Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy.
Description
An engaging experiment in plotting a narrative, the story of Thai teenager Mary’s final year of high school is told via 410 tweets, taken verbatim and in consecutive order from the Twitter feed of a real-life Thai teenager (handle: @marylony). Writer-director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s film follows Mary, her best friend, Suri, and their classmates as they drift through the grounds and buildings of a high school that looks like a bombed-out ruin and is run by a megalomaniac headmaster who issues inexplicable dictates from offscreen. Meanwhile, the film’s onscreen missives —tweets like “Only my body is awake” and “I want a jellyfish,” sound-tracked by the punctuation of a tapping Return key—provoke an unexpected interlude in Paris, an exploding cellphone, bizarre online purchases, the sudden appearance of a brass band, romantic disappointments and events that veer without warning from absurdly comedic to profoundly tragic. The whiplash plotline, governed by cryptic observations, some veined with philosophy, others sparse mundanities, pulls Mary in some strange directions. But Thamrongrattanarit makes inventive, antic use of the blurts and bleats and pulses of information that populate the Twittersphere, drawing attention to the irrepressible stream of context-free commentary, and playfully reading between the lines. –Lynn Rapoport
Thai director and screenwriter Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit began making films in 2006, with the experimental documentary See. His first feature, 36 (2012), won the New Currents Award in South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival and the Thai Film Director Association’s Best Director award. Thamrongrattanarit writes film criticism for various publications and has screenwriting credits on several other films.
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/89749887?autoplay=1Film Details
Language Thai
Year 2013
Runtime 127
Country Thailand
Director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit
Producer Aditya Assarat
Writer Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit
Editor Chonlasit Upanigkit
Cinematographer Pairach Khumwan
Music Somsiri Sangkaew
Cast Patcha Poonpiriya, Chonnikan Netjui
Print Source Pop Pictures Co. Ltd/ assarat@yahoo.com