Incestuous Thai Movie My Bromance Explores Boyhood Troubles.

Thai movies are tearjerkers. And when they're as controversial as a homosexual relationship between two adolescents, they're usually a home run for its sappy plot. In 2007, Love of Siam was a telling case of two boys, for instance. It was a boy-meets-boy premise buttressed with a coming-of-age story to conflict with the inevitable kith and kin confrontation.

Today, however, a coming of age genre demands more from the audience to believe that it's artistically honest, and not an exploitation of its problems. Tastefully, film makers must accept that, though, the taboo is always appealing, self-empowerment has become more bearable to watch than its characters' depreciation. My Bromance, a 2014 Thai romantic drama, has decided to shock with the latter, spinning the sappy genre on its head with incestuous overtones.

The 1 hour 58 minutes film, directed by Nitchapoom Chaianun, is set in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It begins with a hot-blooded, tempestuous Golf played by Teerapat Lohanan, a bully of a stepbrother to the softer, effeminate Bank, his film counterpart and star-of-the-moment Pongsatorn Sripinta, who's starred this year in another gay drama, titled Red Wine in The Dark Night. Like the latter's thriller, dabbling themes of homosexuality into the strange turned the film's kindred spirit of two brothers into a bizarre romance- kissing, hand-holding brotherly love, to say the least. Of course, nothing ends well with a drama thickened this much by ingenues' lust for love.

Notably, Chaianun was careful not to steer this hefty genre into its one-dimensional circuit. The problems of family and self acceptance remains, but Golf and Bank's relationship turmoil was rooted in personal woes. A problematic Golf, whose father deprives him of attention, is tamed by a more patient, albeit fatherless Bank, who too, has a fair share of issues that mirrors the former's insecurities. As if by happenstance, the two finding each other could only point toward the larger theme of love. That it wasn't pre-mediated, the foolhardy idea of love was instantly felt.

Chaianun was also strategic to remove the film from the currency of technology to highlight his characters' naivety, underscoring the film's sexual blur between his characters. Golf was less of a keyboard warrior than a true hobbyist of plastic toy fixtures, as seen colouring his figurines throughout the film, only be reciprocated by Bank at the end. Moreover, its expression as a totemic symbol was also introduced in the film as an everlasting promise: Rings were exchanged to the seal the protagonists' romance, whether as siblings borne out of circumstance or star-crossed lovers doomed to fall apart. Everything, to wit, was done to strip the notion of love to its fleeting substance.

However, that's not to discount the movie of its pitfalls. With common-sense-defying narrative and poor characterization, My Bromance quickly became beguiling halfway. The denouement was flawed with an expected death, and complete with a lackluster voiceover at the end, which felt like a farce. The film, conflicted to what's been aimed as youth-quaking love, began to move toward the dramatic territories of adult tragedy. Calculate that with its cliches- self-sacrifice, loss, and total acceptance- My Bromance didn't survive a satisfying ending.

8 years after Love of Siam broke water works in theaters, Thai movies that have stuck to its tried-and-true formula of LGBT complexities still work, somehow. Made more by the fact that in 2015, when modern romantic films rush to encapsulate the digital age in its themes, watching a dissimilar movie only made its genre all the more nostalgic and refreshing.