Krailas Phondongnok | มะลิซ้อนออกดอกเป็นมะละกอ (The Same Is Not the Same) / 2015

realities of chance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Krailas Phondongnok (screenwriter and director) มะลิซ้อนออกดอกเป็นมะละกอ (The Same Is Not the Same) / 2015 [19 minutes]

 

We know that homophobia exists everywhere, although one might hardly imagine it in the seemingly LGBTQ-tolerant Thailand. Yet that is precisely the subject of Thai director Krailas Phondongnok’s short film of 2015.

     Watching her favorite TV film on the Zodiac signs, the Mother (Somkhuan Phondongnok) at the center of this film is interrupted by her daughter, Ap-Sorn (Siriporn Chaireun) who is fed up with her mother’s devotion to all things magical and spiritual, and changes the channel to her favorite subject, a boy-love film, a phenomenon of great popularity throughout Asia.

     As she begins to watch the images of the boy lovers laying together in bed, the mother grows angry, disgusted by such TV fare and amazed that it is even permitted to be aired. She walks away cursing how low society has become.

       In the same room, his back turned away from the TV, is her son, Inn (Nattapat Sookwongsil) who is disturbed by his mother’s homophobia, particularly since, as we soon discover when he hooks up with his friend Mac (Faseethong Phanwong), that he and Mac are a gay couple. When Mac stops playing basketball and joins him, Inn relates the news that his mother is totally unaccepting of his own identity, and fears that he will never be able to relate the truth to her. Indeed, he soon tries by wondering what he she discovered that her son was a “ladyboy”—unfortunately one of the ways in which Asian culture male homosexuality is still described. She perceives it only as an issue of gender, related to the dog she and her friends have worshipped because of its hermaphroditic features, beloved as a token to help in their choice of numbers for the daily lottery. “How many cocks or pussies do you have?” she flippantly asks.

     He explains he has only one penis but he still likes other boys, but she refuses even to deal with his statement, busy as she is in consulting her chart of numbers from which she will make her lottery choice.

     When he returns to Max, they get the idea to visit her as a couple and do so, in her presence engaging in a deep kiss—a kiss caught by his sister on her cellphone, she absolutely delighted to spread the word to her friends that her own brother is involved in boy-love. Furious, his mother is offended by their behavior and bans him from the house forever.

     Together, the two boys mull over the consequences, both trying to figure out what to do about the situation which has obviously gone awry. Suddenly, a smile creeps over Inn’s face. Soon after they show up to his mother both in the green robes of Buddhist monks.

      Monks in Thai culture are not only representatives of authority and, accordingly, in his mother’s thinking are images of good luck, but are permitted (more recently with great controversy and increasing hostility) some sexual latitude since there is nothing in Buddha’s teachings about homosexuality or transgender behavior.

      Inn asks his mother’s permission to enter into a relationship with Max. Seeing only the green robes of cultural significance, the color itself which she believes represents good luck, she has little choice but to bless their relationship. But immediately after, they tear their robes away, standing now only in their underwear, Inn asking the very same question.

      This time the mother doesn’t quite know how to respond, having just given the permission but now being faced with them as being mere boys with precisely the same request. Clearly, even as illogical as she is in her life, she cannot fail, we hope, to realize the absurdity of a rejection as a son and friend as opposed to the acceptance of a green-robed religious figures. Yet, as the film’s English title suggests, for some people “the same is not the same.”

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).