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Suri (Chonnikan Netjui) and Mary (Patcha Poonpiriya) in Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy. |
By Miranda Inganni
Finding inspiration in 410 consecutive tweets by a teenager, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy fuses social media and filmmaking in this wonderfully whimsical movie.
Deftly intertwining the tweets (originally posted by Mary Malony) with the drama, we follow moody Mary (Patcha Poonpiriya) and her more evenly keeled best friend Suri (Chonnikan Netjui) as they navigate their way through their final year of high school. Mary is impulsive -- ordering a jellyfish in the mail, booking a quick trip to Paris which she subsequently sleeps through because of jet lag -- and a frustrated creative -- forever chasing the “magic hour” in which to take her pictures. But mostly she is a mercurial, seemingly hopelessly romantic, teenager.
Mary and Suri are in charge of creating the school’s yearbook, which provides for many distractions and obstacles that they must overcome to complete the book.
Accident prone Mary traipses through her days, despite her cell phone blowing up repeatedly, getting poisoned by mushrooms while on a quick camping trip and even a terrible tragedy. All the while, she pines for M(Vasuphon Kriangprapakit, a young man she meets near a pancake cark next to the train tracks.
While Mary goes through what is for so many the awkward transition into adulthood, Thamrongrattanarit capitalizes on the limitations -- and lack thereof -- of the original tweets allowing Mary to mature in the face of adversity during the course of the film.
As director Thamrongrattanarit creates the story line around the tweets, plot points can seem eclectic. But the feature has a groove that flows smoothly once you suspend all reality and give in to the film's playfulness. It's got to be hard for a grown man to create a story out of a bunch of tweets written by a teenaged girl. But Thamrongrattanarit pulls it off with aplomb.
Accident prone Mary traipses through her days, despite her cell phone blowing up repeatedly, getting poisoned by mushrooms while on a quick camping trip and even a terrible tragedy. All the while, she pines for M(Vasuphon Kriangprapakit, a young man she meets near a pancake cark next to the train tracks.
While Mary goes through what is for so many the awkward transition into adulthood, Thamrongrattanarit capitalizes on the limitations -- and lack thereof -- of the original tweets allowing Mary to mature in the face of adversity during the course of the film.
As director Thamrongrattanarit creates the story line around the tweets, plot points can seem eclectic. But the feature has a groove that flows smoothly once you suspend all reality and give in to the film's playfulness. It's got to be hard for a grown man to create a story out of a bunch of tweets written by a teenaged girl. But Thamrongrattanarit pulls it off with aplomb.
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