tbyrnesea
Another beautiful episode. I had worried that when we reached this point in the story that having the plot culminate with 2018 Ongsa and Sunsoon would make the ending feel a little detached and hollow, but flashbacks are helping to make it work. I would have liked to see now-Ongsa's demeanor be a little closer to then-Ongsa's for stronger continuity between the long-suffering Ongsa and the Ongsa that finfally seems to get the love he wants.
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We finally reach the point in the plot that all the sad falsetto singing hinted we would reach. We see a lot of then-Ongsa grieveing now-Soon's departure, helped out by flashbacks and the rainy sseason. Then finally it's time for Ongsa to decide whether to meet then-Soon. Lots of sadness that we knew had to happen, so a little less hard on the viewer than on the characters. Overall very well done with some very well shot scenes of a shattered then-Ongsa.
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This episode gives us a bit of stasis, albeit a sad pause. Ongsa finallly knows that his love is not un-requited, and now we wait to see how Ongsa is going to deal with everything he's learned. The episode is emotionally powerfull because it combines then-Ongsa's sadness at loosing now-Soon with his sadness at having to forgo loving now-Soon. One scene is particularly emotionally charged: Soon wakes up crying as he recalls now-Ongsa's accident and coma and is consoled by then-Ongsa, and shortly after Ongsa cries at both now-Soon's departure and the prospect of forgoing a relationship with then-Soon. The power of the scene comes from combining a concrete loss (now-Ongsa is dying - now-Soon is going to vanish) with the harder to imagine loss of forgoing a future relationship.
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We start to see a bit more affectionate interaction between now-Soon and then-Ongsa. Ongsa continues to be sad that he doesn't seem to mean as much to Soon as he hopes to. The emotional level of the episode is fairly high, and it remains easy to empathize with the characters. Then just as we see an end to the arc concerning Ongsa's insecurity about perhaps un-requited love as Soon begins to share his story with Ongsa. So any relief there might have been to his emotional turmoil is obscured by more dark clouds. The genre of the story becomes more and more clearly some sort of fable or romantic fantasy as the old DVD shop owner takes on even more of an oracular role, and as an obviously fake (Costa Rican) butterfly shows up as an emblem of OngsaSoon's love.
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I don't know whether the acting has gotten even better with this episode or if I'm just noticing it more now that the plot is more established. The acting by all the principles in this episode is flim quality. The characters, especially Ongsa, are so three-dimensional, without actors mannerisms or dead lines to spoil the illusion. We get one of New's patented jump-cries in this episode when we cut from a scene of Ongsa-then and his parents laughing together to Ongsa-now in the hospital bed attended by his parents. It reminds me of the numerous jump-cries in Dae Deng.It took me a bit of time to come to terms with the causal loop in phi Sunsoon moving from the coffee shop to the apartment next to nong Sunsoon because he remembers tha man next door from his days as nong Sunsoon. I think the whole loop is supposed to exists as some sort of destiny with fate or karma or something like that as an external cause of the loop.
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The very slow pacing and atmospheric directing match the style of the characters. It's pretty rare to see a story about a relationship with a character as introverted as Sunsoon, and it's even rarer to have the narrative pace and feel of the story match. The story telling is very light-handed, with some key elements left to allusion, e.g. referencing Jonnathan Livingston Seagull as a way of indicating that the time travel we are seeing is magical, miraculous or spiritual rather than something like Back to the Future. The series so far bears little resemblance to any Thai Yaoi Series, not even Dai Deng. The series feels more like an Ozu film than a Thai drama series.
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The atmospheric feel of the episode fits the characters and the story well. I guess it could become a bit dull, but as long as there is enough emotional depth to the story, it should work well.The intial interactions between Ongsa and Sunsoon in the early stages of their relationship are so sweet that the episode would succeed on the basis of them alone.The acting is very good throughout, very three dimensional and believable.I like the way the the story is filled out a bit by the references to Jonathan Livingston Seagul (to hint at the spiritual nature of the cross-time appearances and connectedness) and Love of Siam (which allows Ongsa and Sunssoon to experience eachothers reactions to film about a young same sex couple. I wonder if these might be a bit too obscure for the average viewer today though.
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We've reached the emotional crux of the story, and it seems like it should have been sadder. I think trying to accommodate so much plot along with the crux of the emotional arc in one episode weakened the emotional impact a bit. Probably enough tears to satisfy the casual viewer though.
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The slow pace of the series is finally starting to pay off now that we have enough background to empathize with what the characters are going through. The expansive atmosphere gives us the space to share their sadness. The theme of this episode is the acceptance of loss: loss of friendships as we move on to new stages of life, loss of older acquaintances as they pass on, and of course the loss that Ongsa has to finally accept at the center of the story. We revisit a number of events we've seen before to linger a little longer and delve a little more deeply into the loss and resignation they represent.At the start of the series I was somewhat doubtful that the time-travel plot could work as well as reincarnation did in Dae Deng to create the exagerated emotional charge that one turns to magical realism like to acheive, but after this episode I'm convinced that it works.
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