The Durians of The Paradise of Thorns (2024) Leave You With a Bitter Taste
Honorary Financial Secretary Venesya Ko reviews the queer Thai drama, The Paradise of Thorns (2024).
Naruebet Kuno’s The Paradise of Thorns (2024) was one of my most anticipated films of the year, and so, no one is more disheartened than I am to report that while it had all the makings of a five star–film, it is unfortunate that its writing never allowed the film to reach its full potential.
Thongkam and Sek are a gay couple who run a durian farm. When Sek dies in an unfortunate accident, Thongkam not only has to deal with grief, but is also thrown into a bitter struggle with Sek’s family, particularly his adopted sister, Mo, over the durian farm.
The film has been praised for its daring examination of queer rights, and for foregrounding the importance of marriage equality. While I agree with this sentiment, I cannot help but feel like the message of the film ended up being undermined by the violence, misplaced antagonism, and tragedy that the writing chose to prioritise for the sake of cinematic entertainment– especially in the final leg of the film, which left me with a sour taste.
It almost seems like three quarters into its runtime, the film forgot its own objective to critique the systemic oppression of women and the LGBTQIA+ community, and became a shell of a story to say, very simply that, “life is devoid of happiness”. I do believe that Kuno, who also happens to be the film’s screenwriter, had the right idea in the beginning. Unfortunately, the film was never conclusive about its opinions, and felt directionless as a whole. Not to mention, the final fifteen minutes felt like watching a completely different storyline, and it is disappointing that the director chose to over dramatize the trauma of these characters for mere shock value, rather than foregrounding the harmful effects of heteronormative ideas of traditional marriage as the root cause of their anger, as well as the injustice they have been subjected to.
Before I delve further, I feel obliged to admit that despite its flaws, everyone who watches this film will undoubtedly appreciate its gorgeous cinematography and anxiety-inducing sound design. The latter was particularly effective in translating the tumultuous emotions of the characters as their conflict intensifies, allowing the audience to immerse themselves deeper into the film.
The cast also did a wonderful job in portraying their characters, especially the two leads, Jeff Satur and Engfa Waraha, who play Thongkam and Mo respectively. While Satur embodies his role as the heartbroken Thongkam– and according to Letterboxd user jansbaby, as the “cuntiest durian farmer”– exceptionally, it is Engfa Waraha who captivates in her role as Satur’s “enemy”?
While Waraha has always been great at delivering romantic, emotional lines in previous projects, such as Show Me Love (2023), involving a beauty pageant and two girls who fall in love with each other, it was her chemistry with co-star Charlotte Austin that propelled the series’ success. However, in The Paradise of Thorns, Waraha proves that she is a capable actress, portraying the ugliest and heaviest of emotions like jealousy, resentment and anger so effectively with a fierce, tearful look of her eyes, or with an ear-piercing cry of indignance. She provided the most enthralling performance of the film to me, and I am thrilled to see that she is finally receiving the recognition she deserves.
Onto the film’s writing, I feel that the cast’s acting was able to shine through because the characters were well-written to an extent. And that is why it is especially infuriating that the plot was not able to live up to Thongkam and Mo’s complexities.
The film was produced and released prior to Thailand’s legalization of same-sex marriage–a triumph which will come into effect in January–and sought to highlight the societal and systematic oppression that queer individuals like Thongkam are forced to face in their everyday lives. From the microaggressions Thongkam has to face on a personal level, such as Sek’s family ignoring the significance of their wedding ring, to losing the legal rights to the durian farm both he and Sek invested in, the film is initially able to successfully critique the marriage-based system of love prioritised by our heteronormative and patriarchal society, to ultimately highlight how such restrictive structures ignore and expect queer individuals to stay quietly in the margins.
As the film progressed, however, it became riddled with repetitive scenes that did nothing to further the plot, but served only to make Thongkam suffer even more. Not to mention, the final arc of The Paradise of Thorns has this sympathetic character act completely out of character and attempt sexual assault on another character. All the potential the film and its message had, is undermined in the last leg of the film, in favour of ten minutes of gratuitous violence that was seemingly intended to be entertaining, but was really just a horrifying viewing experience.
Moreover, I felt like the writer’s choice to have him begin a relationship with Mo’s brother Jingna, so quickly after his partner’s death, took away from the significance of Thongkam and Sek’s relationship. It was an unnecessary choice that was perhaps pandering to a small, existing part of the audience that expected a Boys LoveBL Romance subplot, but ultimately only managed to unfortunately distract from the film’s examination of the real-life struggles of the queer community.
As for Mo, there were many attempts at presenting her as a multidimensional character, and I would argue that the film does succeed to a certain extent. Though she was a character that most people would find hateful, it worked because her backstory and flaws largely humanised her. Yet, the final 15 minutes of the movie overly exaggerates her actions and erases all the depth that the first three quarters of the film had spent convincing the audience, her character was capable of.
The film could have used her character–especially because it had already explored her struggles and her anger–to further reinforce how a marriage-based institution of love is harmful not only because it automatically condemns individuals who do not wish to conform to these heteronormative values, but also because it falsely encourages and teaches women that self-actualization, happiness and social mobility can only be achieved through a heterosexual marriage with men.
I argue that Mo is an effective example because as the film had shown prior to those last fifteen minutes, her belief in such a narrow-minded framework of marriage, is why she is unable to leave her toxic environment, even when it was destroying her. Most of the characters are entitled in one way or another, they all believe their situation to be the worst. But it is important to note that Mo’s anger and greed specifically stems from the fact that she wasted so many years of her life for the promise of a marriage. She states that if not for Sek, she would have left the countryside for a better future at the capital city of Bangkok. Mo threw away her future and education for a man, and in the end no one even cared about her because she was just another tool they could use, she is even referred to as “the help” at one point by people who are supposed to be her family.
When Mo is given the chance to leave the durian orchard, and in extension, the hold Sek’s family has on her, to finally rediscover who she is outside of marriage, she chooses not to. She instead takes advantage of the unfortunate circumstance to steal the durian orchard from Thongkam, and then proceeds to marry an influential male figure from the village she once sought to escape. I believe that even though her treatment of Thongkam is inexcusable, the film still manages to present Mo as a sympathetic character at this point, showing the audience that she continues to be trapped by, and rely on, relationships with men–even when she is undervalued and objectified–because she has spent years being conditioned to believe it is the only way she can attain some sort of control and financial security in her life.
I am not sure if it was the screenwriter’s intention, but Mo’s actions and the animosity between her and Thongkam also reveals that while the legalisation of same-sex marriage is a right queer individuals should have, marriage does not erase all other issues inherent to a patriarchal society, especially issues such as homophobia, poverty and sexism that are most evidently observed in the film. In The Paradise of Thorns, the idea of marriage that Sek promises them is what allows his mother to abuse Mo; and though his mother begrudgingly accepts Thongkam’s relationship with Sek, she continues to direct homophobic comments at him throughout the film. Additionally, despite all of them having the common goal of acquiring wealth and escaping poverty, they refuse to acknowledge the intersectional struggles of the other, and are all antagonistic towards one another.
It is also why I am frustrated that the ending is written such a way, because it was inserted randomly during a moment wherein Mo and Thongkam could have come to an understanding and realised that despite their differences, both of them were ultimately victims of the ideal of traditional marriage which prevented them from seeing beyond a heteronormative framework of validation and fulfillment. Instead of allowing the characters to dwell on the reasons for their anger, to reconsider their self-victimizing behavior, in order to finally move on from this harmful cycle of violence they’ve been trapped into, the writers instead chose to end the film on a traumatic and melodramatic note that resolves nothing, except shift the focus away from the important discussion of queer rights.
Thongkam and Mo are even more miserable and alone at the end, than they were in the beginning of the film. And now the audience also has to sit with this equally dejected feeling for the rest of their lives (I’m being overdramatic but you get my point).
I’m disappointed that I didn’t love this film, because it had so much potential, yet I will only remember it by those horrible final, 15 minutes. I suppose, to end things on a brighter note, you could say that in the strange way it has managed to root itself so deeply in my mind that I must write about it, goes to show that the film was at least memorable and impactful–even if not in the way it wanted to be.