Drop everything and come to Shaw Lido tonight (Sept 19, Mon, 9.30pm) to see Pina, which I saw two days ago and can’t wait to see again. Here’s why:

It’s a vision of the future of 3D cinema. Even more than James Cameron’s Avatar before it, Pina makes a single-handed, multi-bodied case for what 3D cinema should look like if it is to take pride in being a legitimate art form. The elaborate planning needed to capture famed choreographer Pina Bausch’s dances—ingenious with space, and filmed nonstop before live audiences—even implies that 3D might be the key to restoring lost staging practices and less hyperactive editing styles to the movies. (Ironic that this newfangled “gimmick” should offer itself as a potential messiah to all the ever-lamenting Hollywood classicists.)

It’s the hulking Citizen Kane of dance retrospectives. As if its groundbreaking use of deep cinematic space wasn’t enough of a clue, Pina stakes its claim to being the Citizen Kane of dance retrospectives by revealing Bausch to us through the legacies and people she left behind, in ways that defy easy summary. Instead of filming regular talking heads, Wenders layers the testimonies of the dancers of Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal over clips of their faces. More than one reminisces about Bausch’s penetrating gaze, which read them more clearly than they could give voice to, so it’s almost like Wenders is trying to exhume Bausch’s very gaze.

It was almost never made. The attention that Pina accords to the Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers grows even more poignant when you learn that Wenders cancelled plans to make the film after Bausch died unexpectedly, just a few days before filming was initially slated to begin. It was at the behest of these dancers (and Bausch’s fans worldwide) that Wenders decided to press on. “Dance, dance, or we are lost,” cries the movie’s subtitle as the credits end, and I can’t think of a more fitting rallying cry for these people who, through Bausch’s influence and choreography, ask to be found.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS
Just as Pina feels infused with the spirit of all the dancers that surrounded its making, Cave of Forgotten Dreams has the head and heart of the people that accompanied its making: academics. It isn’t a knock to say that this documentary about the Chauvet Caves, which hold the earliest cave paintings known to man, feels much like the movie an archaeologist or art historian or anthropologist would have made.

I daresay director Werner Herzog is a little bit of all those respectable professions, and he defers even more to the small group of actual professors in his midst who, like his filmmaking team, have been allowed a rare visit to study the caves under limited time and conditions (no touching, no straying from the narrow central walkway, etc). Yet Herzog’s own specific penchant for spelunking for people’s stories and dreams shines through (an archaeologist he interviews turns out to have been a unicycle-and-juggling circus man), even if his inimitable deadpan sometimes makes his meditations on the subject more portentous than his documentary-101 approach otherwise affords.

If there’s any doubt what Belle’s life as a princess will be like after the credits have rolled, this shot provides the answer. ”Far-off places, daring swordfights, magic spells, a prince in disguise”: she’s been there, and more besides. Is there another movie—an animated children’s film, no less—that has so compellingly explored the complex emotional territories of filial self-sacrifice, mob hysteria, the politics of mental illness, and full-blown romantic despair? One imagines Belle will now be content if everything else were to be found just in books. I know I would be, if I had a library like that.

]]> http://www.againstthehype.com/2011/04/beauty-and-the-beasts-best-shot/feed/ 2 http://www.againstthehype.com/2011/04/heavenly-creatures-best-shot/ http://www.againstthehype.com/2011/04/heavenly-creatures-best-shot/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 02:00:55 +0000 Colin Low http://www.againstthehype.com/?p=1841

Back in 1994, Peter Jackson already showed a great facility for having his camera swoop around the vistas of New Zealand. The above swirling shot of Heavenly Creatures might well recall the iconic opening of The Sound of Music—until we hear Juliet Hulmes’ bawling seep into the soundtrack. Using a sunny, animated landscape shot to indicate a tormented interior? Yowza! Indeed, no screencap can do justice to the persistence with which Jackson and his editor Jamie Selkirk keep the camera alive and moving throughout Heavenly Creatures, by means of trailing the wild swoops, fancies and injustices in the minds of its adolescent leads. Come back to us, Peter Jackson!

These days, director Christopher Nolan is justifiably esteemed for risking his blockbusters on such nominally cerebral material as Inception, The Dark Knight, and The Prestige. But for me, Nolan’s breakout success Memento—today celebrating the tenth anniversary of its release—is still the movie that best corrals his recurring strengths and weaknesses into one taut package. I’d go further to advise fans and skeptics alike to catch the chronological-order cut of the movie (available on the Limited Edition DVD), which shores up how duly the movie’s meticulous construction serves its high-concept premise, its reliance on copious exposition and its motivating dead lovers—all tropes that have since dogged Nolan’s work, often for the worse.

But more than that, the chronological-order cut also offers a crucial look at how editing can utterly change our conception of an actor’s craft, and a writer-director’s rounded compassion. The above shot, my pick for Nathaniel Roger’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot series, offers the gist of my elations and problems with Memento. I’ve heard somewhere that, coming off the back of The Matrix’s success (my review), Carrie-Anne Moss’ signing on to Memento was what led to the project being green-lit. Funny that we haven’t seen much of her since, while the two movies that remain her most prominent cultural legacies are still going strong a decade later. And they both reduce her to token plot points! That’s irony for you.

Of course, Memento knows from irony; it peddles unabashedly in it. Layered dream-heists, impossibly diabolical terrorist plots, obsessive magicians’ gambits: none of these quite hold a candle to the simplicity and continual thrills of Memento’s backwards chronology, as motivated by the short-term memory loss of its protagonist Leonard Shelby. Yet this doesn’t mean we’re being dropped into scenes without preconceptions, despite some critics’ claims that this continual backwards structure is meant to put us into Leonard’s shoes. It’s not like we have anterograde amnesia ourselves! Given the way the narrative is structured, we know each new scene is going to show us how Leonard’s been duped yet again. The fun of Memento is in seeing how it’s done, and its enjoyably ironic scene-by-scene revelations play out all the way to the celebrated twist ending. As it turns out, that irony holds up just as brutally when we’re going forwards instead of backwards, only we now get to catch Leonard in the very moment of misreading the scenario in which he finds himself.

Warning: Spoilers follow!
With one exception. Carrie-Anne Moss’ performance as Natalie visibly improves from theatrical to chronological-order cut. The problem with Memento’s structure of continual revelations is that they imply that we’re verging onto the truth of what we’re seeing. But what this does for Natalie is “reveal” her to be a femme fatale who is manipulating Leonard for her own purposes, especially since this aligns with Memento’s use of detective noir conventions. However, watching Memento in chronological order, we learn that Natalie is really the character whose motivations happen to shift most across the events of the story. Leonard just keeps trying to find his wife’s killer, and Teddy keeps trying to get him to leave town. By contrast, Natalie has to:

1. Wonder what happened to her boyfriend, and why some oblivious stranger has his clothes and car
2. Realize she’s in deep shit, because the money her boyfriend took with him for a drug deal is now missing
3. Use Leonard as a means of getting rid of her pursuer (Why not? If he shows up with her boyfriend’s stuff, he was probably involved in his disappearance somehow)
4. Repay Leonard’s help by getting info of the driver who owns John G’s license plate, even though he probably won’t remember that he did

Now why would Natalie do this last point, other than out of kindness? Some viewers have floated the possibility that she’s trying to get Leonard to kill the “Teddy” who set up the deal with her boyfriend. Except: 1) nothing in the film indicates that she has enough information to link Teddy with “John Edward Gammell”, and 2) the license plate number is legitimately Teddy’s. This interpretation is likely influenced by the way that the original Memento tracks Natalie’s motivations backwards, so that we’re increasingly met with a Natalie who is justifiably guarded, even furious, at Leonard’s blithe audacity and his cluelessness at her plight.

The truth is, for all Nolan’s investments in scowling, grim-jawed leading men (both here and in his subsequent movies), Carrie-Anne Moss still provides the best snapshot (heh) of grief over a dead lover in his filmography thus far. As she points out to Leonard, in a line that reads as cryptic so early in the original cut, but that is fully attuned to how far she’s come in view of chronological events: “You know what you and I have in common? We are both survivors.” They have also slept together the night before, and Moss astutely implies that Natalie is doing so partly to replace her lost boyfriend (see the shot up top), while also making Natalie pragmatic enough to pull away because Leonard’s not worth the emotional trouble (“You don’t remember me.”) She walks out the diner a survivor, but only before Nolan’s partiality towards cleverness over empathy lead him to remake her in his image.

If you want an auspicious start with Doc Films, which screens movies every night of the academic year at the University of Chicago, you wouldn’t find it with late-era Stan Brakhage. No offense to the master, but these apparently random film collages failed to make a case against the urgency of my reading assignments. I did make it through Murder Psalm, Brakhage’s 16-minute short that intercuts “found” clips of Mickey Mouse barraging down a city street, trotting warhorses in negative, a corpse being slit, a girl assaulted by the splash of a beach ball on a fountain, another girl driven to an epileptic fit by a flash of lightning, yet another girl staring at her unchanging reflection in the mirror—or is it, etc. There are interpretations to be made here about the multiplicity of violence, identity and horror, though such interpretations may find it harder to justify the interpolating frames of damaged nitrate (one wonders if they were part of the original). To be charitable, I’m clearly still unprepared for the avant-garde, and I’m not yet willing to cede all worth in the movies to the strength of their coherence and readability. But so it goes.

Nonetheless, I am now the proud owner of a Doc Films quarterly pass, which lets you into every. single. movie. that Doc is showing this quarter, a veritable list that includes (in screening order) Gilda, Pather Panchali, McCabe & Mrs Miller, Dr Strangelove, The Kids Are All Right,  The Birth of a Nation, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Intolerance, Back to the Future, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Winter’s Bone, Eyes Wide Shut and I Am Love. So I’m not at all shaken that I dropped down $30 earlier for a slip of paper into 16 minutes of disjointment; it’ll pay itself back. I’m more concerned about the two acquaintances I met earlier who paid $5 each for their regular admission tickets, then came over to ask me what tonight’s film was about. I had to suppress my mirth at their facial expressions when I mentioned the words “avant-garde director”. But, again, so it goes.

These screencaps probably evoke more delight for those who’ve watched Bring It On than for those relying on the isolated evidence above. Which is partly my fault, since the shots I chose don’t bring out the best in director Peyton Reed’s striking colour and composition choices. But it’s also an inherent flaw in choosing shots from this movie for the Hit Me with Your Best Shot series, since Bring It On’s unflagging momentum is aided by its brisk editing, and it gathers an ensemble gifted with expressive physicality. (And what’s a cheerleading movie without either of those?) So not only do these single frames fail to do justice to the giddy movements that the lead actors (Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Bradford, Eliza Dushku) each contribute to these respective scenes, but they are cut together with so many unmissable reaction shots of shared joy that it’s more accurate to say that, rather than shots, these are my favourite sequences of Bring It On.

Sequence #1: In the director’s commentary (which I heartily recommend to all fans of Bring It On), Reed likes to remind us that Dunst was only 17 when she filmed this movie. Yet she was experienced or natural enough to act wonders in this thankless role, which demands that we root for Torrance even as she shifts among cheery exuberance, naive tentativeness, barely contained freakouts and whiny self-righteousness. Bring It On’s classic toothbrush scene, framed straightforwardly from the mirror’s viewpoint (and intercut with Torrance’s and Cliff’s sideglance views), makes a woozy romantic gesture of having this mutually infatuated pair lean towards each other to spit their toothpaste in the sink. And in this moment I’ve selected, Dunst adds the hilarious, pitch-perfect accent of covering her mouth from Cliff’s view, which sets the scene for her growing ease with him as this sequence goes on.

Sequence #2: Jesse Bradford is no throwaway love interest either, especially if you compare his work to a contemporary’s (e.g. Jonathan Bennett as Aaron Samuels in Mean Girls). While the conceit of this scene is that his guitar jamming attracts Torrance into silent audience at his bedroom door, I prefer to view it as that Cliff is fervently air-guitaring to a pre-recorded track. What can be dorkier, and more revealingly intimate? (Another note of Reed’s genius: note how all the lines of Cliff’s retro posters converge onto his buoyant, leaping form.)

Sequence #3: Of these three wordless sequences, this moment where Missy gets into the groove of her cheerleading outfit strikes me as the one which might have most easily succumbed to post-looped chatter. I agree fully with Glenn Dunks when he notes that “all three leads from Bring It On seemed like they could have had success and stardom handed to them on a silver platter and yet it never quite worked out,” because Dushku manages to generously sell her character’s enjoyment here without reducing her earlier takes on aloof disavowal (of this whole cheerleading business) into mere stances.

NB: Although she’s quite well represented among the other participants, I feel a bit bad leaving the formidable Isis (Gabrielle Union) and her fellow Compton Clovers out of my picks. But given that a notable plot hinge of Bring It On is that Isis refuses to take any affirmative-action sympathy—another of Reed’s savvy gifts to this movie—I decided to stick with what I love. “Bring it!”

Black Narcissus’s acclaim as a “colour masterpiece” doesn’t quite nail its fascinating austerity, especially when it closes up on Deborah Kerr’s face. Why explore the movie’s odious take on Oriental exoticism, which is where much of its “colour” lies, when it is far more interesting to watch Kerr’s Sister Clodagh as she struggles to establish a school isolated in the Himalayas? (No knock on cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who fully deserves his Oscar.) Without any guidance but her resolve, the young Sister Clodagh has to steel herself against her own insecurities, the pervasive sensuality, a local agent’s religious skepticism and raffish charm, the natives’ linguistic and cultural barriers, her fellow nuns’ weaknesses and falterings. These troubles shape a rare, compelling portrait that illuminates why she wears such hardness in her demeanor, as do so many other Sister Superiors before and since.

Oh, and here’s another: the flood of her memories. When we first encounter Sister Clodagh, she is framed in her off-white nun’s habit, already abstracted to her role. It is only a full hour in that she begins to dissolve (quite literally, in the visual sense) into flashbacks of her days prior to making her vows. These slow dissolves are my favourite parts of the movie, forging our impressionistic sense of Clodagh’s various psychological states:

What’s especially brilliant about these flashbacks is that they are never explicitly presented as part of Sister Clodagh’s troubles, unlike nearly every other plot point. Or at least initially: at the onset of her first flashback, this superimposed view of mountain and lake, Sister Clodagh opens her eyes and smiles. Temptation, after all, knows how to disguise itself as a welcome dash of colour; we can only imagine how much more easily her fellow nuns have succumbed.

Nathaniel R has already done a stellar analysis of this shot for his Hit Me with Your Best Shot series. In his words, this not-quite match dissolve is “so thematically resonant, so unsettlingly inexact and so emotionally spot on… not just the past contrasted with present, it’s identity versus identity.”

Is there a simpler image for her inner turmoil? The hounds are loose! But no, this is a continuation of the same nostalgic trip she’s just left for a while. According to director Michael Powell, this was just to break up an otherwise too-long flashback, but the ironic effect is there.

And finally:

I can only describe these shots as “reverse Oz”, after a similarly staged, legendary moment in the beloved Wizard of Oz. The genius of this shot is that it occurs at the end of a flashback, when she’s leaving the house to meet her prospective fiance. He’s about to tell her some rather bad news. So what does this darkness represent: her future with him, or her future in the sisterhood? The answer is arrestingly unclear.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. When that topmost shot appeared, it instantly triggered the latent Lust, Caution part of my brain. Not to suggest that Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) and Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson) share an… acrobatic relationship like Mrs Mai and Mr Yi’s, of course, but they are quite similar in other ways:

The title Lust, Caution fits their situation aptly. In Angels in America’s multi-protagonist narrative, Roy and Joe take the parts of conservative, anti-gay Republicans forced to face up to the realities of the people they’ve demonised: Roy contracts AIDS through one of his illicit, off-screen encounters, while Joe finds himself losing the battle against his desire. Playwright Tony Kushner, who adapted his own script for the screen, conjures a few other such doublings across political lines. By this point, Joe has fallen for and cohabited with his out gay co-worker Louis; both have spurned their lovers of a few years for each other. The spurned lovers, Joe’s wife Harper and Louis’ ex-boyfriend Prior, meet via some sort of arcane telepathic corridor, and acknowledge that they signed into their failed relationships mostly due to erotic attraction. And both Prior and Roy, stricken with AIDS, start having rather different visitations upon them of an afterlife-y sort.

They’ve made their choices about power. The framing says it all. Roy, like Mr Yi, has sold out to power; Pacino’s casting and throne-bound posture even recall his role in The Godfather trilogy. At the end of the first chapter, Roy explains his denial in an unassailable speech about what labels mean:

Roy: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. That you believe they mean what they seem to mean—AIDS, homosexual, gay, lesbian, you think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with? They don’t tell you that. No. Like all labels they tell you one thing, and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit into the food chain, the pecking order? Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will come to the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men, but really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through city council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry?

By contrast, Joe has declared his love for Louis—”I’ll do anything”—in a scene that I’m sure will feature in today’s instalment of the Hit Me with Your Best Shot series. Which, given Roy’s worldview, explains why Joe’s head and shoulders are cropped out of the shot, his body reclined in a submissive pose. I’ll confess that, this framing aside, I wasn’t too impressed with the directorial choices Mike Nichols made in this HBO adaptation. Most of its six hours look like he plonked a camera in front of the actors, cut with the occasional helicopter footage, and the live special effects and rousing split-staging of the play simply become standard CGI/wire tricks and cross-cutting on film.

And they’re the affective MVPs of their movie. I wish I liked Meryl Streep or Emma Thompson better in this, much as I often love them as actors and (more so) celebrities. But I rarely appreciate Meryl’s work when her characters aren’t loose and funny; they hamper her natural gifts, and she always looks clenched and uncomfortable playing them. What exacerbates this is Nichols’ decision to have her play each of her multiple roles (Meryl has three: a Mormon mother, a Jewish rabbi, and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg) as more realist than drag. Whereas Emma’s roles—punkish nurse, toothless hobo, clueless angel—seem more like stunt casting than anything else, especially since Nichols doesn’t let her look remotely ethereal as the angel. The other leads—Mary-Louse Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Ben Shenkman and Justin Kirk—turn in, for me, mostly perfunctory readings of the material.

Perhaps what ingratiates me to Pacino’s and Wilson’s characters is that, as a liberal, I find myself more fascinated by their perspectives. Though I’m open to the criticism that these are “conservatives for liberals”, types made for our consumption rather than honest representations. But what fighting types! Pacino sinks his teeth into Cohn, and Patrick Wilson gives, for me, the most lived-in repressed gay performance of the last decade, beyond even stalwarts like Ledger and Firth.

But no more, since I couldn’t resist chipping in to Nathaniel R’s blogathon participatory series (I guess that’s what they call it these days) over at The Film Experience. The idea? Have the discipline to pick out and post a single favourite shot of a movie, as determined by Nathaniel. Just a glimpse of the screen captures below should tell you how my self-control turned out.

X-Men (2000) lives up to being forefather of the millenial rise of comic-book superhero movies. Both in the sense that it’s unapologetically well-constructed, and yet in that it looks shabby and transitional. Just look at that title screen! The dated CG effects, full of wobbly lightning and glowing energy cores, look like they were cribbed off the opening credits of the previous year’s Fight Club. To be fair, these effects will be an actual plot point, reproduced by some trumped-up contraption later into the movie. And a similar contraption, with similar but spiffed-up CGI effects, will also be reprised halfway into the decade in Spider-Man 2 (2004). But we can’t deny that this shot reminds us just how improved but pervasive and still-clichéd CGI in the movies has become since then.

Thank goodness that, for all its perfunctory CGI (and action scenes), the screenwriters got the heart of X-Men right. This is the first establishing shot of the movie, and I love that it goes there. Have you heard the apocryphal stories of audiences arriving late to the theatres and wondering if they’d stepped into the right movie? Yet the Holocaust is the most fitting historical anchor for the series’ recurring theme of prejudice, and the context helps to push the escapist fantasy of mutant powers into the realm of the real. The shot also showcases Bryan Singer’s role as director; X-Men is very much a screenwriters’ vehicle, clipping at the pace of its narrative beats, and Singer is there mostly to ensure the screenplay is served by efficient visual compositions, with plenty of crisp, shallow focus.

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Poland any more. (Time since the earlier shot: 2 min 30 s. Also, more shallow focus!)

And here, as the juxtaposition of scenes implies, is Hitler’s modern counterpart. Note the golden rays emanating from Senator Kelly’s head as he sums up his support for the Mutant Registration Act. For all the explicit allegorical intent of a mutant’s sad “coming out” scene in the X2 sequel, I find this relatively muted scene on the US Senate floor far more distressing, precisely because Kelly’s case for the mandatory self-identification of mutants (in case they use their powers against other citizens) doesn’t make him too easy to refute, or map easily to other real-world minorities. But it’s a fine line between this and, say, arguing that HIV victims should be branded to contain the disease’s spread.

Worse, however satisfying it is to see Mystique take Kelly down a notch (and with just those legs!), there’s the dread that accompanies our knowledge that she’s only proving him right. (Kelly says as much at one point.) Nonetheless, Mystique’s unwieldy one-liner—”People like you are the reason I was afraid to go to school as a child”—has its own unassailable logic, and Rebecca Romijn embodies Mystique’s rage, disgust and agility well under all that makeup/CGI. Give or take the awful helmet-like wig.

You know what I love about these shots? When I first watched X-Men, I didn’t know who Sir Ian McKellen was, and yet I surmised from the way he’s introduced here that he was a huge movie star that I simply hadn’t come across before. (I would have a similar experience with Meryl Streep in Adaptation.) A year later, the first Lord of the Rings movie opened and sealed the deal. It was only much later that I learned that Magneto and Gandalf were his two biggest contributions to popular culture.

Senator Kelly: Don’t wanna be alone.

I’ve been mostly impervious to this on previous viewings. But perhaps because I’ve been reading Tony Kushner’s AIDS drama Angels in America, the sight of Kelly’s bulbous, pleading form and his hoarse whimper of that near-universal sentiment really got to me this time around.

And finally:

This is maybe Singer’s most auteurist shot in the whole movie, and it’s so weirdass and INLAND EMPIRE-like that I had to cap off with it. Cheers!

X-Men | 2000 | USA | Director: Bryan Singer | Screenplay: David Hayter, Tom DeSanto, Bryan Singer| Cast: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn, Bruce Davison, Anna Paquin, Famke Janssen, James Marsden

I had the pleasure of chatting with two Singaporean filmmakers, Jeremy Sing and Leon Cheo, about the local short film finalists at this year’s Singapore International Film Festival over at SINdie, the local indie film blog headed by Jeremy where I also write. The films were screened in one sitting at the Sinema Old School theatre, which can be reached by climbing a flight of over 140 steps from the nearest train station—much like being a prospective disciple to a kung fu master.

I’ve never enjoyed a more promising slate of local short films, which speaks as much to my relative inexperience in this area as it does to the state of our indie film “industry” and the diverse quality of this year’s crop of finalists. You can find my distilled reviews of each film under the jump, or better, read them in context: Part 1 and Part 2 of our conversation.

Que Sera Sera (dir. Ghazi Alqudcy)
What a sweet film, and how cheeky indeed that it achieves this by being as profane and borderline racist as it is! A lot of this can be attributed to the disarming figure of Syahidi, who plays the chubby kid that is the film’s centre; as well as the ever-present voiceover by the director Ghazi himself. Like I noted, the voiceover can be rather profane, at one point even getting into a chant of words I won’t repeat here, while the sanitised subtitles keep swapping between “Dick.” and “Head.” It also tempts charges of racism, despite disclaiming that “I am not racist”, when the kid, late for school, bumps into the Indian discipline master at the school gate. It helps, of course, that I know the actor playing the discipline master is a sporting friend of Ghazi’s. But what saves all this even more is the disparity between the cursing voiceover and the boy’s sweet and natural disposition, which ends up making the former seem more harmlessly amusing.

I also loved that, like Philothea Liau’s Brazil (where the value of an eraser reaches absurd heights), Que Sera Sera manages to evoke nostalgic details of past school days, and appends to that a kid’s perspective on those details. I’m referring here to the discipline master’s punishment, so idiosyncratic to its time and place, and so random and unfitting to the problem; and to the boy’s reaction, never questioning the punishment’s logic, but troubled by an unrelated set of problems that it will cause him.

The only complaint I have is that the film contrives a tummyache just so that the main character will miss his class. This makes sense logistics-wise, since you’d only need to cast the teacher and none of his classmates; and it helps the emotion of the scene where he presents his ambitions to the teacher alone, since it’s no longer a chance to show off to peers but a more intimate reveal of his dreams to someone who seems to care (which prompted another filmmaker during the Q&A to ask Ghazi if he ended up marrying that teacher, heh). Yet since the rest of the autobiographical film feels light and frothily believable, the tummyache could have been better foreshadowed so that it wouldn’t seem like a mere storytelling device. For instance, his voiceover could have mentioned that he eats just about anything (and showed him eating something bad), or he could have been filmed eating just before he was made to run laps around the parade square. A minor point, really, when the rest of the film manages to be so funny, truthful, and above all sincere.

Contained (dir. Harry Zhuang, Henry Zhuang)
Great stop-motion animation nearly always catches me in the throat, just for the sheer technical bravado and patience involved, and Contained managed that early on with its depiction of those plasticine waves sloshing. But despite the breathtaking difficulty of crafting those wide shots of the island, I find that my favourite scenes of the film are those set in the dark, tight confines of the hut interior, where the main character tends to his dying flower. There’s a surprising rage to his attempts to save the mere appearance of the flower’s health, culminating in that sad image of the re-attached petals blowing off the flower, leaving strips of cellophane tape flapping in the wind. I love that, while most films would opt for making a similar character pitifully emo, this film drives him insane instead—and breaks out that madness visually in its memorable final shots.

Sunrise (dir. Platon Theodoris)
The theme of being left alone carried over to Sunrise, about an eldest son who has to care for his younger sisters after their mother leaves them for work. It’s the most “foreign” film among the finalists, filmed and set in Cambodia with the orphans of the Sunrise Children’s Village, which may explain why I found it hard to identify with it… although the languid first half may also be to blame. There’s an approach to observational detail (e.g. a shot of a plastic scoop bobbing in a full bucket) that works when these details are tethered to a narrative throughline, and I don’t think it’s achieved in “Sunrise”. To be fair, I like the scene where the boy heads to the temple with his siblings to arrange his mother’s funeral; it reminded me of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Nobody Knows (Japan, 2004), which also involves a kid having to step up to being an eldest sibling, an adult, and even a surrogate parent, long before he ever deserves to.

Promises in December (dir. Elgin Ho)
In Singaporean cinema, the taxi driver and the maid are in danger of being far too common character types, the film pairs the two as leads rather fruitfully. I like that it opens with the maid on her phone, shaping her as a person with an imaginable life back at her Indonesian home, without abstracting it into a burden as many migrant films do; and I like that her employer family’s daughter for whom she makes breakfast actually seems appreciative of her work, when so many other filmmakers want to harp on the flashpoint of abuse.

Instead the film makes the taxi driver the worker-class character who is beset with problems. His HDB flat and packet char kway teow are clearly meant to contrast the landed property and pancakes where the maid works, and yet the film does this while skirting past a lot of the cheap oppositions that are one of my pet peeves about local film. I suspect it works because the maid doesn’t actually live there, making the contrast more complicated, and because the film doesn’t demonise either way of life.

This leads to what is absolutely my favourite shot among all the finalist films: when the maid is in the driver’s taxi, he tosses off a comment that she probably wouldn’t want to live in Singapore if it weren’t for the pay, right? As he says this, we get a shot of the maid looking out of the cab window, on which is reflected a row of HDB flats, and she is silent as they drive by. It’s such a profound shot, capturing the perspective of a woman who probably dreams of a life that the man is disavowing, even as we acknowledge that her six years’ work in a landed property would likely misrepresent life as he knows it.

And then the film has to spoil that by contriving an explicit link between them, of all things by invoking the Asian tsunami of 2004, and delivering “justice” to each character. Not only does the link make the whole setup feel artificial, it’s a little unfair to use a senseless tragedy like the tsunami to give fictional characters grief, especially if it’s a fake-out or if it’s to “punish” a character for not being understanding. Promises in December does both, and I haven’t even mentioned the awful closed-captioning on the film, which mars a potentially horrifying tsunami recording over a black screen with the words “[woman screaming]“. (Or that, at an earlier point, reads “[phone vibrates]” even though the onscreen phone isn’t visibly vibrating.)

Life with Ummu (dir. Tanya Lai)
Life with Ummu’s central features are the shots of the autistic Ummu whacking herself, frantically rearranging the pillows on her bed, and screaming for no clear reason. These are easy for unfamiliar viewers to misunderstand, so it helps that we approach her from the perspective of her empathetic parents and younger sister, obvious though this approach may seem. Life with Ummu is an amateurish stickler for talking heads and unneeded voiceovers, which brings up a recurring issue I have with the still-young Singaporean cinema: the divide between fiction filmmakers, who often have great technique; and documentary filmmakers, who often have great content. Of course, there are notable exceptions in both cases, but I still haven’t encountered a Singaporean fiction film with a narrative as urgent, politically and emotionally, as the ones I routinely find in any of our half-decent documentaries. Predictable it may be, but Life with Ummu is no different.

The 25th of Laura (dir. Joshua Simon)
Counter to the film prior, The 25th of Laura struck me as emotionally detached and clichéd in content (a man moping over his muse—meh), but where technique is concerned, its attempts to innovate are evident. I suppose I was somewhat receptive to director Joshua Simon’s willingness to scatter the logic of his film, even though I get that his efforts can be seen as total wankery. Out of the slipstream bits I can still remember a good few: the estranging Korean voiceover, a figure swathed in light on a bare stage, an attempt at suicide gone absurd, a verdant if under-composed heaven sequence, and an afterimage emerging from a mosaic of photos. But I suspect that as time passes, the absent backbone of emotional meaning will quickly blot these images from memory, so I hope Simon follows this up by discovering a worthy story to which he can apply his talents—without, of course, being overwhelmed by the need to show off.

Mu Dan (dir. Lincoln Chia)
It’s apt to discuss these questions about self-indulgence in conjunction with the last film, Mu Dan. This film is also easily charged with wankery, and not just because it features a shot from behind of a man doing that very deed, his buttocks half-exposed, in its opening sequence (an homage to Sun Koh’s Dirty Bitch, last year’s S’pore Short Film Award winner). It’s also because the film calls attention to its surfaces: hostile cant-angled shots of an HDB lift lobby, a curiously empty and dark HDB unit, Chinese actresses exchanging a blonde wig, wafts of cigarette smoke, red peonies as a metaphor for youth.

I haven’t even gotten to how whole scenes are shot voyeuristically, either from behind doors/corners onto unsuspecting characters; or into mirrors, so that we watch the characters’ reflections the whole time. And that’s before the film ends by re-appropriating a lover’s song of heartbreak to the central situation of a divorced mom losing her son to a girlfriend. Cuh-reepy. I can excuse the odd lapses in directorial control, as in the two-person medium shots without any sense of theatrical blocking, because the rest of Mu Dan emanates discipline and oddball imagination at a level unmatched by its fellow nominees, save for maybe Contained.