I don’t know what a good entry point for writing about this film is: it hit me as a complete surprise, the kind of quiet story that gets stuck in your brain and just keeps growing in significance as it bounces around in there. It’s a small, slice-of-life tale that covers maybe a year of life in a run-down, lively Bangkok apartment block: a place that has a communal badminton court where the lights keep breaking, where the apartments units don’t seem to have enough space for the people they contain, where there is a constant worry about the future, the precarity of making rent. Downstairs, there’s a place reserved for secret, illegal gambling, where much of the misery that follows some characters around is magnified.
The film follows two teenage girls who have grown up together, are best friends, and are both struggling to figure out if what they feel for each other goes beyond friendship. The two girls may live in the same place, but otherwise their situations are different enough that the gulf threatens the core of their relationship. Ann (Fatima Dechawaleekul) is the overburdened older daughter of a woman with a gambling addiction. Her father, a police officer, has died on the line of duty, threatening the family’s right to remain in this apartment block reserved for serving police officers. She is helping her mother by caring for her siblings, taking on small jobs. There seems to be no way out for her: as much as she dreams of being a stewardess, she knows that in the end, her economic circumstances determine her path in life, and the realistic way out is either joining the police herself, or marrying. Jane (Fairy Kirana Pipityakorn) is the only child of the woman who collects rent in the apartment complex and has enough pull and influence to advocate for others when they fall behind on their payments. Her family is considering purchasing a house and leaving – for much of the film, Ann fears losing the safety of having a roof over her head while Jane struggles with having to leave everything she knows behind for a place that is more luxurious and allows more space and safety.
Then, the film throws policeman Tong (Boy Pakorn Chadborirak) into the mix. He’s in his thirties, but recruited by Jane’s forever-body-shaming mum to help her daughter lose weight. It’s a point in the film where things could go different, where a grown man enters the established routines of two teenage girls and proves to be a predator, but instead, there’s a tenderness in how he begins to truly care for both Ann and Jane, how he fits into their dynamic and provides them with a kind of freedom (mostly through his access to a car) while respectfully stepping back when he knows he should. If he upsets the dynamic, it’s by accident: the film doesn’t explicitly talk about Jane’s relationship to gender but there are enough hints here that something is going on. She wears a binder, and her growing relationship with Tong exists on a spectrum between admiration and attraction that can’t quite decide if she wants or wants to be. The question of the nature of the relationship between Ann and Jane is similarly subtle, as the growing financial pressure on Ann’s family muddles things. When they kiss, Jane pretends that it affects her less than she thought it would, but Ann is the one who seems radically changed, to have realised something about herself that she can’t quite afford to put in words. In any case, Ann argues, love if for people who have money, and as much as Jane supports her dreams, Ann knows they are tragically unattainable.
The second half of the film becomes more complex, with the film once again refusing to clearly spell out everything for the viewer, leaving it to interpretation. Tong may genuinely have feelings for Ann or be driven by an instinct to help in the only way that he is allowed to. In any case, he fades into the background as Ann’s mother’s gambling addiction puts her family into peril, as the inevitable moment of separation arrives. Still, the thing that will stay with me is Tong’s insistence on treating others with kindness, of telling Jane that happiness is a more worthwhile pursuit than riches, especially in a place where other adults seem to be constantly locked in a fight for survival, seem to be too selfish to see their daughters as people with their own ideas about what they want their lives to be.
2025, directed by Jirassaya Wongsutin, starring Fairy Kirana Pipityakorn, Fatima Dechawaleekul, Boy Pakorn Chadborirak.
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