'If I Love a Boy', the Thai youth romantic anthology with LGBTIQ themes, explores sexual awakening in adolescence through the telling of five short stories of innocent love, whose protagonists are high school students.
Broadcast between August 24 and November 9, 2019 on LINE TV, One 31, these film stories, by Thai director Andy Rachyd Kusolkulsiri, delve into characters whose lives are marked by sexuality, the development of secondary sexual characteristics , mature thinking and also the awakening of sexual behavior that is, when the adolescent transforms into a sexual being.
In this sense, 'Mom, Please Do Not Disturb (starring Son and Pluggy)', 'You Never Eat Alone (Folk & Petch)', 'Hand On Me (Kia & Taro)', 'Everybody Run (Ball & Poori) )' and 'Night Before Everything (Chokun & Nut)', the five stories that make up the anthology, take us into characters immersed in a stage in which the rise of romantic fantasies occurs and social relationships take place outside the environment family, especially with friends.
In the shorts, with slight contacts with each other, the unity of visual poetics is perceived, although sometimes a certain lack of rhythm is felt in the progression. After seeing them, we remember obvious truths that characterize adolescence, such as the young person who has not yet fully developed abstract thinking and sometimes finds it difficult to think about the consequences of his actions, as well as the use of the senses to express his feelings. emotions, since he has not yet fully developed adult thinking.
In 'If I Love a Boy' they are the high school student secretly in love with his classmate, the teenager who sees the possibility of maintaining the romance with the boy he loves slipping away because he has not dared to come out of the closet, the young man who fills with courage and confesses his love to his best heterosexual friend, the love triangle and the first disappointment in love, and the young man unable to accept that his best friend is gay, but at the same time he feels upset at the risk of losing him .
In the films, which reflect the creative consciousness that the director carries within him, we see novice actors in their first steps into the world of acting.
Son Korbboon Garun and Pluggy Tharakorn Khamsing are the protagonists of the first film. Folk Touch Inthirat and Pech Sirin Siripanich take part in the second. While Nokia Chinnawat Phattharathanachot and Taro Watcharathon Passorndiloklert participate in the third short film.
For their part, Ball Saranwut Chatjaratsaeng, Poori Siphrai and Art Thathep Phritiman are the actors who tell the events and conflicts of the fourth film, and Nut Nathanon Metharathip and Chokun Watcharaphon Suwanrueang lead the cast of the fifth film, in which we can also see acting Folk.
All of these young actors would star in 2019 'Thank God It's Friday', the youth romantic drama directed by Andy Rachyd Kusolkulsiri and written by Kwang Latika Chumpoo.
Of them, only Folk, Nokia and Ball have continued to develop their acting careers, within the BL, with the first appearing in several series, such as 'Brothers', from 2021, the second in 'Knock Knock, Boys!', from 2024, among others, and the third in 'Until We Meet Again', from 2020, 'Unforgotten Night', from 2022, and 'Y Demand', scheduled for release in 2024.
If we take into account that sexuality at this stage of the human life cycle represents the generation of desires, feelings, fantasies and emotions, that is, the development of a sexual identity, 'If I Love a Boy' constitutes a suggestive (and tender, It could also be said) a self-gaze exercise, which is worth submitting to, since all human beings have experienced, are living or will live the sexual awakening and the biological, psychological and social changes inherent to adolescence.