A minority of one here

I can understand the praise which all the other reviewers shower on various aspects of this series. The cinematography. The acting. The writing. The music. From a thoroughly dispassionate standpoint, I am able to give "good" ratings to some of those dimensions too. Anyhow, I leave it to The Shipper's many enthusiastic fans to praise it to the skies, as they do. But I found the series so intensely disagreeable that my feelings of shock and unease will probably stay with me a long time whenever I think of The Shipper. In brief, it gives us a very weird message about life and death, and a bitterly homophobic account of human love. The one and only love story here is a heterosexual love story about a girl trapped in a male body. This might lead to an interesting exploration of trans identity, or an attempt to look at a non-binary self-understanding. But no. She's in a male body, that's all, and the nature of the relationship is utterly conventional heterosexual girl/boy romance. As for the same-sex possibility here (no point even referring to the concept of "BL"), it is literally killed off, stone dead. There is no chance of love between males, the storyline seems to say - it's doomed. Fatal. Something which has to be terminated, erased. As happens here. The only way love could exist between two seemingly male persons, the series tells us, is when one of them in reality is a woman - meaning it's not really any sort of "m/m" relationship at all. It's a hideous and cruel message and it's what this whole series is based on. Hence my low rating. Yes, I should have abandoned it long, long ago. And I did. But I came back to see how it ended. I'm sorry I did.

Footnote: I realise I am not in a minority of one. Fortunately. There are a couple of other discerning viewers who were equally alert to, and dismayed by, the crude homophobic message conveyed by The Shipper. Meanwhile, however, I've read the other reviews here, and I'll say that I'm - well, intrigued. One could say they exhibit a ... striking unity. First of all, there are a great many of them. A huge number of reviews. All for The Shipper. OK, very well. This suggests that it was an exceptionally popular series, watched by a very high number of viewers. Was it? I'm not sure I got that impression ... Next: many, if not most, of the reviews are rather close to identical. They seem to follow a set formula. Read along, and you'll quickly get the picture. The reviewer immediately announces that the series isn't "BL" - and always finds space to make some dismissive comment about BL fans. Then we're told that The Shipper is a vastly superior product - with more than a few reviewers going out of their way to pour scorn on BL, yaoi, m/m romance, LGBT material etc. Next, they tell you that this series is an edifying moral lesson, or a series of inspiring moral messages. Finally, they award it a series of 9s and 10s.

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I was surprised by the high marks I ended up giving this little 3-episode series. But it's an exquisite miniature. There's a story. A beginning, a middle, an end. Two characters who are on screen almost the whole time. No extraneous plotlines. Often a scene is played out in one very plain room, or sometimes outdoors. Everything about it is modest.

Also the lifestyle of the characters. Unlike so many of our most beloved gay love story heroes in Thailand, they are not rich. Not at all, quite the opposite - at least one of them is poor, very poor, struggling, an orphan. And we see that also in the settings, the streets, the clothes, the props, the absence of any fancy cars. Both actors are absolutely compelling to look at - but they are not spectacularly beautiful. I say that as one who is a great fan of spectacularly beautiful Thai actors - I adore those gorgeous guys. But these two hold our attention because of their expressions and movements: their acting. They look like normal, average, pleasant-looking young men. But I'll never forget the beauty of their faces in many scenes: a beauty which they and the camera create. And the story, meanwhile, likewise modest and simple, anything but convoluted, is interesting, as it starts with the idea of repentance, compensation, a wrongdoer trying to make up for his crime.

Some declare this series low-budget, marked by poor production standards etc. It's not a glossy, high-budget production, no. But praising its modesty and simplicity isn't a way of dressing up its shortcomings as virtues. Not at all. It really IS admirably modest and simple in many ways - which in some scenes are rather breathtaking: the dialogue, the facial expressions and movements of the actors, the wonderful slowness of certain scenes (yet in such a short series), the silences, the moments of love, self-realisation, intimacy and total vulnerability. Also the score, a very lyrical piano accompaniment which reminds one at times of some very classy, famous films. Again, modest and simple and just right.

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OMG. Confusing and bizarre

I was deeply puzzled by this utterly disjointed series, a bizarre amalgam of truly disparate elements. There was a gruesome mystery story, utterly vile, really, about murdered children, good grief. A story about a ... "bakery" which wasn't a bakery at all, but a café where hardly any pretence was made of baking anything. There was a story about a father and daughter. Another one about a family detective agency. A gay character who did all kinds of utterly weird un-gay things and was in reality scared of women - not a lover of men. Then there was a tangle of storylines around the owner of the café. Oh yes, and a dramatic sentimental saga about a young boxer. And so on.

But worst of all, there were really disturbing, repellent items which it's hard to forget. Clearly I should have stopped watching. This is not a spoiler, so I can mention these elements again here. First, the story of the murdered children. Truly horrible. Not comic. Utterly gruesome. Next, the repeated depiction of young children as players in some sort of heterosexual romance - the "first love" of one's life, etc. Again, no no no. Kids of that age should not be portrayed as engaged in adult romantic relationships. Finally, worst of all, the message that a crazy fear of women is what makes a man gay! Does Singto, who has given us some other gay roles, really believe this - that a gay man is only interested in men because he has a pathological terror of women?

Absolutely, this is not a BL. No way. But that has nothing to do with my reservations. They are exactly as stated above.

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This is a short film about two male actors in a play who appear to become lovers in 'real life'. It poses many interesting questions which simply need to be ... thought about. As can be seen from many comments below, people seem to bring their own concerns and wishes to their interpretation of what happens in the film. Some think it's about a powerful gay love affair between an older man and a younger man who both happen to be actors in play which calls for them to be intimate. Others think it is about "method acting" - the acting technique developed in the main by Konstantin Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler 70/80 years ago - and the interesting notion that it could somehow force or trick the actors to adopt (in their everyday non-acting reality) the actions and desires of their characters on stage. Which is it here? Do the two men really fall for each other? Or do they merely enact a passion which is instilled in them through some sort of brainwashing brought about by the method acting technique? The film is clever and short and skates over the territory in a series of rather brief scenes which hint at both possibilities. And so the question is left open.

However, it's interesting to see how some commentators are very keen to insist that there is no "real homosexuality" here. This is something we hear all the time, not least from and about actors in gay love stories and 'BL' series in the Far East: they're not "really" gay, they're "just acting". These claims are so universal that you wonder if any gay character is ever played by a real gay actor - or whether any gay actors exist at all. And so "Method" plays with that disquiet. One of the characters even says he isn't gay - he just likes the other actor, who happens to be gay. The problem is that we are not living in an open, equal world where people are free to live "without labels". Far from it. As we see very clearly in the film. Whatever is going on between them, the two men are not allowed to explore it. Instead, we actually see them torn apart violently, assaulted by various other people, and accused of "perversion". And so we're shown that it's impossible to penetrate through to any "reality" - unless actors who really are gay are finally free one day to ... be gay. And that's not the case, not in Hollywood (where not one single leading actor has ever openly declared himself to be gay) or in Korea. Additionally, certain actors who have come out as gay publicly have later expressed their regret and misgivings about their openness, pointing to various ways in which their careers have suffered as a result. So the point of "Method" is to make us wonder, feel intrigued and provoked, alight on one interpretation or the other, - and argue with each other.

Simply because there is so much homophobia revealed (see below) in the "it's all about method acting, they aren't really gay, they don't really love each other" thesis, and the passion with which people argue for it, I'm inclined to take the other view - that they do recognise within themselves the potential to love another man and that fear and convention combine to crush them in the end. This is also somewhere in between, and I would suggest that a lot of real life is "somewhere in between". That is, method acting isn't such an overpoweringly influential technique that it bamboozles helpless straight actors into "turning gay" - which is nothing other than the language of heterosexual purity corrupted by homosexual "perversion". Instead, method acting is a powerful dramatic tool focusing on the reality of an unreal character which may also, in the case of these 2 specific men living subject to the constraints of a homophobic world, propel them into realising an erotic potential which is genuinely there - in their characters and in their relationship. But ultimately Korean society has no place for gay men and as we see at the end, the older actor is vanquished, his homosexual potential extinguished, and he is meekly led by the hand back into a silent world of heterosexual "normality". And so maybe this is an ingenious little film, rather bitter, rather sad. I wonder how many ... yes ... gay men who are not able to be out in Korea were involved in making it?

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A wonderful series. Two continuing storylines, but the 'volleyball story' is the main one which we follow through all the way from episode 1 to 8. The actors are totally compelling to watch, their characters clear and distinctive and consistent, and the relationship is developed in ways which are intensely romantic - but also very erotic - AND actually interesting and indeed plausible. Many gripping scenes - love scenes, though not always. (Some very ardent boy-on-boy kissing - though only ... 2 or 3 times? - plus intense, loving looks conveyed entirely by expressive eyes.) I'll definitely watch it again in the future! A happy ending which is very, very satisfying.

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