In Love Forever - When it comes to you, I’ll always remember.

In Love Forever: 1x03.

 

This is by far the sweetest, most romantic episode of In Love Forever yet, and it’s fascinating how the sweetness comes from how the majority of the episode kind of mirrors the flashbacks scenes that have been unfolding as their own little story after the main part of the episode finishes. It’s still Runch and Neen after their shared decision to go through with the divorce, it should still have all the bitterness of a couple that still deeply loves one another (even if Neen has no certainty about Runch’s love – I would say she does by the end of the episode) being forced into divorce by an outside influence outside their control. And yet, for most of it, the two main characters feel like they’ve entered a protective bubble far removed from their normal circumstances where their love can exist without the outside pressure that Runch’s mum exerts on their relationship. In Neen’s grandparents’ house in the countryside, with their phones out of reach, living a life that is different from their normal routines, it becomes obvious that they love each other but that they are deeply in love – and a year into their marriage, three years into officially being together, can still surprise each other with things they didn’t previously know, that make them even more in love.

Talking about bitterness – with all the fluff, all the happiness that carries the episode – it almost fades by the end of it, but it is difficult not to sometimes still feel it in the back of your throat, like an unexploded bomb quietly ticking away underneath. This is true especially with how the episode begins, and there’s something about Runch here, leading up to their trip, that shows pretty clearly already that this happiness won’t last. A character that constantly falls back into ignoring problems because they are too big to solve or would require radical decisions they’re not ready to make can be frustrating to watch, even if all of her actions come from either love or devotion to her mother. I’m torn about whether I believe that she knows exactly what her mother is trying to do the moment she walks into her house and finds her sitting there with Meilin, or if she is naive about Kingkamol’s motives, not realising the great lengths she will go to to rid herself of Neen, still maintaining an image of her in her head that sees her mother as protective but not vicious. She must realise, the moment she walks in and finds her almost jittery with excitement, that she has been lured home as a ploy (proving Neen’s immediate reaction upon receiving her message, “I bet the old hag is faking it”, true), that her mother does not in fact require her to take her to the hospital, and her high blood pressure, if anything, is due to finally having come up with a plot that will truly hurt Neen in a way that sticks. It’s the whole way the scene unfolds: the excited introduction of Meilin as the childhood friend who used to play with her (long enough ago that Runch doesn’t seem to remember her very vividly, while she has left such a big impression on the younger woman), the attempts to connect them through their shared careers (which Meilin has chosen because of Runch, because Runch is her idol among other things), Meilin’s wide-eyed excitement at seeing her and the way she receives her career guidance, and her phone number. Runch does strike me as the kind of person that would be unaware of someone having a crush on her – I think if Neen hadn’t been so forward and clear about her intentions, Runch would have been very much in the dark and never made the first move – but she should be able to read her mother well enough to see what she is planning. She’s also very well aware how jealous Neen is – remember her reaction at the coffee shop, and that was just a friendly interaction with a regular barista – and knows to keep Meilin’s whole existence a secret up to the point where she has to explain it. It’s kind of defensible based on the fact that from Runch’s perspective, she’s just helping an old childhood friend get settled in her career and she knows that bringing it up would upset both Neen and the very, very brief period of peace they’ve achieved since Neen managed to take full revenge on Kingkamol, but it’s also the actions of someone who has spent a lot of energy and effort on controlling what information Neen has about her life (remember how long she kept her struggles at work a secret).

 

Human Resource

In the middle of Human Resource, Fren (Prapamonton Eiamchan, in a singular performance) and her husband are deciding whether they are willing to pay a non-refundable, half-a-million baht deposit to reserve a spot at an international school for their unborn child. The husband is enthusiastic about it: he is already planning the precise ways in which their hustling for the future of their child will guarantee success, outlining that the rest of their lives will be dedicated solely to ensuring that this child will climb the social ladder higher than they managed to do. Fren is a lot more cautious – she was already hesitant to tell him about being pregnant in the first place, before an accident revealed it regardless, and she is now faced with having to make a decision about a future she can’t even imagine in her head. Instead, she is thinking about the pressure of raising someone to be “good” – all the choices, all the work, that goes into making a good person, in the unspoken context of a world that is increasingly more violent, chaotic, exerting pressure on everyone trying to survive in it. It captures the central themes of the film, how the hustle of survival – or in this case, the hustle of someone who is middle-class not to fall behind, to keep her place. When her husband talks about his negative experiences of going to a public school, when they visit Fren’s mother, who seems to lead a simple life as a shop-keeper and is suffering from constant pain in her leg, they are making clear what the stakes of not keeping up are. It’s the inherent struggle of the (in this case, newly minted) middle-class: memories of their parents lack of options haunt them, falling behind is a vivid possibility, but the option of climbing higher on the social ladder is dangled like a just-out-of-reach carrot to keep the wheels turning. This sense of precarity is translated into a constant sense of unease, of un-mooredness, along with the destabilising sense that society is collapsing around the characters, with news about violence, predictions about future catastrophes, filtering in through the news.

The dichotomy of “being a good person” and “surviving in a capitalistic hellscape” is at the centre of the film. Fren works as a recruiter in HR, feeding desperate people who cannot turn down a job even when it comes with a requirement to work six days a week and face an intolerable boss who frequently throws things at his underlings when he is frustrated (or resorts to quiet, psychological terror, openly exerting his power especially when he is in the wrong) into the machine, knowing what toll it will take on them because she is living with the burden of it every day. There is an empty workstation in the office reminding her every day what it means, morally, to recruit: the woman who used to sit there has disappeared, her mother hasn’t heard from her for days, and the film eventually reveals that she has committed suicide after quietly bearing the burden for too long. The spectre of the consequences haunt Fren throughout the film, as does the deadline of finding someone to replace the employee so that things can continue as usual. If she weren’t pregnant, if her husband didn’t have such grand plans for their child, perhaps she could quit, but through how she and her colleague speak about the potential hires, it becomes clear that the job market is tight enough that it would be difficult to find a new job – and she doesn’t have rich parents to fall back on, or a financial cushion to make this clearly necessary decision. What does it mean for a society when it becomes impossible to make a moral decision, to be a good person? 

Fren’s inability to act and how trapped she is in her situation is contrasted with how her husband adapts to the circumstances of their life. He is a product rep for bulletproof vests, and chasing an expensive contract with the police force that is putting him in contact with very powerful men. Fren seems morally cautious about his involvement, as he is quite literally profiting from an increase in violence, from the uncertainty that is haunting her, to the extent where he is hounding down the most blood-thirsty, captivating news story to make his sales pitch stronger. At the same time, he is in a constant battle against the motorcycle riders who disregard the one-way-street leading to their apartment building: he might not have real, actual power anywhere else in his life, but he tries to regain it by enforcing the road rules they disregard to his inconvenience, in a process that first puts Fren in physical danger, and then, at the end of the film, leads him to an actual act of violence that he commits because he knows that he now has the kind of highly-placed friends in the police force that will mean he is protected against consequences. This is the kind of corruption, the lack of consequences for the well-connected to the detriment of everyone else, that is the cause for both her woes at work and the chaos in society in general, but the film hasn’t really left her with any way out – she is trapped by circumstance. 

Phanakngan Mai (Prod Rap Wai Phicharana), 2025, directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, starring Prapamonton Eiamchan, Paopetch Charoensook, Pimmada Chaisakaoen, Chanakan Rattana-Udom.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Warpaint - Elephants (on Exquisite Corpse)

 

 

In the dark we are waiting for you
With your dying need for their attention
Hold on tight now, we won't let you fall

Reading List: June.

Non-Fiction: 

 

Eric Jay Dolin: The Wreck of the Mentor. 

 

Fiction: 

 

Benny P. Peterson: The Maidenheads.

Isabel J. Kim: The Sublimation. 

Lisa See: Daughters of the Sun and Moon. 

Jules Ohman: Body Grammar. 

 

Films: 

 

Namibia no Sabaku (2024, Yōko Yamanaka).

Bunnylovr (2025, Katarina Zhu). 

Summer's Camera (2025, Divine Sung). 

Samâ firumu ni notte (2020, Sōshi Matsumoto).

Yuyeolui eumagaelbeom (2019, Jung Ji-woo). 

Gespenster (2005, Christian Petzold). 

 

Shows: 

 

For All Mankind, Season Five. 

This Is Not a Murder Mystery, Season One. 

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.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Yellow Fang - Cosmos Session

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.