Singapore Dispatch. 2.

One of SIFF's annual tasks is to provide a glimpse of the future of Asian cinema. This year there was an unofficial spotlight on the Phillipines, which, in the second week, began with a brace of distinctive films. Like the Kuala Lumpur "indie" scene, it seems that Manila has fostered its own close-knit band of DV-carrying outsiders - shooting what one of the gang, Khavn, calls "filmless films."

The previous Sunday, I sat (amongst a handful of other worshippers) and endured/enjoyed over a fifth of Lav Diaz's latest anti-epic Heremias, which, at 540 minutes, is about 50 minutes shorter than his last one. In stark black and white compositions, Diaz incrementally builds a story about a quiet salesman, riding around rural Phillipines selling nick-nacks off a horse-driven cart. After nearly two hours, he decides to abandon his traveling companions - the first narrative incident. Rather than get restless, the longer you watch a Lav Diaz movie, the more you adjust to his pace and rhythm. Time changes. You become more patient, less demanding, and it's actually therapeutic. As I left, someone assured me, "The last five hours are more dramatic."

Diaz's influence is apparent on Raya Martin, whose haunting A Short Film About Indio Nacional, was in competition. After a color prologue depicting a female insomniac's demand for a story, it shifts into a monochrome "silent movie," complete with intertitles. Scenes glide by elusively, depicting the life of a young boy growing up in the countryside on the cusp of revolution against the Spanish. The formal presentational style (wide shots, long takes) allows for unexpected humor, pathos and several indelible moments, in particular a sequence in which a group of children stand in the middle of a field to witness an eclipse. Hands out, eyes heavenward and mouths agape, it's as if they are opening up their souls.

Technically and visually a pole apart, but connected in less tangible ways, was John Torres's Todo Todo Teros, a dazzling mind-trip collected from loose fragments of "home movies" (a touching encounter with a Russian woman in Berlin), specially reenacted sequences, and plenty of footage of Manila's late-night alternative scene (including a memorable car journey chat with Lav Diaz). Torres's narration explores the notion of artists-as-terrorists. The heavy, metaphorical stuff slipped over my head, but it's surprisingly watchable and packed with ideas.

Todo Todo Teros saw its world premiere at the festival and was rewarded with the Netpac-Fipresci prize, shared with Ying Liang's debut, Taking Father Home, a Sichuanese village-boy-hits-city picaresque, which, although shot on low-grade video, is an extremely assured piece of storytelling, not least because the prevailing serio-comic tone gives way to a startling, redemptive finale.

The two big-hitters prize-wise were both richly nuanced character studies - Ryuichi Hiroki's It's Only Talk (Best Film) and Riri Riza's Gie (Special Jury Prize). Hiroki, who makes Pink films as well as "dramatic" ones, was last in Singapore with Vibrator, also starring Shinobu Terajima, an actress with a formidable gift for playing women on the verge. Here she's bipolar, and split between several, unsuitable men - a married "pervert," a sad gangster, an impotent politician, and her swaggering, ne'er-do-well cousin. Surprisingly, it's the latter that ends up nursing her through a serious down cycle and, while they get close in unpredictable ways, deep emotional wounds are not so easily healed. Places and spaces of the shabby Tokyo district Kamata are woven into the story, and the cinematography is fresh and luminous. Why Hiroko isn't better known in the West is a mystery to me.

The tragic student firebrand Soe Hok Gie, as played by Indonesian heart-throb Nicholas Saputra, remains the enigmatic center of Riri Riza's Gie, an epic reconstruction of 1960s Jakarta. Gie reads Camus, climbs mountains and helps little old ladies across the road, but unlike the soon-to-be ousted Sukarno, he can't bed his female admirers, and may or may not be a revolutionary. Gie's words and life allow Riza to encompass crucial years of civil unrest, Suharto's power-play and the atrocious massacre of suspected communists. Several episodes are left open and ambiguous (the staged coup for instance), but this ensures that the film is far more than a point-by-point history lesson. Pace never flagging, it's a superbly crafted story of the personal struggle that lies at the heart of major public events.

The clash of ideologies and personalities is also tackled by Amir Muhammad in The Last Communist, but the approach couldn't be more of a contrast. Continuing in the vein of Amir's The Big Durian, The Last Communist is ostensibly a "documentary" about Chin Peng, the now-exiled leader of the Communist Party of Malaya, and the controversial role his comrades played in the founding of Malaysia. But despite the depth of his research and scores of talking heads, Amir is not the type to play it straight. Firstly, Chin Peng is purposely not interviewed. Instead, a portrait of the man is generated by hearsay, rumor and digression. Secondly, archive images are out the window. Refusing to let his audience stray into the comfort zone of mediated history, Amir uses well-matched contemporary footage to illustrate places, periods and moments from the past. Thirdly, it's a "semi-musical," featuring interspersed song and dance routines that act as an ironic chorus to the narrative. Parodies of cheery government propoganda, they raise smiles at first but aren't quite able to transcend their mock-badness. Those aside, it's a truly fascinating tale, and Amir deftly uses this "lost history" to raise pertinent questions about modern "Malaysia" and the post-9/11 specter of the terrorist. Along with Singapore GaGa, which recently employed similar strategies, we may be seeing a trend towards a new type of cool, playful and implicitly political filmmaking in this part of the region.

Royston Tan's 4:30 is, as the title suggests, a film about time. Singaporean Tan has followed his censor-baiting speed-driven boy-gang debut 15 with something completely different - although his signature command of cinematography and art direction is here in spades. Child actor Xiao Li Yuan (who was 13 during the shoot, but looks younger) is given the burden of carrying the entire film as the antic Xiao Wu, a boy left to live in a crumbling "walk-up" apartment by his absent mother. His loneliness (which is the core of the film), is partially relieved by the mysterious, suicidal Korean lodger (Kim Young Jun, not to be confused with the director of Bichunmoo). Rebelling against sleep, Xiao Wu has literally too much time on his hands - to feel bored and sad, to devise intricate games, plans and diversions, to obsess about the man, and to retreat further into the makeshift world of the apartment. His quasi-erotic fetishism for his flatmate, as well as the suggestion that he is literally dreaming him up, add other levels of ambiguity and unease. Certainly, there's a sense that Tan is working through the tropes of his Asian auteur heroes (as Juan Manuel Freire observed on this very site) but the result is quietly impressive. Unlike 15's raw assault on the surfaces of society, 4:30 all about the interior, and now I'm looking forward to Tan stepping outside again.

Finally, as the general election in Singapore rapidly enters its climactic strokes (the poll is on Saturday), the festival offered a salutary blast from the past in the form of a three-film flashback to the final gasp of the Malay film industry in Singapore, and the singular catalogue of M. Amin, a lesser-known Cathay studio workhorse. I caught one of these, Aku Mahu Hidup (I Want To Live), a sojourn into the back-alley red light districts of the Lion City circa 1970. Despite stodgy melodramatics, didactic plot-turns and a whole LP of John Barry bootlegs, the movie was as relentless and perverse as the sweaty, pimping stepdad who chases the shapely anti-heroine all over the island. This was my personal "closing" film.

(Thanks to Philip Cheah and Lucy Friedland for discussions that have undoubtedly influenced this piece.)

Posted by dwhudson at May 3, 2006 11:01 AM