Singapore Dispatch. 1.

Traveling to attend a film festival is very different from going to one taking place where you live. In a strange city, you're there for a single purpose - you happily eat, drink, talk, walk, and breathe cinema. Time is broken down into viewing slots, sleep loses priority, food is fuel, conversations never stray beyond what's good or bad. But when the film festival is on your doorstep, the experience has to sit alongside the necessities of daily life. Chores to do, work to be done, loved ones to spend time with - and about 130 feature films (not to mention more shorts) to try and get your head round. It's schizoid living for two weeks during the Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) as I try to balance my real life and my festival life, and the classic festival feeling of panic is only heightened by the split. Am I missing all the good stuff?

Every year I look at SIFF's program and find it more uncompromising and challenging than the last, and that's double-true this year. Rising rentals and competitive local distributors have forced SIFF to shift away from tried and tested festival hotties and focus on the (relatively) unknown and unshown. This pays off with discoveries and revelations for the truly committed and the hardcore, but definitely leaves many local cineastes wondering where the big guns from Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Venice have gone. Instead, they targeted the Don Askarian retrospective - and the Armenian émigré's remarkable, symbolic tableau developed devoted disciples in Singapore.

The festival flagged up its "Secret Life of Arabia" focus by making Kiss Me Not on the Eyes, by Jocelyn Saab, the opening film, paired with a short by Malaysian auteur U-Wei Bin Haji Saari, My Beautiful Rambutan Tree in Tanjung Rambutan. Saab's film opens strongly with a pulsating montage of Cairo life, great music and a taxi full of feisty women - but later settles into a predictable dialectic between sensuality and the restrictive laws and customs of conservative society. U-Wei delivers a dark tale of spoilt, upper class children, an accidental death and the supernatural growth of a tree - I'm sure it was allegorical, although I didn't really "get it."

The Arabic program balances fictional features and documentaries (including a worthy tribute to Michel Khleifi, who also provided the fireworks during the accompanying seminar). One stand-out is Erik Gandini and Tarek Saleh's Gitmo: The New Rules of War, a chilling but relentlessly compelling investigation into interrogation techniques and office politics among the high brass at Guantanamo Bay. Confession: I watched Gitmo at the festival's office video/DVD viewing area, a valuable resource, but with a constant flow of guests and the attractions of whatever your neighbour is watching, it's easy to get distracted - even so, Gitmo had me riveted.

As others have noted, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is actually a new edit of Horny Home Tutor: Teacher's Love Juice, and belongs to the genre of Japanese soft-porn known as Pink. I am no expert on these (although maybe I should be), but I seriously doubt most Pink movies have as many weirdly embedded geo-political references. A sex worker (Emi Kuroda) accidentally acquires a clone of George W Bush's finger and she finds that it's just as horny to penetrate her as it is to destroy the world. Turned into a speed-reading genius by a bullet to the head (more penetration), Sachiko finds herself on the run, and her journey (to an Osama-style cave hiding a doomsday device) involves a dizzying number of sexual encounters. Initially, the audience laughed it off, but by mid-point, after a rape, the seduction of a teenage boy and more rough sex and masturbation, we had shifted into a fatigued silence. Read as an audacious, excessive sexualisation of "the war on terror," Glamorous Life presents one possible response to the Bush administration's affect on all our "democracies."

Another is of course, Manderlay (one of very few Cannes 05 hangovers at the fest), which I finally caught, and surmised that much of the critical shit-storm surrounding it was unjustified and weakly argued. People seem to get very hung up on Von Trier the egomaniac (and anti-American) and refuse to simply watch the films. It's rarely acknowledged that he's a brilliant (albeit calculated) storyteller - everything unfolds with a precise and deadly logic. In dealing with race, power, money, sex and democracy, it's a risky, uncomfortable ride.

Back in the viewing room, I checked out the double-bill of actor Tadanobu Asano's dreamy debut featurette, Tori, and the documentary that accompanies it, Sorano (almost twice the length of its subject). I'm a huge Asano fan, and felt pretty disloyal fast-forwarding through parts of both these tapes. Tori is made up of five short segments, including some digital animation, a graff/skate clip, a dance film, a traditional stand-up comedy routine and a strikingly odd samurai vignette. It's certainly sincere, but it's also a forgettable mish-mash of styles and interests. In Sorano, a psychiatrist attempts to analyse both films and the creative team - a fruitless exercise. The best insight into Tori's shortcomings: Asano confesses that he doesn't know how to "perform" as a director and just agrees to everything his team suggests.

The main newspaper in Singapore, the Straits Times, is too busy manufacturing election fever (the ruling party, the PAP have not been out of power since independence) to recognize that the festival is happening, other than reporting on the surfeit of local films this year. The most anticipated, Royston Tan's 4.30, is the festival's closer, so I'll deal with that in the second dispatch, but I did catch Kelvin Tong's Love Story, a low-budget Chinese-language feature financed by a scheme fronted by Hong Kong megastar Andy Lau. Heavily inflected by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, it muses on love and art while switching across a series of non-linear romantic encounters between its blank-faced writer protagonist and a parade of improbable females. It's ultimately too stiffly artificial and self-conscious to achieve the sexy, poetic melancholy that it's aiming for, but Tong's biggest mistake is to literally dis-locate his film. Love Story unfolds in an anonymous urban void, a Mandarin-speaking nowheresville, which denies the film a chance to breathe or be real.

The opposite is the case for the collection of "New Malaysian Shorts" (which could have easily been called "Love Stories"). They are all imbued with a vital sense of place. This may be down to the fact that they are part-collaborations between the same close collective of Kuala Lumpur-based filmmakers (James Lee, Wong Ming-Jin, Tan Chui Mui and more), who pitch in to act in, shoot and produce each other's works. All filming is on miniDV (with James Lee usually behind the camera, and Tan Chui Mui frequently in front of it) and there is a sense of pushing hard within very tight limitations. Newcomer Azharr Rudin's hour-long Amber Sexalogy is a sextet of vignettes dealing with the start, middle and end of a relationship and not necessarily in that order. It's too long, but the final single-take episode (a seemingly unrelated encounter during a walk to the train station) is a superb coda to all the failed romance. Wong Ming-Jin's It's Possible Your Heart Cannot Be Broken pulls off the difficult trick of being both laugh-out-loud funny and poignant. James Lee's two mini-stories of disconnection, A Moment of Love and Sometimes Love is Beautiful, are quietly devastating. The night ended with Tan Chui Mui's South of South, a real change of scene (a period piece set on the coast seen through the viewpoint of a child), which concludes on an image of extraordinary beauty.

Posted by dwhudson at April 23, 2006 6:00 AM