Bangkok Love (sob) Story

After I watched the movie, I felt like I’ve just had a steaming hot pot of tom yam gung with extra chili padi sliced in, then added with pepper, and chili powder, and then mixed in with a huge lump of wasabi dissolved in Tabasco sauce.

Another way to describe my aftertaste would be having a chocolate brick filled with raisins and gummy bears, covered with a thick layer of icing sugar, then dipped into honey and finished off with a crust of caramel.

Or imagine a princess who lost her glass slippers while escaping from an evil witch, got thirsty and took a bite from a delicious red forest apple not knowing that it had been poisoned and turned her into a mermaid. While her feet turned into flippers, she fell and got pricked by a pine needle and fell into a deep sleep. The witch imprisoned her sleeping body atop a high tower and as she slumbered, her hair grew long and thick. The sheer weight of her braid soon gave her a neck sprain. Finally, the prince charming came to the rescue. Only thing is that, he’s a frog waiting to be kissed.

Well, do you need another analogy? I guess my emphasis on the excessive is becoming a compulsive analysis. But that’s exactly how I felt about Bangkok Love (sob) Story. It is a 110 min overdose on the worst-case-scenario situations. This cinematic equivalent of a straight-acting gay has tragedy in such epic proportions, it can outdo a powerhouse full of drama queens anytime! This is perhaps the greediest gay movie I’ve ever seen that kept begging for tears.

I won’t go into the synopsis of the story, but here’s how the movie would triple the sales of Kleenex…

1) Two butch guys with very masculine professions (an assassin, the other a cop), playing love hide-and-seek. The montages of them being so close yet so far was heart-wrenching at first, then digressed to the point where the tedious ‘missed connections’ looked so artificially staged.

2) The AIDS-ridden mother and brother of the assassin (Cloud, played by Rattanballang Tohsawat) being paddled as a campaign for tolerance and acceptance of people living with HIV. Like an orphan out to milk every sympathy vote, the presentation of the symptoms and disfigurations were authentic, but the sequence of Cloud’s mother reaching for medicine while the brother got AIDS bashed was overtly melodramatic.

3) That stubborn love that the cop (Stone, played by Chaiwat Thongsaeng) had for Cloud. Even though Cloud kept avoiding Stone after their first gay sex encounter, Stone (supposedly straight and married with a wife) fell logiclessly in love with Cloud. Stone took care of Cloud, took care of Cloud’s family, became blind because of him, waited many years for Cloud while he served his imprisonment for his crimes, and never gave up loving Cloud. (Such persistent love… what a big turn on!)

4) Alas, after overcoming and bearing much adversity, the two lovers were finally reunited outside the prison walls. By then, both of them have grown old, Cloud’s hair white with age. Then as they walked off talking about starting a new life togayther, Cloud got shot dead by his enemy.

Now, tell me that’s not the most tragic gay cinema of all! Being naturally adverse to sad movies being the big sob that I am, I did well holding back tears in most parts of the movie’s cue to cry because I find the bitterness so overwhelming, I became desensitized to it. But I did lose moisture through my eyes at the scene where Stone visited Cloud in jail and they held hands through the iron grilles. Stone, blind by then, felt around Cloud’s fingers and realized that the latter wasn’t wearing the ring he gave him. In an earlier scene, Stone gave Cloud a ring. If Cloud loves him, he will wear it on his finger, if he doesn’t, Cloud can throw it away. So Stone was disappointed when he couldn’t feel the ring on Cloud’s finger, but Cloud took it out (of his pocket? Necklace? I don’t know where because my eyes were so flooded, I had to look up towards the cinema’s ceiling and distract myself) of somewhere and said that he had kept it someplace else. Someplace close to his heart.

At that instant, love just hit me with some raw energy. It didn’t matter if it is between two guys, two girls, bisexual or heterosexual, love in its pure state has only joy.

I wonder why then, do people play hide-and-seek with love. Why delay joy?