Establishing a new love bond goes beyond the good relationship or chemistry with the new partner. Children represent a challenge and new approaches, and there are borders that foster parents should not cross..., but what if love arises between the adolescent child and his or her stepfather or stepmother? Is it wrong for a mother's boyfriend to have consensual sexual relations with her son? What will happen when the secret is discovered? 'Club Friday Season 16: Domestic Incident', the Thai miniseries directed by Ma-Deaw Chookiat Sakveerakul, raises these and other questions.
Written by Sorawit Muangkaew ('Slam Dance', 2017), Thanamas Dhalerngsuk ('Triage', 2022), Park Thamsarun Khusunthia ('Addicted Heroin', 2024), and Kay Trinnarich Nonghin ('A Secretly Love, 2024), and the same director, the four episodes of this melodrama, lasting about 45 minutes, explore complex and controversial topics such as the non-pedophile relationship between a woman's boyfriend and her son, one of legal age while the other is a teenager; the mother-son relationship and infidelity, with an LGBTQ+ twist.
With the message: "the person who makes you feel at your worst could be the one you love the most and trust the most", concludes the first episode of a miniseries that revolves around a single mother who maintains a very close bond with Guy , his only son, his closest companion.
Rin (Yuyee Alissa Intusmith - 'Chum Taang Kao Chum Thong', 1997), an enterprising and talented woman, unintentionally finds love in Mr. Gott (Lift Supoj Janjareonborn ('Jenny', 1996), an admirer who is interested in a business partnership with Guy's mother's company, a character played by Aon Kasama Khamtanit.
Gott seems to be a good man who tries to win the affection of both mother and her son, as is Rin's wish. However, while Rin and Gott begin a courtship, Gott and Guy cannot help but fall in love, while sharing games of soccer and other distractions between stepfather and stepson.
With an insatiable curiosity about the world, explore his sexuality and experience love, which he believes he has found in Kem, his friend and soccer teammate (Tae Chayapat Kongsub - 'Y-Destiny' (2021), the life of Guy, a teenager Quite typical, he will take a dangerous and abrupt turn when he starts sleeping with him mother's boyfriend.
With a plot adjusted for entertainment purposes only, with no intention of offending anyone, promoting immoral sexual values ​​or creating a pessimistic disposition of a gender or group of people, 'Club Friday Season 16: Domestic Incident' addresses another complex and fully global debate such as incest, typified in numerous penal codes around the world with the "carnal act or other erotic sexual act with a descendant or ascendant, adoptive or adoptive, or with a brother or sister."
However, while in some countries there is debate about its decriminalization, other legal instruments do not classify incest as a crime, considering it as a moral and not a legal problem, considering it as part of individual freedom, the right to free development of personality. and personal autonomy, while they do consider a circumstance of punitive aggravation of the crimes of sexual assault and sexual abuse, violence or intimidation and without the consent of one of the parties, or if the consent of the minor was obtained through deception, seduction and corruption of minors, not present in this Thai audiovisual.
Director and screenwriter Ma-Deaw Chookiat Sakveerakul, known for directing 'The Passenger of Li', '13 Beloved', 'Dew the Movie' (2019), 'Triage' (2022), 'Manner of Death' (2021), Among other films and series, he once again demonstrates that he knows how to describe people adrift, fragile beings in permanent confusion who believe they know what they want and defend what they want.
While the marriage benefits both Gott and Rin, as they could apply for joint bank loans, while the merger of the two companies would serve to better position them in the global market, Gott and Guy will blur all the codes and one will abandon himself to the complex and contradictory desires of the other. However, Ma-Deaw never judges anyone and the telluric force of her direction embraces the complexities of sexual desire with immense tact and aplomb.
This is not a pedophile relationship. The adolescent boy has a say. He counts and decides. Ask, demand and get. Especially sex. A lot, all the time. Maybe too much, if that were possible. He is the one who starts flirting with his mother's boyfriend, testing, enjoying. He's smart and he's lost. With an absent father and a mother, although worried and loving, very busy with her business and rebuilding her love life. It doesn't have many references. To which we must add the disturbing power of a sexy man who has just entered her life, while suffering from a heartbreak.
The premise is interesting. Very entertaining and intelligent. Provocatively frivolous and playful. The beginning is good. An unprejudiced and uninhibited narrative.
I hope that what follows, once the situation is raised, is not a tiring and tedious loop, a repetitive and obvious drama, in which the focus is closing and almost everything is reduced to the sexual exploration of the boy and his boyfriend. mother, while both betray Rin.
Anyway, I would like 'Club Friday Season 16: Domestic Incident' to explore well the loss of innocence, the difficult and painful access to maturity, the mother-son relationship and the couple's relationship, and not remain as a The boy needs more affection and attention than his mother can offer him, so he believes it is possible to find them through sex, using his youthful body and physical attractiveness as currency, especially when it involves a man who could be his stepfather.
'Club Friday Season 16: Domestic Incident' explores well the loss of innocence, the difficult and painful access to maturity, the mother-son relationship and the relationship as a couple.
The miniseries is much more than a boy in full exploration of his sexuality with his stepfather, while both betray Rin. It is much more than the story of a young boy in need of more affection and attention than his mother can offer him, and who She believes it is possible to find them through sex, using her youthful body and attractive physique as currency, especially when it involves a man who soon becomes her stepfather.
It is not the first time that this issue appears on the screen. Films such as 'Soshite, baton wa watasareta' ('And So the Baton Is Passed' – 2021), by Japanese director Tetsu Maeda, the Liechtensteinian 'Eugénie' aka 'Eugenie de Sade' (1973), by Jesús Franco, 'Beau- père' (1981), by the Frenchman Bertrand Blier, 'Russkaya Lolita', (2002), by the Russian Armen Oganezov and script by the director himself and Vladimir Nabokov, the American 'The Diary of a Teenage Girl' (2015), by Marielle Heller , the Italian 'La seduzione' (1973), by Fernando Di Leo, among other films, have addressed a similar topic.
After playing Kluea in 'This Love Doesn't Have Long Beans' (2024), it is impressive how Aon Kasama Khamtanit plays him first leading role, in which her ease, self-confidence, honesty and heartfelt transmitting capacity, picked up on the fly, are evident. by the audience; plus the nuanced performances of Yuyee Alissa Intusmith and Lift Supoj Janjareonborn, actress and actor with more than three decades of artistic experience each.
'Club Friday Season 16: Domestic Incident' is daring, dazzling and different, more in touch with the awakening of a young man to his sexuality and the chaos that it provides, that power that gives a young body learning everything/expert in nothing who simply tries sex with his mother's boyfriend, as an experience of the life he is discovering.
The audiovisual combines narrative, visual appeal and high-quality acting, mainly through the protagonist trio, but with greater focus on the sexual relationship established between the teenager and his mother's husband. A couple that combines a teenager of precocious maturity and an adult who, with his striking traits of immaturity, narcissism and dependence, with an excessive penchant for keeping in touch with young people, among them his secretary, a much younger woman in love with her boss, but not reciprocated, seems to indicate having Peter Pan syndrome.
Acidic, stark and liberated. Direct, raw and open. On the positive side, its freshness, its setting, its characters and its shameless liberal bravery. Against them is their permissiveness and realistic licenses.
Without hesitation, the Thai filmmaker presents us with the thoughts and actions of the male couple in a brilliant, tenacious way, with lively, sweet and transgressive language, we see ourselves in their fears and desires, we explain those loose words, we are recipients of all that philosophy of the short life of the adolescent and that of the adult who has tried on other occasions to experiment with sex with men, precisely, with other young people, but has not been able to achieve it because he considers himself heterosexual, and yet, before Guy he gives in. He does not seek the carnal. He has fallen in love. Therein lies the intelligence of the script, in the way it presents its dilemmas, in its voices, in the direct connection of these two characters with the viewer.
The only thing I don't understand is the director's intention, already at the end, to place Gott having sex with other young people, after having rejected this type of proposals at the beginning, when he was already married and had a sexual relationship with Guy. In the end, he is a man in love with a boy who does not dare to publicly assume his sexuality.
This is a type of audiovisual that, although its creators do not judge or take sides at any time, and are only interested in showing realities that can exist within any family, in the epilogue they issue reflections to the audience. After the secret relationship between her son and her husband is discovered by Rim, it is up to the two male figures to choose, and given the love for her mother and the love for the man he loves, Guy chooses Gott, and the latter, between future of his company that would be assured of maintaining the relationship with Rin, and the love for Guy, Gott chooses Guy.
But since the program has to assume a position towards society, with the intention of giving a moral lesson that marriage is sacred, the miniseries loses its horizon, and that is exactly where it fails, since it places Gott having sex with other young people, despite having rejected proposals like these at the beginning. They position Gott, towards the end, as an evil man capable of betraying everything and everyone in his path, including himself, and as someone incapable of publicly assuming his sexuality, ending his romance with Guy, which will allow mother and son reestablish their fractured maternal-filial bond.
Great music, with a rhythmic rhythm, for a crazy story, fresh, vital and personal that goes beyond conventionalism and flourishes; happy family made up of mother and son, a mother who tries to rebuild her love life with a practically unknown man, a teenager with a broken heart, who loses control when he discovers the pleasure of flesh in contact with another human being; newly found pleasurable enjoyment that will focus your steps towards that evolution where emotions become confused and feelings interrupt a path not lacking in danger and drama.
In other words, 'Club Friday Season 16: Domestic Incident' shows what is not allowed with bravery of taste that does not offend, and perfectly captures that discovery of sexuality in a teenager and the dangers of maintaining a secret relationship with an older person, with a considerable age difference, who on top of this is his stepfather.
Ma-Deaw Chookiat Sakveerakul presents us with a bold, non-conformist and refreshing story that speaks with strength, clarity, directly to the screen and to a compulsive viewer who finds it difficult to welcome and follow this teenager and his avid world without being startled, silenced and fascinated by the naturalness and frankness of exposition that does not hide, that does not flee and that speaks emphatically of the mental mess of two heads, that of the adolescent and the adult, whose bodies go at a mile an hour requesting passage.
It surprises, alters and stuns, a marvel of narration exposed, shameless and insolent, that does not leave indifferent; Whether you understand it or not, whether you like it more or less, whether it shocks you or suggests it, it is clear that the miniseries has captured your thoughts while the frames roll; Get to know it, don't judge it, and remember what it is to feel absolute happiness followed by the most miserable misfortune, that ferris wheel without control or brake that decides without thinking about the consequences and that wants to devour the world even though it, sooner rather than later, devours it. to those involved in the plot, because no one will escape pain and suffering when the secret is revealed.
The best: the freshness of the script, the acting ability of its protagonists, and the courage to address a sensitive but real topic that can occur within any family, and is generally ignored in audiovisuals.
The worst: the betrayal of a mother, the infidelity to his girlfriend-wife, and the intimate relationship that it exposes, can bother a certain audience with a not so open mind.