I Recommend: The Love of Siam

It is always a pleasant feeling whenever i find a great and meaningful movie. But sometimes, the opposite happens: this great and meaningful movie finds you, speaks to you; and you are taken aback, overwhelmed, affected, changed.

I did not plan to watch the Thai film The Love of Siam. I thought it was just another gay-themed film where the highlight would be that one hot love scene between the two male protagonist. I did not even think its worthwhile to watch; thus, for the first 30 mins of the film, i did not focus and went on to do my usual computer work.

Until it caught me.

The movie caught me because it was simple. It was honest. It was real.

It caught me not because it is about love; or about a budding teen gay romance. It caught me because of how innocently and without too much put-on it has conveyed love and its many meanings. It caught me because it hit something soft and tender and lonely in me.

The Love of Siam was marketed as a gay-teen movie perhaps to capitalize on the growing audience that this type of films attract. But it is so beyond that.

The movie tells the story of two young male best friends who fell in love and witnessed how love became this singular moving force that affected everybody around them – their families, their friends. It is about how love changes a person, makes him better, makes him do things, positive things, that he thought is so beyond his capacity. The movie speaks of love as pure and beautiful no matter who you are or who you are offering it to. Because it is, really. It reminds one that love really is uncomplicated and true. That it is we, the persons who feel it, who makes it into something that is messy and selfish and deceiving.

Further, the movie’s script is genuine and intelligent; the characters are well developed; dialogues are just on point, nothing over done or over expressed (in fact, a lot of the meaningful scenes happen without the dialogues; and one should really watch and focus on the movie to appreciate them.

 

The Love of Siam ends without any of its characters fulfilling the traditional conclusions of a love story. There are no happily-ever-afters or expected closures. Instead, the film ends with a mere spark of hope. That hope that closes the film actually opens up million of possibilities for its characters, as numerous as the countless fortuitous encounters in Siam Square that initiate relationships between strangers or abruptly conclude long-standing affairs all within the fateful movement of time. The director of the movie drafts a bittersweet ode to the complexities of loving, which commercial cinema has tended to avoid throughout the years.

As long as there is love, there is hope.

Extra: The score and the soundtrack of the movie is equally beautiful. If only the main love song was in English.

The Siam in the title refers to Siam Square, a shopping district in Bangkok where most teens hang out to shop, dine, meet, and have fun. Siam Square, in the eyes of the Bangkok youth, has become both the place for welcomes and farewells, of declarations of love and hurtful break-ups, of chance encounters and scheduled meetings. In the film, the popular venue is not only the setting for Mew and Tong’s reunion and the numerous other events in the story but it also represents the unpredictability of the many facets of love which the film so intricately paints. While Siam Square or any other shopping mecca are ordinarily thought of as accessories to the bastardization of love and romance because it commonly equates blatant commercialism with the love’s outward depictions like dating, gift-giving, and hanging out, The Love of Siam uses that very element to depict love’s many wanderings and permutations. Underneath the glow of the traditionally amiable romance, The Love of Siam strives to say something more about the act of loving, whether romantically or familial: that it is more a nebulous network-like journey to maintain hope than a straight path to the assumed happy ending.

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For those of you who would want to download and watch the film: here’s the torrent file link: http://www.mininova.org/tor/1330804