THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

A REVIEW OF THE FILM FAN CHAN (2003)
by Edmund Marlowe

The 2003 Thai movie Fan Chan (Thai: แฟนฉัน, English title: My Girl, though a more accurate translation would be My Girlfriend), which had multiple directors, starred Charlie Trairat as Jeab (or Jiap) and Focus Jirakul as Noi-Naa. The following review was published on IMDb on 23 August 2014. The movie poster image and screenshots (the latter slightly enhanced to increase brightness) were supplied by the Editor. Clicking on any image will open the full-size image in a new tab.

The power of simplicity
by Edmund Marlowe, 23 August 2014

By far the best of the many Thai films I have seen, this will utterly astonish anyone expecting the melodrama and poor acting so often encountered in Thai cinema. As even by the standards of the latter, its budget was low, it shows in the tradition of which The Bicycle Thieves is perhaps the most spectacular example, that with fine acting and masterful direction, depiction of the emotions in a simple story can trump a budget of any size.

A young man called Jiap is invited to the wedding of his long-lost friend Noi-Naa. His initial decision to give precedence to a prior engagement is soon abandoned when in his car he listens to the musical hits of his childhood and memories flood back in the way old music is perhaps uniquely powerful in making them do. Most of the story then focuses on Jiap as a ten-year-old agonisingly torn between the super-girlish circle of his oldest friend and neighbour Noi-Naa and a gang of characterful boys led by an amiably fat bully called Jack. Extremely nostalgic and wittily recounted, it is definitely a story to make one both laugh and cry. The acting is superb.

The title and cover are misleading. Touching as the deeply-felt friendship of Jiap and Noi-Naa is, Fan Chan is not a romance, but a story about friendships and their meaning in the emotional world of the nearly pubescent boy. The idea of its being a romance is actually deeply ironic, for what it does perhaps most convincingly and interestingly is to remind us of a truth that was obvious to everyone until a generation or two ago: that beyond his mother's love, a boy's needs until well into adolescence are for his own sex. Nowadays this tends to be obscured by contrived gender-blindness combined with a silly and uncomfortably half-hearted wish to see children aping their parents' romantic antics.

Unfortunately, the full mind-blowing emotional impact will only be felt by those with nostalgic memories of the lost simplicity of rural Thailand in the 1980s, and especially those who were children then. These above all accounted for its being the extraordinary and unexpected local hit it was, but even with its impact diluted, it fully deserves a global audience.

         

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