If I Love A Boy

If I Love A Boy is a 2019 Thai boys' love anthology from the production house Studio Oh Ha Oh: five unrelated short stories, each running around twelve minutes, each catching one small, tender moment of love or friendship between young men. There is no continuous plot holding them together, only a shared register, gentle feeling, filmed close and kept short. In Mom, Please Do Not Disturb, Son (Son Korbboon Garun) is taken home to dry off by his friend Pluggy (Pluggy Tharakorn Khamsing) after getting caught in the rain, and the afternoon turns sweet. In You Never Eat Alone, a simple food delivery puts Folk (Folk Touch Inthirat) and Petch (Pech Sirin Siripanich), two people with a shared past, back at the same table.

Hand On Me follows Kia (Nokia Chinnawat Phattharathanachot) as he looks after an injured friend, Taro (Taro Watcharathon Passorndiloklert), who is still thinking about his ex. Everybody Run pairs Ball (Ball Saranwut Chatjaratsaeng), a runner sidelined by injury, with Poori (Poori Siphrai), the friend who takes charge of his recovery. The last of the five, Night Before Everything, is the one with something real at stake: a close friendship between Chokun (Chokun Watcharaphon Suwanrueang) and Nut (Nut Nathanon Metharathip) is tested when one of them comes out and the other cannot find the right reaction before the night is over. Each short keeps its ending to itself; the anthology is more interested in the moment just before a feeling gets said out loud than in whatever follows it.

Light, gentle and early in the Thai BL boom, the collection leans toward warmth over high drama, and the twelve-minute format suits that: there is no room for a subplot, only for one scene to land. The five parts aired weekly between 21 June and 19 July 2019. The same production house went on to make the series TGIF: Thank God It's Friday, though the two projects are unconnected. For viewers tracing how Thai BL developed, If I Love A Boy shows the form at its smallest and least self-conscious.