Director Pen-ek Ratanaruang's racily picaresque and sentimental tale pays homage to traditional Thai pop/folk music and also to Thai cinema, with a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the well-known export Tears of the Black Tiger.

Pan (Suppakorn Kitsuwon) is a young would-be singer who falls in love with Sadaw (Siriyakorn Pukkavesh); his romantic life and musical career are fatefully interrupted by a military call-up and lots of misadventures follow.

Ratanaruang's movie has an easy swing to it, though it's tricky to see exactly how much to believe in a hero who abandons his apparently fervent love so easily, or how much to credit a story which appears to have as its moral the idea that hearth and home are best, after all.