Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (2013)

Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (2013)

An absurd and endlessly creative coming-of-age story that finds profound meaning in the mess of youth

The Very Best

8.5

Movie

Thailand
Thai
Comedy, Drama
2013
NAWAPOL THAMRONGRATTANARIT
Awat Ratanapintha, Boonsong Nakphoo, Chonnikan Netjui
127 min

What it's about

Mary is in her last course of school. She'll confront sudden changes in her life, loving relatins and friendship. Based on some tweets of an anonymous girl.

The take

With a premise as insane as this—a high school coming-of-age film adapted from 410 consecutive tweets from a real, random Thai girl under the username @marylony—you would expect Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy to be some sort of incoherent commentary about social media. What director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit gives us instead is a completely original and surprisingly affecting portrait of a young woman in her senior year trying to come to terms with the fact that her life may only ever be a mess of incongruous parts without a definite identity. It's as whimsical as it is bittersweet, with the film flitting back and forth between the absurd and the melancholic.

Thamrongrattanarit structures his film as a series of loosely connected vignettes, with every single one of @marylony's tweets appearing on screen. The effect is one-of-a-kind—as if we're watching different layers of meaning constantly interacting with each other, our understanding of what we're supposed to think of as serious or tongue-in-cheek always changing. And through the film's deliberately lo-fi aesthetics, the experience of watching it is like flipping through a scrapbook of memories mundane and precious.

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