Barcelona Dispatch. 2.

Singaporean Royston Tan has made a name for himself revealing the fringe of his country's society - particularly the side of that fringe occupied by teenagers without hope, lonesome and lost. In his second full-length film, he carries on investigating the lives of underdogs and lonely young people (though this time without the graphic violence of his previous 15: The Movie).

The first Official Section film shown at the Barcelona Asian Film Festival, 4:30 has more to do with Nobody Knows than with any young gangster epic. An 11-year-old boy, Xiao Wu, is dazed and confused and abandoned (by his mother, who has put him in the dubious care of their drunk tenant), but his pranks are rather naïve and more a product of boredom than of rebellion. The story focus Xiao Wu's relationship with his newly found "Uncle," who needs a little care and attention even more than the young boy. To depict this shared loneliness, Tan chooses a style with more connections to Tsai Ming-liang (and especially the exploration of intimacy, of closed doors, of What Time is It There?) than to MTV-style kinetics, his past tendency. There are moments when melodrama threatens to intrude, but creating powerful visual metaphors of solitude seems one of Tan's gifts.

One of the surprises of 2003 was Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe, a wonderful romantic comedy of surreal and magical aspects, photographed with an abstract aestheticism by Christopher Doyle, centering on two people, alone but not lonesome, who find mutual understanding in the worst moments of their lives. The images moved slowly, slid, they floated, and they revealed inner corners of their central characters, the suicidal Japanese man and the wounded Thai girl. What kept the revelation from being a masterpiece was an unnecesary criminal subplot (with Takashi Miike in the role a gangster, or better, in the role of himself) that distracted from the essential in this film: the process of falling in love between two lost people in a hostile world.

Presented in non-competitive Asian Selection section, Invisible Waves proves again that Ratanaruang handles personal drama better than labyrinthine crime. The director's plan here seems to be to take the gangster thriller to a dimension far from the logics of street wisdom, the genre clichés, and transform it into a philosophical odyssey with a slapstick sense of comedy. Well, at least that's an idea, because it's hard to decipher the aim of a film which floats with no direction through two long hours. Sure, it's lensed by Chris Doyle, but except for a few seas, a few skins, that doesn't really show. The story is weak, as well as the storytelling, and the results of the oblique visual style, set in frames that never capture action in a normal mode, range from fascinating to frustrating (sometimes this seems like the work of an amateur director). Tadanobu Asano's performance doesn't redeem anything, though he's proven capable of bring to their characters complex, secret depths, but here seems as strangely jumbled as the man behind the camera.

Posted by dwhudson at April 30, 2006 5:07 AM