Kongdej Jaturanrasmee's ‘Snap’ reveals, if nothing else, that he would approve of a resurgence in film cameras.
That sense of rediscovery is present throughout the movie which sees former high school friends brought together to attend a wedding in their hometown just after the implementation of martial law in 2014.
We start with Pueng (newcomer Waruntorn Paonil) sitting in a coffee shop with her boyfriend taking photos of a cake and posting them online. The plot quickly gets set up as we’re introduced to an old friend who clearly means more than Pueng lets on, later she gets together with the gang from school to plan the journey back to Chantaburi. As both bride and groom are friends from the same group they’ve decided to hold the wedding ceremony at their school. In a style popular with modern Thai indie movies little cartoon effects pop up to indicate social media activity. These effects continue throughout the first half of the movie but drop away as Pueng takes a trip down memory lane to all her old haunts.
When they arrive in Chantaburi Pueng discovers her old house has been turned into a salon and that other important things she remembers have been moved. As she reconnects with her past we learn the circumstances of why she left Chantaburi eight years previously. Her old boyfriend Boyd (Toni Rakkaen) has been drafted in as the wedding photographer.
The goal of the film is to explore how our memories of school and young adult life affect the way we make decisions as grownups. The deeper meaning behind this becomes clearer as the story unfolds and Pueng is forced to discover how all the details of her past life have changed, but that she and her friends are all too comfortable behaving the same way they did when they were last all together 8 years previously.
Boyd's internal life frustrates her as he never offers her anything concrete, unlike more fantasised romantic love stories there are no scenes of passionate love making at the beach house followed by a horse ride along the seashore. Boyd's refusal to explain his feelings leaves Pueng doubting if there was ever anything there in the first place.
Her middles class self-confidence starts to ebb when she's faced with the reality that she must return to Bangkok and marry her boyfriend, who unceremoniously announces that he’ll propose to her at some point in the future.
Political subtext underpins many of Kongdej’s movies but here the characters take centre stage, and the story is as much a comment on the way disengagement from reality affects relationships as it is about how that same disengagement affects society as a whole.