Be with me, my beloved love, that my smile may never fade.
Some of the plucky criticism hurled by my friends at Eric Khoo's third feature, Be With Me:
"I have a thing against disability movies."
"The piano soundtrack is so feeble - just like in a Taiwanese serial."
"What are they subtitling?"
After the lurid nightlife and housing-project anomie, suicide, prostitutes, necrophilia, an abiding obsession with social misfitism in general, I thought it was nice to have a wholesome story for a change. Eric seems to have momentarily given up the custodianship of his social outcasts and other unsavories; here are characters who are not only not socially stunted or alienated, they convert alienation into charity, longing, desire - and the glimmering prospect of possible fulfillment. Leaving your characters to wallow in their isolation, self-inflicted or not, is easy. Too many directors treat their fashionably depressed muses as canvases of misery; the storyline and dialogue become ripe for pathetic fallacy; incidental glimpses of big cities are excuses for "urban dislocation". Whereas enacting self-healing or reconciliation onscreen is a choice and demands a suspension of style, of aesthetic detachment and the smirk of irony - in other words, an unflinching sincerity that I think simply requires a higher level of craft.
It's tricky work, though - here, in a quasi-documentary chronicle of a real woman with a disability, you have to avoid the additional pitfall of looking like an omnibus episode of Extraordinary People. What might seem like technical clumsiness of Eric's part, I think, is something of a transcription of Theresa's personal plight - the "slow" pacing as we observe her daily rituals of cooking, teaching, typing, all carried out with a labored grace. Duration and process is palpably tracked - this is her duration and process, of course, not ours, and we might be inclined to dismiss it impatiently.
The teenage puppy love and security guard threads are unfortunately insufficiently developed and occasionally mar the tone of the film, but if they bear watching alongside Theresa's story, it is thanks to their lightness of touch. Mee Pok Man and 12 Storeys had characters that circled fruitlessly within the confines of an endemic situation. While Be With Me's minor characters still yearn - and perhaps still fruitlessly - they are crucially now no longer unconsoled. There is questing, desire unrequited or unfulfilled perhaps, but nonetheless a redeeming movement, an emotional investment that rescues them. There is the work of reconciliation and empathy: love letters, memoirs, translation; all of which suggest that Eric is moving on from important work about social divisions in Singapore to the more onerous task of reflecting on social integration, healing divides and starting rehabilitation.
"I have a thing against disability movies."
"The piano soundtrack is so feeble - just like in a Taiwanese serial."
"What are they subtitling?"
After the lurid nightlife and housing-project anomie, suicide, prostitutes, necrophilia, an abiding obsession with social misfitism in general, I thought it was nice to have a wholesome story for a change. Eric seems to have momentarily given up the custodianship of his social outcasts and other unsavories; here are characters who are not only not socially stunted or alienated, they convert alienation into charity, longing, desire - and the glimmering prospect of possible fulfillment. Leaving your characters to wallow in their isolation, self-inflicted or not, is easy. Too many directors treat their fashionably depressed muses as canvases of misery; the storyline and dialogue become ripe for pathetic fallacy; incidental glimpses of big cities are excuses for "urban dislocation". Whereas enacting self-healing or reconciliation onscreen is a choice and demands a suspension of style, of aesthetic detachment and the smirk of irony - in other words, an unflinching sincerity that I think simply requires a higher level of craft.
It's tricky work, though - here, in a quasi-documentary chronicle of a real woman with a disability, you have to avoid the additional pitfall of looking like an omnibus episode of Extraordinary People. What might seem like technical clumsiness of Eric's part, I think, is something of a transcription of Theresa's personal plight - the "slow" pacing as we observe her daily rituals of cooking, teaching, typing, all carried out with a labored grace. Duration and process is palpably tracked - this is her duration and process, of course, not ours, and we might be inclined to dismiss it impatiently.
The teenage puppy love and security guard threads are unfortunately insufficiently developed and occasionally mar the tone of the film, but if they bear watching alongside Theresa's story, it is thanks to their lightness of touch. Mee Pok Man and 12 Storeys had characters that circled fruitlessly within the confines of an endemic situation. While Be With Me's minor characters still yearn - and perhaps still fruitlessly - they are crucially now no longer unconsoled. There is questing, desire unrequited or unfulfilled perhaps, but nonetheless a redeeming movement, an emotional investment that rescues them. There is the work of reconciliation and empathy: love letters, memoirs, translation; all of which suggest that Eric is moving on from important work about social divisions in Singapore to the more onerous task of reflecting on social integration, healing divides and starting rehabilitation.
posted by D at 11:47
1 Comments:
Nonetheless, I still have a thing against disability movies.
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