The One about The Love of Siam

I watched this film because a lot of people has recommended it. So I did and this is my review.

Most people will brand this film as a “Gay Flick” because the lead characters, Mew (Witwisit Hiranyawongkul) and Tong (Mario Maurer) had a sort of relationship in the movie.. they even kissed! but other than that, the film’s main focus is not about the relationship of the two but rather, it focuses more on family and friendship.

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PLOT
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Mew, a stubborn kid, is neighbor to Tong, an energetic boy who lives with his parents and sister. After accidentally spitting gum into Mew’s hair, Tong wanted to befriend Mew but was unsuccessful. At school, Mew was cornered by several other students was harassed until Tong stepped in to defend him. Tong was injured and apoligized to Mew for the chewing gum incident. Mew was grateful for Tong stepping in and responded that they were even. The two became good friends from that point on.

Mew plays on his grandpa’s piano and is joined by his grandma, who begins to play a song. Mew asks his grandma why she liked that song and his grandma responded with telling Mew that it was played for her by his grandpa. It was a way for him to express his love to her and explains that one day, Mew will be able to do the same for the person he loved.

Tong’s family goes to Chiangmai and returns without Tong’s sister Tang since she wanted to stay with her friends a couple days more. Tong bought Mew a present and decided to give it to Mew piece by piece in a game of Treasure Hunt. One by one, Mew found all of the pieces except for the last one which was hidden in a tree. The tree was cut down before Mew was able to retrieve it leaving the present Tong bought for Mew incomplete. Tong was disappointed at their misfortune, but Mew remained grateful for Tong’s efforts. Tang called her parent’s and told them that she would extend her stay at Chiangmai until the 24th of December. Tong looks at his calendar and realizes that Tang will not be able to attend the Christmas play he would participate in.

After the Christmas play, Tong receives a phone call from his parents telling him to stay with Mew and his grandma. After spending the night at Mew’s house, Tong awakens to the sight of his parents along with Mew and his grandma. Tong is told that his parents are going to Chiangmai a couple days to look for Tang. Tong lives in depression until his parents come back, only to find out that Tang may be lost. Tong is devastated and cries in front of Mew, who is trying to comfort his friend.

Months have passed and Tong’s family decides to move. On the day of the move, Tong finds Mew sitting on a ledge overlooking a pier. Tong says his final words and departs in a car. Tong looks back only to find Mew walking towards the car before coming to a stop and crying for losing his best friend.

Six years pass. The boys are reunited during their senior year of high school at Siam Square. The musically talented Mew is the leader of a boy band called August. Tong has a pretty girlfriend, Donut. The meeting stirs up old feelings that Mew has harbored since boyhood, his love for Tong.

Mew’s band, meanwhile, has a new manager, June. She looks just like Tong’s long-lost sister, Tang. After meeting June, Tong and his mother, Sunee, devise to a plan to pay June to pretend she is Tang, in hopes that it will pull Tong’s father out of his alcoholic depression. Tang borrows a story from the Thai film Ruk Jung, saying she has amnesia, which is why she has forgotten how to say her family’s Catholic grace at the dinner table.

Mew is also the object of an unrequited crush of a neighbor girl, Ying. But Mew has strong feelings for Tong, which have inspired him to write new songs. The manager as well as the entire band were all impressed with Mew’s composition.

The boys share a prolonged kiss in Tong’s backyard one night after a party in honor of the return of Tang. Prior to that Tong also spends the night with Mew, which causes his mother to worry.

At Christmas time, as Tong and his mother are decorating a Christmas tree, they have a heart-to-heart talk about making choices, and Tong asks his mother to let him make his own choices.

Tong then goes to Siam Square for a date with Donut. Mew’s band is playing nearby, so Tong abandons Donut and tells her he cannot be with her. He then rushes to see Mew play and is guided there by Ying, who has accepted the fact that Mew loves Tong. After the performance, Tong gives Mew a gift, a missing nose from a wooden doll that Tong gave him when they were children. However, Tong tells Mew he can’t be his boyfriend but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love Mew.

The movie ended with Mew putting the missing nose back to the wooden puppet, saying “thank you” and cried quietly.

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OST
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The soundtrack of this movie has very catchy tunes even if it is in Thai. Most of the songs is about “Love.”

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REVIEW:oggsmoggs
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To label Chukiat Sakveerakul’s The Love of Siam as simply a gay teen romance is to misjudge its power and intention. Within the two and a half hour running time (the director’s cut is reportedly four hours long) of the film, Sakveerakul essays not only the two young leads’ reunion and inevitable attraction but also a family’s slow and painful road to accepting a long-delayed reality. I would like to think that The Love of Siam, above everything else, seeks to reaffirm the life-affirming values of loving and being loved without sacrificing the portrayal of the very palpable pain that usually accompanies the emotion.

The twenty-minute prologue tracks the histories of young Mew (Arthit Niyomkul) and Tong (Jirayu La-ongmanee), who are both schoolmates and neighbors. They form a very close friendship which was abruptly ended when Tong’s family had to move out when **** (Laila Boonyasuk), Tong’s elder sister, went missing during a trip in Chiang Mai, causing the family tremendous and irreparable sorrow. Years later, Mew (Witwisit Hirunwongkul), lead singer and composer for an up and coming boy band, again crosses path with Tong (Mario Maurer), who is struggling at home with his domineering mother (Sinjai Plengpanich) and alcoholic father (Songsit Rungnopakunsri). The two reconnect and inevitably fall for each other, disrupting whatever peace they have grown accustomed to.

To make matters more complicated, Mew’s Chinese neighbor Ying (Kanya Rattanapetch) is hopelessly in love with Mew, not knowing of his homosexual tendencies. On the other hand, Tong is currently dating Donut (Aticha Pongsilpipat), presumably not knowing of his own homosexual tendencies too. Tong’s family, more specifically the father who’s been spending days and nights drinking, is still suffering from the loss of ****. June (also played by Boonyasuk), Mew’s band manager who looks a lot like ****, is then recruited to pose as the long lost daughter, momentarily easing the father of his staggered pains.

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.

In fact, 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. Sakveerakul drafts a bittersweet ode to the complexities of loving, which commercial cinema has tended to avoid throughout the years. What he exclaims in The Love of Siam is that daringly traversing outside the common simplicities of love is far more gratifying than safely assuming formula.

Through the interconnected lives of two boys who are on the verge of self-awareness amidst their own individual conflicts and the people surrounding them, Sakveerakul notes that love survives notwithstanding the dilemmas that pervade the world. As Ying translates from a Chinese song, “as long as there is love, there is hope.” Corny as it sounds, the Bangkok of The Love of Siam thrives on that noble aspiration, without knowing that it does so.

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REVIEW
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The movie mainly revolves on Love. Love of friends, love of family, and evenlove in termsof relationship and hopeless romantics.

So, watch this film, overlook the “gay theme” and learn about loving and respecting other people.

and another thing, Kanya Rattanapetch, the one wearing pink, is <3!:)) hehe…:D