I don’t bother with film shorts in the States. I think of American shorts as a training ground for young, credit\u00ad card-toting wannabe filmmakers, who haven’t yet honed their chops enough for someone — besides their parents -\u00ad- to fund their first feature. Why muck around with American shorts, anyway? When hundreds of full-length, independent features receive theatrical releases there every year, I’m spoiled for choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Similarly, I seldom eat margarine in\nAmerica because there’s plenty of dairy butter. But in Malaysia — where a\nsmear of saturated palm oil becomes magical taken with kaya on roti bakar —\nfilm shorts are worth savouring. With fewer than ten independent Malaysian\nfeatures receiving theatrical releases per year, film shorts are one of the few\nways to catch authentic versions of Malaysia on screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Living in Penang, I’m on starvation\nrations; indie movies — of whatever length — usually don’t come this far\nnorth unless they’re headed for Bangkok and points beyond. So, when the Mass\nCommunications department at Han Chiang College hosted a slate of Malaysian\nshorts (which had already screened in Kuala Lumpur in 2005 and 2006), I decided\nto see all 31 of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The programme, which ran during the\nweekend of November 25, 2006, was comprised of five sections, lasting less than\ntwo hours each. Three of the sections — ‘A Company of Shorts’, ‘Once Upon a\nTime’, and ‘Beautiful Malaysia 2006’ — were showcases of shorts by a mix of\ndirectors. One section each was devoted to the collected works of directors\nLiew Seng Tat and Tan Chui Mui.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aging Flowers and Oil Drums<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘Beautiful Malaysia 2006’: it’s\npretty clear what these films are meant to represent. But, when compared with\nmainstream feature films and television (not to mention hype from the Malaysia\nTourism Promotion Board), the shorts at the Han Chiang festival offer\nunorthodox images of the country. These films — whether through dramatic\nevents or mundane details — may confirm shared notions about the place, or\nthey may disrupt those notions in subtle or spectacular ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Ng Ken Kin’s Sunday<\/em>, the protagonist meets up with friends in three different hawker stalls during the course of his off-day and shoots the breeze in a variety of Chinese dialects. When he finally arrives home, he greets his wife in Bahasa. Instead of going with the movie’s flow, I’m hung up on identifying the language used for each scene. Just as I’m getting into the conversation, I lose the thread. Ken Kin forces me to confront — on screen, as I do in daily life –\u00ad the particularities of living in a multilingual country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An example of the spectacular: in Liew Seng Tat’s Flower<\/em>, a soldier in his 20s courts a woman in her 70s. Is that done<\/em>? I want to believe in the possibility, here — where a woman is considered past her prime after age 30 — or in any country, for that matter. But a woman in the audience two rows ahead of me isn’t buying it: she flails her arms over her head like an agitated octopus when the soldier leans in to kiss his lover. Inter-generational romance is just too revolutionary a prospect for some folks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even when its story isn’t perfectly\nclear, a film may still evoke something telling from Malaysia’s collective consciousness.\nDon’t ask me to explain Tham Wai Fook’s black comedy Ah Guan & Ting Ting<\/em>. I have no idea why two, three, then four\npeople are kidnapped and stuffed into metal oil drums in an abandoned house. I\ncan tell you, though, that once the first three hostages find themselves inside\nthe drums — Hou Hou, Uncle Tuck and May — their preoccupations come to light:\nfootball, porn, and the high cost of mobile phone calls, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later, a fourth hostage turns up,\none who knows the identity of the other three hostages — she’s somehow related\nto all of them. She chides them for their history of bad behaviour: if only Hou\nHou had studied harder for his PMR exam; or Uncle Tuck spent more quality time\nwith his wild-monkey son; or May visited her parents this past year, or at\nleast showed up at the cemetery on Ching Ming — then perhaps they wouldn’t\nhave found themselves in this mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This kind of guilt-tripping — playing on such common values as good marks, parental responsibility and filial piety –\u00ad would work on any number of Malaysians, especially if they believed that karmic vows of better behaviour would spare them from dying at the hands of a demented criminal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Technical Suggestiveness<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When their narratives are difficult\nto decipher — or even non-existent — these movies often have something else\nto offer. I don’t care for James Lee’s narratives, but he’s great with light.\nHe understands the power of light to create atmosphere or to focus or deflect\nattention on a subject. As well as directing three entries in this festival,\nLee served as cinematographer for a number of the directors, and those shorts\nbenefit from his talent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of these is Kok Kai Foong’s Self Portrait<\/em>. At one point in the film,\nlate at night, The Man leaves his artist\u00ad girlfriend behind in their holiday\nbungalow to wander outside, battery-operated lantern in hand, looking for who-knows-what.\nHe appears marooned in both physical and psychic space, an island of white\nmoving through the pitch black. When he finally returns to the bungalow, his\nartist-girlfriend and what might be an apparition of his previous girlfriend —\nthe one he jilted for this current one — are awake and cosily sitting together\non a bed. The ghost-girlfriend has her head resting on the shoulder of the\nartist-girlfriend, and their backs are to the camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Man doesn’t enter the bungalow;\nhe looks at them through a louvered window. They sense his presence and turn to\nlook at him impassively. He’s an outsider to another story taking place within:\nthe two women have formed an alliance, prioritizing their friendship over\ncompeting for him. As he stares at the women in the warmly lit room, his orange\nface, bisected by the blue louvers, is frozen in a look of paranoia and\nentrapment. Earlier, the artist-girlfriend had painted a small self-portrait\nwith her own face confined to a window-like panel; the framing of The Man’s\nface in the window represents the power reversal that has just taken place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People at a Table, Talking<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I’m new enough to the country to\nstill be enchanted by Malaysian foibles. In Sunday<\/em>,\nI get distracted: What are they eating? Holy cannoli, it’s roti bakar, served\nwith the crusts cut off again! Why do they always do that? The crust is the\nbest part! It’s the same with Hokkien and Mandarin swearwords — even in\ntranslation, like those in Tan Chui Mui’s Company\nof Mushrooms<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Local viewers have probably heard\nthese words many times before, in a multiplicity of languages; instead, they\nmight come to a film festival expecting to see something out of the ordinary.\nHowever, Company of Mushrooms<\/em> strives\nto reproduce the ordinary as naturally as possible. Chui Mui films the\nconversation of four unremarkable men — who, for most of the short’s duration,\nare sitting at a restaurant, eating, drinking and smoking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the festival ends, I hang out\nat the Taman Free School hawker centre with a bunch of other film fans to\ndiscuss the films we’ve just seen. A debate arises over Company of Mushrooms<\/em>: What is the movie supposed to mean? The\nending is not very clear. What is that expression on the face of Ho Yuhang’s\ncharacter just after Pete Teo’s character unexpectedly takes his leave? Ho\nYuhang’s character pauses for a moment and looks in the direction of the\ncamera, before turning to walk back to his karaoke joint alone. Is he agonised\nover something — or just plain drunk?<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the table, a friend of mine says\nthat his grievance with the Malaysian shorts is that, sometimes, an idea exists\nin the mind of the filmmaker as a ‘full baby’ — but only comes out as ‘half a\nbaby’. He questions the whole point of Company\nof Mushrooms<\/em>. He perceives sexism in the dialogue — but, at the end of the\nmovie, the four characters each go their separate ways, and nothing comes of\nit. Nothing changes. So what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Interpretation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Previously, during the Q&A\nsession with Chui Mui, she was quick to tell the audience that she didn’t like\nbeing asked to explain the ‘message’ of her films. That’s not her job, anyway;\nit’s up to filmgoers to come to their own conclusions. Over at the hawker\ncentre, I offer my own take on the meaning of ‘Mushrooms’:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even though male bonding has been depicted in all sorts of movies — from those of John Woo to Martin Scorsese -\u00ad- Company of Mushrooms<\/em> is different. In her own understated style, Chui Mui lays bare the woeful limits of male bonding and the thoughtless perpetuation of misogyny in general culture. With the amount of time these four guys spend dissing, getting dissed by, or accommodating their women, their power struggles consume them. These men are miserable even as they try to convince themselves and their peers that their failures to love and be loved don’t really matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of the film, the men walk\naway, disconnected — not only from the women in their lives, but also from\neach other. This particular cast of beta dogs doesn’t have the wherewithal to\nlive any differently. That’s the tragedy of this ordinary scenario — and it’s\npotent just because it is so ordinary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Perhaps, I didn’t articulate the\n‘message’ quite this clearly at the time….)<\/p>\n\n\n\n For me, independent Malaysian shorts\nreveal fundamental truths about the country that are undiscoverable any other\nway: not through the mainstream media, not through the Internet — not even\nthrough living here, as I have, on and off, for the past six years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a full mind-altering experience,\nnothing beats watching more than 30 shorts over the course of two days. These\nindie films — especially when seen as a set, rather than individually —\ncomplement each other and produce some mighty synergy. Like Planta and kaya on\nroti bakar, the shorts are better together — and local specialties not to be\nmissed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ~~~ <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lucy Friedland spends inordinate amounts of time watching movies and watching people eat. This year, a story of hers was published in two anthologies: The World is a Kitchen<\/em> and The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2006.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n First Published: 20.12.2006 on Kakiseni <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t bother with film shorts in the States. I think of American shorts as a training ground for young, credit\u00ad card-toting wannabe filmmakers, who haven’t yet honed their chops enough for someone — besides their parents -\u00ad- to fund their first feature. Why muck around with American shorts, anyway? When hundreds of full-length, independent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":3,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,3540,3569],"tags":[223,3915,555,575,2719,2722,2796,231,2716,3916],"language":[7523],"writer":[7618],"class_list":["post-27535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-film","category-review","tag-film","tag-han-chiang-college","tag-ho-yuhang","tag-james-lee","tag-kok-kai-foong","tag-liew-seng-tat","tag-ng-ken-kin","tag-pete-teo","tag-tan-chui-mui","tag-tham-wai-fook","language-english","writer-lucy-friedland"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27535"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39146,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27535\/revisions\/39146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27535"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=27535"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=27535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}