Here
Here (2009)
Director: Ho Tzu Nyen
It’s a friday night and we’re sitting in Picturehouse screening a limited 4-day run of Here, a Singaporean film that competed for the Caméra d’Or at Cannes Film Festival 2009. The already-small-to-begin-with cinema is less than half-filled, of which more than half of those filled squealed sporadically with much delight throughout the film - tell-tale signs of film extras (or related) watching themselves.
That is the amount of reception Singaporeans have for our local ‘breakthrough’ works outside the domains of Jack Neo and Royston Tan. For the benefit for our less-than-discerning nation, whom we’ve known rather blast their eardrums at Transformers next door, it’d be better to remain outside the door. Here’s lack of a logical sequence and abstractness will be too much for most to stomach. My viewing partner was brimming of frustration towards the end of the 86 minutes.
For many years now, we have seen many local films struggle with the Singaporean context, repressed Singaporeans being a commonality, almost a cliché. Here, however, is largely context-less. Set in a fictitious hospital, the entire set-up and rehearsed acting - meticulously orchestrated right down to matching colours for aesthetic effects - reeks of artificiality.
That said, the location at which the film was shot, of which Google searches only reveal to be a “former mental hospital” (Woodbridge?), is an arresting archive of our abandoned spaces, which will prove to be valuable in time when the defunct building goes under the wrecking ball.
It is not hard to see where the director is coming from, given his background in visual arts. The film, an investigation of the human mind through acceptable social norms, is at many junctures more a work of visual art with sounds than an art film.
There are many pretty (as in beautiful) long takes, such as that of leaves waving gently in the wind against the blue sky, in a desaturated film stock and accompanied by a disconnected soundtrack of random sounds to conjure different moods and feels, depending on the viewer. Almost like the disconnection between what the eye sees and the random soundtrack the mind conjures at any point in time, depending on the recent playlist on one’s iPod.
These longs takes, unlike those made famous by Tsai Ming Liang - wildly copied and thus diluted for effect, are more poetic quiet contemplations than prolonged frustrations.
The film is laudable for the amount of control over how it looks, despite coming across as unnatural. It’s a very pretty picture to see, and not without depths for further discussions and explorations of themes - like can you undo a ‘wrong’ by conditioning to think the otherwise?
At the same time, I would also like to see how the director moves from a minimalistic and very clean Here to the dirty reality, one more contemporary of our times. Besides, we only have that many isolated and disused locations.
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