In Love Forever - This is why I could never get over you.

In Love Forever: 1x02.

We pick up seamlessly where we left off in the previous episode. Runch’s mother has thrown a vase out of anger and frustration, and a shard cut Neen’s leg. It’s an escalation of their years of fighting that Kingkamol knows has crossed a line, and it is clear from how Runch removes her from the house – determined, quickly, without doing anything to reassure her that she understands that it was an accident – that makes it clear that this is a turning point. It’s clear from the face she makes right before leaving that it hasn’t made her change her mind about her approach to Neen, that all she is concerned about here is Runch’s reaction, not the harm she has actually done.
Inside, Neen seems stunned, shocked out of being able to even have a fight about what just happened. She just keeps saying “don’t” to Runch’s attempts to soothe her. The scene of Runch patching up the wound is so significant. It might be a placed advertisement, but it also fits into both the characters and the situation perfectly. Here’s Runch, meticulously running through all the steps of cleaning and disinfecting the wound, then applying a plaster with the words “sorry” on them, gently blowing on the wound like you would for a child. It shows her care and love, but beyond the physical act of applying a bandaid to a wound, symbolically, she is trying to patch up a gaping injury – that her mother is inflicting upon their marriage – with a bandaid and a sorry, and as such, nothing she does here could possibly be enough. She apologises on her mum’s behalf, but she must also know that her mother, given the opportunity, would never apologise for what she has done, and so it won’t change anything real about the dynamics of their relationship.
It’s also important to remember that Runch and Neen are not on the same page about each other because they don’t talk. Neen thinks that the only way that Runch would have ever asked for a divorce is if she didn’t love her anymore, while Runch has explained to her overseas friend that the opposite is true: she asked because she loves Neen so much that she wants to protect her from the harm that Kingkamol is causing her, specifically because she feels that the conflict is changing her wife, forcing her to become hardened and less innocent (and the episode will show just how much this is true). From Neen’s perspective, Runch’s clearly demonstrated love and care are confusing, because she is trying to create the emotional distance to grapple with the coming separation, but all these acts of love just remind her of why she fell in love with her in the first place – “You always act this way. This is why I could never get over you.”
At the same time, Runch is following Neen’s clear instructions. For the four months that they are forced to remain together, she will act like a devoted wife – except it isn’t an act, because that’s exactly what she is – and in addition, Neen requested that she be allowed to break her mother’s heart just once, which is what she will do her best to achieve in this episode. The prospect of at least exacting revenge against the woman who has destroyed her marriage is the one thing that really lights her up here, and it’s so easy to do with how reactive Kingkamol is to any suggestion that there are parts of her daughter she cannot control.

In Love Forever – As a wife, you’re the worst.

In Love Forever: Episode One.

In Love Forever begins with Runch and Neen in the bedroom. There’s a dreamy sense of unreality even before the moment is revealed to be a dream: the lighting is captivating, the theme song from the title sequence repeats, transporting the viewer right into the story. If you had read the novel, it would be a moment of slight disorientation: at what point in their relationship are we entering here? If you hadn’t, you would just be drawn in by the clear intimacy and closeness, the sense of longing. The fact that it is a dream – Runch’s dream, which is cruelly interrupted by a phone call from her mother – twists the whole meaning of the scene. Here’s Runch, portrayed to have lost control in all areas of her life, a character that we will see taken apart in this first episode, asserting control, asking for what she wants, placing Neen’s hand where she wants it, asking Neen to let her be in charge (“Will you let me set the melody for us tonight?”). Even the deeply romantic “You don’t have to talk. Just listen to my heartbeat” gains more meaning through the lens of a dream: Runch is a character who finds it impossible to talk about her emotions with her partner, which is the whole crux of their failing relationship, but here she is voicing that all of her love and feelings can be conveyed if only Neen “listens to her heartbeat”, or gains a deeper understanding of her not through words but through trust and closeness alone (when in reality, Runch’s inability to express herself leads to misunderstandings and misinterpretations). To Runch, what should get them through, what should keep their relationship alive, is the depth of their feelings. And then, the phone goes off, Runch wakes up to the empty space next to her on the bed (there seems to be a blissful moment right before the reality of her own life catches up with her), not even safe from the intrusion of her mother in her own head – it’s a masterful way of showcasing how there is no safe space for her, not in her house, not in her relationship, not even in her dreams. It’s a claustrophobic sense of overwhelm and exhaustion that continues through the episode and escalates as we follow her through  other spheres of her life.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Die Sterne - Das bisschen Besser (on Wo ist hier)

  

Und dann arbeitet man sich heran
An das, was man in der Dunkelheit vermuten kann
Weil die doch einiges verspricht
Nur Licht gibt es hier leider nicht

Summer's Camera

Summer’s (Kim Si-a, delivering a beautiful performance) father died a year ago and she enters her first year of high school carrying bits and pieces of him around, perhaps as an attempt to feel closer to him or to try and get closer to an ambiguous death that she herself can’t explain. Hit in the middle of the road while taking photographs, it was maybe not an accident, maybe suicide, and there is nothing that can give her clarity about it: her mother is in the depths of her own grief, still caring and loving, but unreachable at the same time as she is making her own way through her feelings about the death of her husband. She is in the process of packing up her dad’s office, framed photographs on the ground, detritus of him everywhere. Summer, carrying her father’s photobooks, notebooks and watch in her big red backpack, has stopped taking photos herself, which means that there is still an unfinished roll of film in her father’s old analogue Nikon: a perfect symbol for being in the middle of grief, arrested in a moment of time. Finishing the roll would mean developing it, and finding the last things her father cared about enough to take a photo of.

Summer’s Camera is a coming-of-age film that contains within itself the entire history of Summer’s first relationship, from beginning to end. It starts when the school’s adored soccer star Yeon-woo (Yu Ga-eun) accidentally kicks a ball towards her and Summer finds her so arresting that she feels compelled to photograph her. Later, she will describe the feeling as “hearing the shutter click”, a turn of phrase that her father used to describe the feeling of strong emotions in a moment that necessitate capturing it in a picture. Later on her best friend explains she has learned in physics class that moving faster than light slows turn time: but Summer has already figured out how to do that through the lens of her camera.

What makes Summer so compelling is her character is a level of self-certainty, in the midst of all the emotional turmoil of her loss and the things she later finds out about her father, that feels so unusual in a character so young. She has a crush, she pursues that crush. She comes out to her best friend and is supported – her friend isn’t surprised because she’s only ever been interested in photographing girls. None of the drama of the film comes from her not being accepted, or having to fight prejudice. Instead, Summer’s Camera is a film about navigating a relationship with another person who has a whole world of their own inside them, and what happens when their wants and ideas about the future don’t line up with your own: in the case of Yeon-woo, she is less dedicated to Summer than to soccer (it’s interesting how Summer’s passion for photography seems to line up with her relationship to Yeon-woo while Yeon-woo’s passion for soccer is in conflict with it). In the case of Summer’s dad, it’s a world of secrets she discovers once she does develop that final roll of film in the Nikon. What she finds is portrait photographs of a man she has never seen before, after a lifetime of believing her father didn’t take portraits. This stranger turns out to be her father’s lover who has been with him since high school – a man who only finds out about his death from his daughter, and has to work through his own grief while Summer relies on his advice as she navigates her first relationship. It’s tender and tragic to see these two characters, with all the complexities of emotions behind them, keep each other company: Summer the daughter of a man he loved (and very straightforward in her questions, desperate to understand her father better), he the secret that her father kept (and arrested in resentment, in pain), that her mother maybe knew about, but it’s impossible to ask her these questions. The film captures the almost untouchable nature of this man in Summer’s and Maru’s memories of him at different stages of his life: Summer remembers seeing him take photographs in the woods, always at a slight remove from his family, impossible to imagine, she explains to Yeon-woo at some point, as aging into being a grandparent, as if already arrested in time before his death.

It’s like Summer is assembling puzzle pieces to arrive at a more complete picture of her father after his death, coming to terms with the idea that he had a whole world inside of him that she didn’t have access to before: but the final puzzle piece is an affirmation of his love, when she finally goes through the final photos on the digital camera he used right before the accident. It’s a moment where she sees herself, photographed with the same love and devotion, asserting her own place in her father’s life, loved and cherished the way he showed his devotion. 

2025, directed by Divine Sung, starring Kim Si-a, Yu Ga-eun, Kwak Min-gyu.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Ninoosh - That Sinking Feeling

Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up fine. 

...

 

  

To Pie, the best girl,

I don’t think words can capture the sense memory of feeling of your beautiful fawn coat, petting you while you were snoring away, the little paw- and nose twitches while you were probably dreaming of catching pigeons. I wish you could have had ham and pork belly every day of your life, instead of having to scavenge them when you saw a second of opportunity. In your last days, you managed to repossess your vet’s lunch (home-made roasted chicken), because nobody could ever say no to that face. We spent your last hours recounting stories about you, mostly food-related crimes (sandwich-gate, rat-gate, and so many more), but all filled with amazement at your persistence, unwillingness to ever lose sight of your goals or give up, and the deep love we all have for you, which you always returned in spades. Rest easy now. I wish I could see you walk so so jauntily, tail swishing wildly, ears alert to every sound, one last time. 

Reading List: May.

Non-Fiction: 

 

Thak Chaloemtiarana: Read till it shatters: Nationalism and identity in modern Thai literature. 

Ligang Song, Yixiao Zhou (eds.): The Great Energy Transformation in China.

Yanya Jakimow, Margaret Jolly, Sonia Palmieri, Ramona Vijeyarasa (eds.): Gender and Politics Reimagined. Centring Oceanic and Asian Lenses.  

 

Fiction: 

 

Monika Kim: Molka.

Kylie Lee Baker: Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng.

Tan Twan Eng: The Garden of Evening Mist. 

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: Bangkok Wakes to Rain. 

 

Films: 

 

Heldin (2025,  Petra Biondina Volpe).

Forbidden Fruits (2026, Meredith Alloway). 

Montréal, ma belle (2025, Xiaodan He). 

O Agente Secreto (2025, Kleber Mendonça Filho). 

Chime (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa). 

Linda Linda Linda (2005, Nobuhiro Yamashita).

Gyakusatsu kikan (2017, Shûkô Murase).

Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (2010, Apichatpong Weerasethakul).