flower in the pocket
watched flower in the pocket by liew seng tat last week. mainly because i caught one of his shorts a couple of years ago and was blown away by his weird sense of narrative and perspective. can't remember what the short film was called, but it featured a grandmother's fantasy and active desire with an old love - a young boy (starring seng tat himself) wearing a communist beret. they pranced around - she in her existing embodiment as a coquettish old woman, and he as a nubile smiling young man - and then have sex together. he goes down on her with a pure and satisfied smile. lovely! a very wonderful story that is at the same time humourous, light and moving.
so i was all ready for another brilliant film, and flower in the pocket didn't disappoint. the story centres around two young boys and their father. it's quite a simple tale, but as with his previous short, it's really the relationship between the different characters that drew me in.
the first half of the movie slowly unwraps the things that these two boys do - at school, not completing their homework, playing around drains, forming new friendships by bullying and being bullied, tasting food, shitting, cleaning, sleeping - all the minute mundanity of life coloured through intimacy. it's full of tangible silences that sutures the whole story together. each character is rich and complex without falling into a stereo/archetype, and are revealed through interactions with the spaces they inhabit, the relationship they are de/constructing with each other, needs and desires, and best of all, minimal drama.
the younger boy - mah li ohm - speaks no malay, and a know-it-all classmate, maria, translates every single sentence that their bahasa malaysia teacher utters perfectly to him. even then, miscommunication happens, as he tried to tell a story about "keluarga saya" from his drawing of himself and his brother, mah li ahh. maria thought it's her name, and asked why his drawing of a boy has a girl's name? the intricate and chaotic linguistic landscape of the country is presented through such small moments - which was quite refreshing for me after two marathon days of cinta and mukhsin - which brings up sepet and gubra. they were all good cinematic stories about malaysian life, love, cultural and raced heterogeneity, but got a little predictably soapy after awhile. i loved sepet when it first came out. it presented outright the kind of differentiating assumptions we carry and enact through everyday life - mixing of chinese music with arabic calligraphy, scholarships given on race-based NEP quotas, the destabilisation of borders through peranakan identities etc. but when orked came out again in mukhsin, and the romantic, nostalgic and rose-tinted treatment given to play, poverty and conflict, i got a little weary of festive-seasoned advertisement moments.
or maybe it's because the protagonists had different ethnicities. i could relate a little more to a poor chinese family from somewhere near jinjang than i could to a middlish-class malay family from an unnamed but beautiful kampung. even though i have encountered both, i experienced them from a different positionality in raced identity. either way, it's really good to have more diverse takes to a complex reality.
so anyway, back to flower in the pocket. they were befriended by a tomboy malay girl, ayu, who gave them "glamour" names so she could more easily pronounce them - azman abdullah and azmi abdullah. and the beauty of priorities in childhood is presented by a simple "boleh" - quick assent for the convenience of knowing. ayu called herself atan and claimed the male identity to be able to play with them easier, but shed this simply when she brought li ohm and li ahh back to her place for lunch one day. when the two boys found a stray puppy, she cycled home and put on a helmet and gloves to be able to continue playing with them and the haram puppy. there is no hysteria, high-tension, drama or sudden change in background music. it's just a mellowed, routine negotiation of identity in constant flux and reenactment. very wonderfully done.
the father is a man withdrawn from life and his children, presumably because his wife left them (he tore her picture and tried to swallow it at the later part of the film), and works with mannequins together with a malay man, mamat, who has a strong physical and emotional bond with his wife. the tale evolves to his gradual awakening of his children's existence and his subtle and awkward demonstration of love and care to living things surrounding him.
the second half of the movie, when the story centred more around the father than the children, got a little too silent at parts. the small moments that reveal a lot more than is narrated gulfed question marks that weren't too titillating. maybe it's because i know the actor - james lee - who played the father. so i couldn't suspend my disbelief as well. or maybe it's because his character was focussed on interactions with inanimate objects, spaces and stillness. not sure, but it can't be easy to sustain and fold a story well without resorting to tried-and-tested techniques of contradictions, subtlety and drama.
either way, i'm going to try and get a copy of this film on DVD. it's something that makes me feel all wobbly and smile when thinking of film-making in this country, and the tentative steps we're taking to capture slivers of our life in this time. right down to the blurring out of the puppy when azan was sounding the background, and the bleeping off of "melayu" when li ohm asked to tear a page off his exercise book to wipe his bum after he had a poo :) hopefully, they'll do something about the uneven sound throughout the film before releasing it on DVD.
gush over!
so i was all ready for another brilliant film, and flower in the pocket didn't disappoint. the story centres around two young boys and their father. it's quite a simple tale, but as with his previous short, it's really the relationship between the different characters that drew me in.
the first half of the movie slowly unwraps the things that these two boys do - at school, not completing their homework, playing around drains, forming new friendships by bullying and being bullied, tasting food, shitting, cleaning, sleeping - all the minute mundanity of life coloured through intimacy. it's full of tangible silences that sutures the whole story together. each character is rich and complex without falling into a stereo/archetype, and are revealed through interactions with the spaces they inhabit, the relationship they are de/constructing with each other, needs and desires, and best of all, minimal drama.
the younger boy - mah li ohm - speaks no malay, and a know-it-all classmate, maria, translates every single sentence that their bahasa malaysia teacher utters perfectly to him. even then, miscommunication happens, as he tried to tell a story about "keluarga saya" from his drawing of himself and his brother, mah li ahh. maria thought it's her name, and asked why his drawing of a boy has a girl's name? the intricate and chaotic linguistic landscape of the country is presented through such small moments - which was quite refreshing for me after two marathon days of cinta and mukhsin - which brings up sepet and gubra. they were all good cinematic stories about malaysian life, love, cultural and raced heterogeneity, but got a little predictably soapy after awhile. i loved sepet when it first came out. it presented outright the kind of differentiating assumptions we carry and enact through everyday life - mixing of chinese music with arabic calligraphy, scholarships given on race-based NEP quotas, the destabilisation of borders through peranakan identities etc. but when orked came out again in mukhsin, and the romantic, nostalgic and rose-tinted treatment given to play, poverty and conflict, i got a little weary of festive-seasoned advertisement moments.
or maybe it's because the protagonists had different ethnicities. i could relate a little more to a poor chinese family from somewhere near jinjang than i could to a middlish-class malay family from an unnamed but beautiful kampung. even though i have encountered both, i experienced them from a different positionality in raced identity. either way, it's really good to have more diverse takes to a complex reality.
so anyway, back to flower in the pocket. they were befriended by a tomboy malay girl, ayu, who gave them "glamour" names so she could more easily pronounce them - azman abdullah and azmi abdullah. and the beauty of priorities in childhood is presented by a simple "boleh" - quick assent for the convenience of knowing. ayu called herself atan and claimed the male identity to be able to play with them easier, but shed this simply when she brought li ohm and li ahh back to her place for lunch one day. when the two boys found a stray puppy, she cycled home and put on a helmet and gloves to be able to continue playing with them and the haram puppy. there is no hysteria, high-tension, drama or sudden change in background music. it's just a mellowed, routine negotiation of identity in constant flux and reenactment. very wonderfully done.
the father is a man withdrawn from life and his children, presumably because his wife left them (he tore her picture and tried to swallow it at the later part of the film), and works with mannequins together with a malay man, mamat, who has a strong physical and emotional bond with his wife. the tale evolves to his gradual awakening of his children's existence and his subtle and awkward demonstration of love and care to living things surrounding him.
the second half of the movie, when the story centred more around the father than the children, got a little too silent at parts. the small moments that reveal a lot more than is narrated gulfed question marks that weren't too titillating. maybe it's because i know the actor - james lee - who played the father. so i couldn't suspend my disbelief as well. or maybe it's because his character was focussed on interactions with inanimate objects, spaces and stillness. not sure, but it can't be easy to sustain and fold a story well without resorting to tried-and-tested techniques of contradictions, subtlety and drama.
either way, i'm going to try and get a copy of this film on DVD. it's something that makes me feel all wobbly and smile when thinking of film-making in this country, and the tentative steps we're taking to capture slivers of our life in this time. right down to the blurring out of the puppy when azan was sounding the background, and the bleeping off of "melayu" when li ohm asked to tear a page off his exercise book to wipe his bum after he had a poo :) hopefully, they'll do something about the uneven sound throughout the film before releasing it on DVD.
gush over!