Fast & Feel Love Review: adulting 101

 

More than 15 years ago, when I had just graduated from college, I dipped my toes into an obscure fighting game. I didn't know how good I really was, since I didn't fight anyone else. Finally I had the chance to test my skills against someone for the first time. I went to University Mall, where they had setups for that game, played like two dozen rounds against this younger dude and got completely destroyed. For the next five years or so I'd enter the competitive scene for this game, holding tournaments and engaging with a community that I'd never have interacted with otherwise. Eventually, my speed and reflexes just weren't what they used to be, and various responsibilities (including med school, graduating from that, and finally entering the workforce) took over and I stopped. I haven't played seriously in more than a decade. Sometimes looking back, I wonder what would've happened if I pushed my little hobby as far as I could. I guess I'll never know; I never did have the drive to pour my everything onto one single thing and maintain it for my entire life.

For Kao (Nat Kitcharit),  he doesn't have that problem. Obsessed with speed stacking at a young age, his singular goal is to get the fastest cup stacking time ever and become the world champion. To help achieve that goal, he gets into a relationship with Jay (Urassaya Sperbund) who doesn't have any concrete dreams of her own. As the years pass, every incremental increase becomes even harder to achieve, and for Kao, much like that bus in the 1994 movie Speed, he has to go fast, without any other distractions, or he will explode like a blazing fireball. But to anyone who's ever watched a Summoning Salt video (or to anyone with common sense, really), you'd know that there is a human limit to how fast something can go. Kao's getting older and Jay's starting to realize that she's spent the last 10+ years living someone else's dream. So, one day, she leaves.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a singular attachment to a goal, but Kao soon realizes that that sometimes comes with a heavy personal cost. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes almost the same to support a man in his passions. The film makes it a point to illustrate how the increasing responsibilities of adulthood affect our childhood dreams, and how it affects the people around us. As Kao struggles to fill the gigantic hole that Jay left, he begins to face the responsibilities of being an adult for the first time.

Fast and Feel Love is probably Nawapol's most mainstream work. Although there are some moments where his arthouse sensibilities shine through, for the most part it's a self-aware, fourth wall breaking deadpan comedy full of references to everything from Star Wars to Mariah Carey. Tonally it's unlike anything he's done before, and considering his entire filmography, it's not his best. It's definitely an acquired taste, and I'm sure I've missed a bunch of references to Thai media and culture, but I personally found it an enjoyable watch. 

The film is an interesting companion piece to Nawapol's earlier Happy Old Year, in that Happy Old Year concerns itself with space: empty vs. emptied space and the things (and the memories) that we acquire to fill that space. Fast and Feel Love, on the other hand, concerns itself with time and how we spend that limited time: the almost irrational obsession with faster and faster stacking times, Jay's investment of her time on a one-sided relationship, the time that is taken away from us by the minutiae of adulthood, and the fact that the clock is ticking on both Kao and Jay: Kao's getting slower as he grows older, and Jay's window to becoming a mother is growing smaller. Eventually, Kao's coming-of-age doesn't completely transform him because old habits die hard, but by the end of the film you know he's come out of the whole ordeal a better person.

Aside from the obvious adulting/codependency stuff, Nawapol's pattern of addressing contemporary millennial concerns is felt in the film's exploration of time: we have only so many chances to live our lives, so how then do we live it? And what can we do to make those moments matter, if we can at all? 

Nat Kitcharit and Urassaya Sperbund are both great in their roles, though the latter really shines in various moments - it's kind of a shame she hasn't done a lot of movie work. The rest of the movie is technically adroit: Panayu Kunvanlee, who worked on films like Bangkok Love Story and 2020's The Con-Heartist (a mainstream Thai film I enjoyed a lot) did the editing, including those deadpan comedic jump cuts that seem to be popular (?) in mainstream Thai cinema and Natdanai Naksuwan, who did additional cinematography for Baz Poonpiriya's One for The Road, does DP work here.

p.s. there's also something to be said about how gendered household roles function here; I'm reminded of a moment in the 2016-2017 J-drama Tokyo Joshi Zukan where the perennially love-searching Asami Mizukawa is asked about what men want in a woman, and the guy she's talking to answers that what men really want are women without dreams of their own. I kept coming back to that moment while watching this.