interrupts his latest conquest to ask for a favor, he allows his loyalty to pull him away from his penthouse and nightlife, however reluctantly at first, to drive him to meet an old flame.
Aood, who is dying from cancer, stepped away from the very same penthouse lifestyle himself years ago, abandoning Boss and their dreams to open a bar together for the girl in question, a red-haired dancer named Alice who wanted to start a dance studio. Though their relationship, like Alice’s red hair, didn’t last long, Aood hopes to see her one last time before dying. Gratified to discover that she misses him, Aood gains the closure that he seeks and deletes Alice’s phone number from his phone before moving on, without ever letting Alice know that he is dying.
He then further guilts Boss into continuing the journey back to their native Thailand, explaining that he’s gone through all of his connections and wrapped things up with most everyone, except for his most difficult relationships — those that he feels he must see face to face. Boss, to his credit, never complains as he willingly carries Aood on this ultimate burden of friendship as the two revisit Aood’s past.
Like How It Ends, another film that premiered at Sundance this past weekend whose protagonist journeys through a catalogue of past relationships as they face certain death, each successive meeting brings Aood closer to difficult and long-buried truths. But while How It Ends veers towards comedy, self-reflection, and resolution, Aood’s path wallows in a pattern of destructive behaviors that have left behind him a wake of regret involving heartbroken women and possibly abandoned daughters. Rather than offering apologies or closure for these women, Aood imposes on them awkwardly and almost takes masochistic delight in seeing them cry and reliving the pain he has caused them before deleting them permanently from his phone and life.
Along the way, Aood and Boss play cassette tapes of Aood’s father’s DJ show. Suffering the regret of having missed his father’s funeral, Aood unearths his ashes from their final resting place for a self-indulgent scattering along a random roadside. Deleting his father’s name from the phone leaves one final number: Boss.
The two continue their journey to Boss’s hometown, where Boss, a master bartender but not much of a drinker himself, demonstrates his skills in mixology by crafting Aood’s bittersweet emotional journey into a series of drinks: Anna’s Dance, Noona’s Tears, After the Rain. It’s after tasting these concoctions that Aood tells Boss that he has one last regret that he’d like to face, and reminds him of the one time he knows of that Boss drank himself into despair.
From here, the film veers into a flashback of a younger and far less confident Boss, facing and escaping a heartrending family dynamic that paints an entirely new portrait of him as latching onto Aood for friendship in his lonely penthouse, and surrounding himself with empty relationships as a way of building up a wall against the memory of early rejections that have defined him. In the kind of circular and introspective conjoined journeys that signify Hong Kong producer Wong Kar Wai’s legendary body of work, playboy Boss revisits the one relationship that ever meant anything to him: the woman who mixed him his first drink.
Providing inspiration for both his career and the name of his bar, the bartender Prim (Violette Wautier) both comforted Boss as his family abandoned him, and traveled with him to New York to pursue their shared dream of opening a bar together. The flashback continues through their gritty early days as a couple struggling to make it as immigrants, until she meets Aood, who helps her land an exciting new job, and unbeknownst to Boss, hopes to wrangle her away for himself. Through a series of misunderstandings exacerbated by Aood, the two lovers separate, losing touch over the years as they each pursue their goals separately. In perhaps his sole redeeming act, Aood nudges the two towards a hopeful and poetic reunion.
One For the Road premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, January 28th, and plays again Saturday, January 30th.
