1448 Love Among Us

As an immediate heads up, this review will contain major spoilers for the third act of 1448 Love Among Us.

1448 Love Among Us is a movie created as a sort of protest against article 1448 of Thai civil law which prohibits same-sex marriage. 1448 attempts to show why this law is wrong by depicting a sweet, same-sex relationship as well as ways in which they are oppressed by their union not being considered legal. It is a respectable goal but passion for political change does not necessarily translate into a good film.

Our two non-threatening homosexuals to root for are Pim, a woman with a long-term boyfriend who wants her to move to Japan. However, before this happens, she meets Pat who has been nursing a crush on her. The two women grow closer as Pim and the boyfriend drift. Eventually, Pim and Pat enter in a relationship. Unable to get legally married under Thai law, the two women still hold a commitment ceremony and start a life together. For a while, they happily live their life before tragedy suddenly strikes.

So yeah. This movie buries one of its gays. Pat gets into a car accident and is unresponsive. Whatever surgery is needed that would save her needs to be signed off on by a legal family member. As their union is not recognized, the surgery isn’t performed and Pat dies.

I definitely have questions about this. I don’t know much about Thailand but what sort of medical system won’t perform life-saving surgery without familial consent? Whatever. The movie needed to make a point about why article 1448 is wrong and they chose the easiest and most dramatic route- sudden death.

After Pat dies it is later shown that Pim cannot inherit Pat’s possessions or money despite them having a joint bank account as they owned a coffee shop together. Instead, all that money goes to Pat’s father.

The tonal shift between the first two acts of sweet, inoffensive lesbian love and then suddenly the relentless tragedy of the third act doesn’t quite work for me. I absolutely understand what the filmmaker was trying to do here by building up this sweet relationship and making you root for these characters before pulling a fast one by killing one. I get it. That doesn’t make it good. There’s such genre whiplash between sweet romance and tragedy fueled by inequality. When Pat did die and through the entirety of the third act, I didn’t feel sad, I felt angry because I felt like this movie had tricked me.

The thing about this or any other movie burying its gays is that it needs to think about the audience. This movie seemed pretty clearly made for a heterosexual audience. Its inoffensive, conventionally attractive lesbians are certainly meant to appeal to The Straights. Likewise, Pat dying is a way of garnering sympathy and ideally, political change from them.

However, if you’re going to do pretty much any movie with LGBTQ characters, I think you need to assume the audience is going to be made up of the same. Especially this movie. The majority of people who watch it are probably those who already oppose article 1448. Realistically, it’s not going to be watched by people on the other side of that debate. It’ll be watched by those who already agree with this film’s message.

And as a lesbian, I am sick of seeing lesbians die in stuff. Even in this case, when it genuinely means well, I’m tired of narratives that assume the only way the straights will sympathize with us is if we die. I’m not entirely sure how this movie could have fixed this problem but I do think it should have considered how much of its audience might be made up of Thai WLW and how instead of sudden, relentless tragedy, they might have wanted to see characters like them get some sort of win even in the face of legal discrimination.

On top of everything else, this is just an incompetently made movie. It takes far too long for the actresses to have any chemistry and I didn’t fully buy their love story. This movie also has a pretty low budget so sound quality and camera work suffers accordingly.

As I mentioned at the beginning, a passion for political change doesn’t necessarily make you a good filmmaker. There is a constant failing to portray the depth of emotion any given scene was going for and an over-reliance on montage. This movie has really lofty goals of making a political statement and doing a shocking, genre switch but the talent behind the camera is not such that it can realistically achieve those goals.

I did not enjoy this movie. The director showed no talent as a filmmaker and I felt cheated when it suddenly buried its gays. However, I respect it. I respect having such passion for a political cause that you make a feature-length movie about it despite an overwhelming lack of talent. I respect the attempt because how this movie turned out was probably genuinely the best the filmmaker could’ve done. 1448 definitely came from a place of passion but it failed to translate as a movie.

Overall rating: 3.5/10

Other WLW films in similar genres