This documentary pulls together oral history to trace a very specific New York chapter of gay life in America. Back in 2014, someone found a box stuffed with hundreds of letters sitting in a storage unit in LA. These letters went all the way back to the 1950s and were written to a young guy named Reno Martin, who'd later become known in Hollywood as agent Ed Limato. When Martin left home to chase a radio career, his closest gay and queer friends kept writing to him just to stay in touch. Every letter's signed with a fake name and ends with a warning to burn it after reading, which tells you everything about an era when just being gay, or dressing in drag, could get you thrown in jail. The filmmakers actually tracked down the surviving writers, now in their eighties and nineties, and turned what could've been dry historical digging into something genuinely personal and intimate. The people behind this doc found the original letter writers themselves, several of whom are stil...
The past timeline centers on a noble family where both brothers train in Khon, and a commoner who attends school alongside the elder brother. Dance ends up taking a backseat though, because the elder brother falls for a female servant while the younger brother starts getting close to the commoner boy. Both of them know full well that it's not just the fact that they're two men together causing problems, it's also the class divide standing in their way. There's a jealous fellow student thrown into the mix trying to drive a wedge between them, plus all the usual family drama you'd expect, the eldest brother eventually gets banished, and the younger one is nearly forced into marrying a woman once his relationship with the commoner becomes public knowledge. It all works out peacefully in the end though. The present day storyline follows Sandy and Lucky, two students who both love Khon but completely disagree on how it should be performed, one insisting tradition has to be preserved exactly as is, the other pushing to modernize it for younger audiences. When one of their arguments gets filmed and ends up online, the two of them are forced to team up and create content together just to keep their Khon club from getting shut down.
I genuinely couldn't tell if this was meant to be some kind of reincarnation story, given how it uses the same dance form and same actors to mirror love across two timelines, but honestly it works either way. The past storyline is heavy with tension and tragedy, while the present feels much lighter. What I appreciated was that the romance never got pushed aside just to deliver a history lesson, and the historical weight never got dropped just to rush toward a happy ending, the show actually balanced both pretty well. The dance performances themselves felt genuinely sincere too. I personally found the period storyline more compelling, since working within those strict historical boundaries actually made the story feel more grounded and believable. The modern storyline didn't land quite as hard for me in comparison, though there's a line in there about how art needs to evolve with time, and that might genuinely be the point the show is trying to make. Blending a Thai BL with a traditional art form like this was a genuinely interesting experiment and one that actually gets you thinking. The cast did solid work with what they were given. The story isn't without its flaws, there's some unnecessary drama thrown in, though I guess that's almost a requirement for the genre at this point. Overall this is a refreshing change of pace in the BL space, with clean visuals and a generally well executed concept. (6/10)
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