'Lunch' by award-winning director, Anocha Suwichakornpong a Thai film (strange how this appears in the Singapore Short film selection!) where nothing much really happens. And you thought though the plethora of Thai horror films or the recent romance Hello Stranger that the Thais are a dramatic bunch. It may surprise you to know that film scholars actually do study of films where nothing happens, which Margulies defines in his 1996 book “Nothing Happens” as “the everyday [that] is often appended to films and literature in which the representation’s substratum of content seems at variance with the duration accorded it. Too much celluloid, too many words, too much time, is devoted to “nothing of interest.” We have the two protagonists – the (virginal) schoolboy and the (horny) schoolgirl. They play truant, dine-and-dash, exchange dirty banter on a vast field, talk about their future, hug trees, caress tree bark, dissect the science behind rock-paper-scissors, and also toy with the idea of marriage at what must be the most mindbaffling moment of the evening of shorts in Programme A.
