In Kongdej Jaturanrasmee's new film Snap, a wedding photographer returns to his hometown in Chantaburi with a group of high school friends. In that picturesque small town, Boy (Tony Rakkaen) takes happy prenuptial pictures of his old flame Phueng (Waruntorn Paonil), who's marrying a high-ranking soldier. That word, "soldier", carries a weight so leaden here: Snap is a soulful romance about a man searching for lost time, but the film is contextualised as a personal aftermath of the larger social tremors, namely the military coups d'etat of 2006 and 2014.
If a coup -- and thus politics -- seems like a distant rumble that has no actual impact on the everyday life of people, Kongdej's film suggests otherwise. It is a rupture that pulls people apart. Politics, in a way, is more powerful, or more heartbreaking, than love. In Snap, we learn that Phueng had to move out from her town after her father, a military general, was promoted after the 2006 putsch, and that ended her budding romance with Boy. In 2014, the two people, having grown out of the fog of their teenage years, reunite as another coup is imminent -- and as Phueng is marrying a soldier, a presence that seems inevitable.
Kongdej, whose previous film Tangwong also referenced the red shirt protests and our political malaise, frames the nostalgic love story inside the looming shadows of the superstructural force. His strategy is clear, perhaps too clear in part -- the dialogue about a military mobilisation, a portrait of a uniformed general in the background of the characters, the fact that Phueng is from a military family. And yet the foreground is a sad journey of childhood friends returning to the place of their memories, with Boy and Phueng tiptoeing awkwardly around their past feelings. There's a schoolyard, the wooden benches on which students reveal their crushes, a pop soundtrack of their adolescence -- the atmosphere is that of a balmy evening after a lazy afternoon class, relived again by the group of friends who know their lives have moved on.
The film's title, Snap, refers to the act of picture-taking, which in turn is an act of time-capturing. This film aspires to be a story of personal moments stolen by the force of history, and I only wish the two lead actors would have conjured up the magic of that melancholy with more persuasion, especially the lengthy scene inside an aquarium. At times, the mood wavers between abstract sorrow and bittersweet relish, and since the narrative is superimposed by the invisible hand of Thai politics, the story risks reducing its characters into mere symbols.
But Snap has its moments; its wistfulness has an appeal, and Kongdej manages to capture the slow reality of the town without romanticising it (or not too much). Once again, the director shows that he's able to respond to social frustration through the fate of ordinary people, and it makes him an important filmmaker at a time when Thai cinema lacks political edges. If a picture is a monument of a specific time in history, Snap does its service by recording the time the characters have lost and maybe hope to regain.
