dry grass singing

but the greatest of these is love

Be With Me (2005)
Director: Eric Khoo
Rated: M18

[The film was selected as the opening film for the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival 2005. It premiered to a full house and a standing ovation.]


Hype. The four-letter word that ought to strike fear into every film-maker's heart. The high expectations that accompany a critically-acclaimed film can sabotage an otherwise perfectly satisfactory viewing experience, and it is the rare film that survives unscathed. Be With Me, Eric Khoo's first film in eight years since 1997's 12 Storeys, escapes with just a few minor scratches and bruises, and manages to finish on a poignant yet understated note that all but makes up for any minor flaws in the film's narrative structure. This quietly classy effort by one of our two internationally acclaimed directors (the other is Royston Tan, of 15 fame) successfully weaves together three separate narratives, each exploring the universal experiences of love and loss, and the tapestry that emerges is one that celebrates, no matter how mutedly, the strength of the human spirit even in the face of the deepest sufferings.

The central narrative thread, ‘Meant To Be’, is based on the real-life story of Theresa Chan, SIngapore’s Helen Keller. Onto this story of a woman who has triumphed over her blindness and deafness to live a fulfilling life, Khoo superimposes a subtly-conceptualised subplot of an old shopkeeper, his debilitated wife, and their social worker son who is the lynchpin that holds all three narratives together. ‘Finding Love’ traces the life of an obese security guard who is obsessed with a glamorous, high-flying executive, while ‘So In Love’ is a tender paean to the young love between two schoolgirls who meet in an internet chatroom.

The structure of the film helps to sustain the viewer’s interest all the way to the final shot. Khoo has set himself the difficult task of bringing all three narrative threads together, and the strain of the endeavour shows in places, particularly in one unforgivable aesthetic faux pas towards the end of the film. The three narratives could also have been more evenly-spaced. By and large, however, the links between the characters in the three narratives are convincingly drawn – in an island the size of Singapore with a population of 4.5 million, it is entirely possible that the lives of a shopkeeper ‘Uncle’, a down-and-out security guard, a high-powered corporate chick, and two middle-class schoolgirls should overlap, and Khoo makes full use of this to make an implicit comment on the simultaneous strength and fragility of the bonds that hold our society together.

Let me just start by deflating a few expectations for you with a jab of my metaphorical reviewer's pen. Those of you who are expecting to see lots of hot sexy bedroom scenes should know from the start that, despite the M18 rating slapped on the film by the Media Development Authority, there really is nothing particularly controversial nor provocative about the film. The notorious depiction of 'lesbian intimacy' that forced Khoo to replace the film's original promotional poster with something depicting a more acceptable heterosexuality was really nothing more than a shot showing two teenage schoolgirls embracing each other on the steps leading to the entrance of Borders. Nothing that any real-life thirteen-year-old schoolgirl studying in a real-life girls' school would not have at least heard whispered about on her school's grapevine. Definitely nothing worth an M18 rating. It really is time the film censors woke up to the truth of what is going on among youths in Singapore today (or, indeed, what was going on among youths in Singapore as early as fifteen years ago).

Viewers who are unacquainted with Khoo's work and who are expecting either the larger-than-life histrionics of Singapore's other veteran film-maker Jack Neo, or the absolute blank minimalism of European arthouse films, will also be disappointed. In this film, Khoo finds the happy middle ground between loud populism and isolated elitism, and the result is an readily-accessible film that still demands intelligent engagement on the part of the audience. Even more than in 12 Storeys, Khoo's directorial vision presents an unsentimental yet lovingly-shot survey of the Singaporean cityscape – the Shenton Way office tower, the old provision shop, the wet market, the Orchard Road alfresco café, the disco, the charity hospital, the 2-room HDB flat, the district 10 semi-detached house, the posh condominium.

Set against this geographical social critique, the lives of the characters are played out in near-silence as communication is carried out in the form of SMS messages, IRC chats, emails, letters, and almost-wordless dialogues. Indeed, the sparse dialogue in the film is mostly given to peripheral characters like the security guard’s contemptuous family and the abusive parents of the family next-door. In fact, the only major character with a significant speaking part is, ironically, the deaf and blind Theresa, who speaks in the awkwardly dignified manner of a woman who has lost her hearing at the age of 14. The silence, as they say, is deafening, and works as a stark reminder of our human need for connection and intimacy, especially amidst the potential isolation of urban life.

In true Singaporean fashion, the main coping mechanism employed by the characters to keep their loneliness at bay is the preparation and consumption of food. The hawker fare that the security guard gorges on alone is his only consolation in an otherwise drab existence. In contrast, the provision shop Uncle’s sumptuous cooking is a symbol of his love for his wife, and, later in the film, signifies for him the continued will to live. Similarly, the fact that Theresa prepares her own meals underlines her independence and her determination not to let her handicaps control her life.

And it is her strength, together with the love that enables its existence, that saves this film from being yet another well-shot, glamorously nihilistic Eric-Khoo social commentary. As in 12 Storeys, the potential for nihilism is always there, shadowing the lives of the characters, and to deny its existence would be to impose on the movie an interpretation that it simply does not support. Yet, for all the stylistic similarities between Be With Me and 12 Storeys, this film differs from the previous one in its assertion of the enduring power of love. Cheesy as it sounds, the strength of the film lies in its honest, unsentimental portrayal of the continued persistence of human compassion even in the most brutal of environments. Call it by any other name, but there is no denying what lies at the heart of the acts of kindness that relieve and illuminate the bleakness of urban life as seen in the film. And it is this ultimate rejection of cynicism and darkness that makes this such a gem of a movie in a world where critically-acclaimed art so often denies more than it affirms, tears down without building up.
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posted by eothen @ 7:25 PM