There are various factors for a film to tell the story it is telling. One of which is the question the filmmakers have to ask themselves before even starting their production,  they have to figure who their audience is going to be. In most films the purpose behind answering this question would solely be for the marketing.

While in many other films, there are more reasons to it, such as how the audience would perceive the message of the film with their cultural background and how the filmmakers would manage to send their meesage through the cultural background.

The End of the Affair, a British film released in 1999 and The Sin, a Thai film released earlier this year (2003) should make a good comparison since they share one of the main themes in adultry. The two films give different aspects to this universal sin while the way their stories are told to make the audience sympathise with the characters depends on the different social values and beliefs.

The Sin is a remake of a film by the same Thai title Shoo (or secrets lovers). The original was directed by Piak Poster, released in 1972 and the version we are discussing is by Ong-art Singlumpong. The remake is conducted differently. While the original was a suspense with a famous twist ending, the remake is a drama concerning Oedipus complex and domestic violence.

“I’ve been questioning if guilt and righteousness could occur to any person’s love at the same time. Either one would let themselves stepping into love or let love stepping into their life, what one must face is how to go through such pain.” The Sin starts with the saying of Riam’s, the main character, to herself, representing the voice of the director’s and the screen writer’s to one disclosure in the matter of adultery, at least for Riam’s case.

The story begins when Teap, a photographer, coming to visit his father to clarify the rage and sorrow which he supposes to have ceased after over ten years of running away from home. Chaung, Teap’s father, a former police officer has now become Chief Chaung of this unidentified island, assuming from the costume and people’s names to be located in the South of Thailand. He now runs a fishery business, owning many fishing boats and is one of the most respectable figures on the island.

Chaung (Sorapong Chatree) has been married to Riam, a woman of his son’s age for a while. The late-twenties Riam is a traditionally perfect wife. She is pretty. She takes care of everything in the household, not only the chores, trying to make home the most pleasant place to live. She earns some money dying clothes at home (one of the things that remind me of Ju Dou, the Chinese film by Yimuo Zhang, released in1990, but since I am more interested in comparing the aspects of Western and Eastern audience and the filmmakers’ art of justifying adultery according to their audience cultural background, I’ll spare The Sin on Judo). Life should be lived happily and humbly if it hadn’t been wrong from the start.

To the audience’s wonder on the Middle-regional-sounding of Riam’s name, Riam reveals the reason to her marriage has been for gratitude since Chaung saved her life from a shipwreck while he was fishing in the gulf with his men. From my perspective it is clear that Riam has nowhere else to go and some of the male islanders’ attitude shows it wouldn’t be save for her to remain without such protection.

Chaung is a sexist and sexually abusive husband. He has to be, otherwise the Thai audience would never sympathise with Riam and Teap. On the other hand, Henry Miles in The End of The Affair who is supposedly an ideal husband in the British society of his time, perhaps even in all cultures for all time.

The End of The Affair, an adaptation of the novel by Graham Greene and a remake of the film released in 1955 under the same name, this version we are discussing is directed by Neil Jordan who also writes the screenplay, starring Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore and Stephen Rea, sets in London from 1939 to late 1940’s. Maurice Bendrix (Fiennes), a rather successful novelist has had an affair with the wife of his acquaintance for five years since he and Sarah Miles (Moore) fell in love at first sight.

Sarah had been married to Henry (Rea) for ten years when the lovers first met. The love Sarah has for Henry seems to me as being a companionate love. Or perhaps she doesn’t love him at all, but remain with him for her duty and like Riam, for the life he can provide her. She says to Bendrix or her Maurice with honesty, “Perhap, there’s no other kind (of love)”, when she wants to end the affair.

Henry is everything of the opposite to such an abusive egoistic husband as Chief Chaung who, for some reason gets his wife to call him ‘Chief’ (the Thai word used here is ‘Nai’ which can also be translated as ‘master’). Henry is indeed everything he seems, a gentle man and a cultured intellect working in a rather high position in a ministry. Sarah once refers to him, “My husband is a good man, good men don’t have secrets”, this also foreshadows her guilt in the affair happening shortly after.

The film is cleared from the second half to be portraying the religious idea of love; love is universal and there is only one kind. The target audience of a Christian background can sympathise with Sarah in the confession she makes and in the reason she gives up Bendrix for the promise she makes to God in exchange of her lover’s safety.

Henry is impotent and as Bendrix says,“Sarah’s human”, human is, and always will be imperfect. When for Riam, if the Chief was impotent instead of being violent, she would be viewed by the target Thai audience of a (mutated-from-the-original-teaching) Buddhist background as being solely lustful. Perhaps, due to the Thai gender inequity where the Thai women are always expected to able to repress their sexual desire, not only in the way that women should not be lustful, but some of the Thai people even go as far as to believe that women hardly have sexual desire.

In the Thai society, the sexism in the city is not as obvious as in the country. In the urban, gender equality is probably only the face of what is actually the Thai’s desire to (create an image to) measure up with the so-called developed countries. While in such the rural area as where The Sin is set, the women depend their lives almost completely on their men, whether good or bad, pleasant or miserable, feeling captivated or free, depends solely on whom they choose to, are allowed to or forced to marry.

This still-existing system of society shares a certain aspect to the life of Sarah Miles, setting in the passed century of England, when and where a woman’s success was measured and judged by her husband’s social rank and occupation, rather than her own.

The difference between Sarah and Riam in a cultural aspect lies in the reason they admit to have kept them in marriage, although both remain married for what valued highly in their religions. Sarah says the wedding vow is the first promise she’s made to God and she has made only two promises in her entire life, the other is to end her affair with Bendrix. In Riam’s case it is gratitude.

Thai people value gratitude highly as it reflects in parents selling their daughters for prostitution. One of the rhetorical questions the filmmakers maybe asking the audience is; can gratitude be taken the wrong way? Does Chief Chaung have the right to rape his wife? Does he even have the right to claim a woman whose life he has saved for his own sake of sexual desire and companionship in the first place?

There is, however, another point to analyse the characters in these relationships and that is their mental strength or what I prefer to call, spiritual strength. In The Sin, Riam’s expects Chief Chaung to finish the little boat he has started building for her which he intentionally leaves unfinished. Her wish is fulfilled when Teap comes along, he finishes her boat, providing her with the freedom she’s always longed for.

I can not help but question why she wouldn’t at least try to finish the boat on her own. She could learn by observing and asking the islanders. She could build it while Chaung is out fishing. Doesn’t one earn their independence from one’s own sought?

Riam lies her life into the palms of her men’s hands. She lets herself being dragged along into Teap’s Oedipus complex and trapped in the web of a father and son’s rage. Sarah breaks up the affair for her guilt, belief and faith and later on chooses to flee with her Maurice once she’s learned she is dying. Sarah is spiritually stronger than her men, they rely on her. Eventually, her pure love and the love Henry and Maurice have for her draw them together in harmony.

I would blame Riam’s cowardice on the cultural evolution, the traditional belief that suppresses women from thinking for themselves.

The cultural difference can not be viewed much from Teap and Maurice. The films hardly show any of the two men’s background and social life. We only get to see a few shots of Teap’s childhood and the day he runs away from home when is mother commits suicide. Both men seem to have no commitment. Teap obviously feels more guilty than Maurice. And perhaps, Maurice doesn’t even feel guilty at all, what’s always killing him is his great jealousy.

A secret lover should never get jealous, they are supposed to know their position in the relationship. That is the Thai idea through the media who like to portray jealousy secret lovers in ridiculous or undignified manner. Teap’s jealousy shows in a sad scene of hearing the woman he loves being raped by his father night after night. He can not do anything about it for he believes himself to be weaker and spiritually smaller than his father, and partly because he has been formed in the culture where the social value is held that parents are always right. To my perspective, his feelings in this scene tend to be more of sympathy towards Riam and rage towards his father, rather than jealousy.

Maurice tells Henry that “A jealous lover is less ridiculous than a jealous husband”, true in a view of an egoistic artist, and true, considering Henry’s social rank. What face is there for Maurice to lose if people find out he is a jealous lover who hires a private detective to follow Sarah? He is after all a novelist, and the stereotype of people taking this career is being peculiar and decadent, they always have something to hide and other things to justify. Henry, on the other hand, the good man, the respectable man who works for the government, has a reputation to risk if he is found lining up with those jealous husbands suspecting their wives of committing adultery.

According to Henry, “Jealousy happens when there’ desire.”, in the end he invites Maurice to stay at his place together with him and Sarah so the two men can take care of their dying beloved woman, showing that perhaps true love does not include jealousy and that love and desire are different matters, although many times the two matters come in the same package. Sarah herself tells Maurice he can sleep with any other woman as he’d please, for the only thing she desires of him is his happiness.

Chief Chaung’s jealousy only drives him to solitude. His love is possessive and aggressive, and perhaps his feeling toward his wife should not be named love, for, perhaps, he is not capable of loving anyone but himself. Teap and Riam’s love is true and full of passion and compassion, but they are too weak, too sensitive and maybe too impractical to struggle in this world.

The same message the two films send to their audience is that true love is pure and innocent within itself. To me, love is a universal language, but still, there is a condition in this world called culture and tradition where that pure love is not innocent for its consequences faced by the lovers themselves. Love is perhaps, a crime.