Where are you going to my friend?

Let me show you paradise that never ends

I will take you by the hand

And escape to faraway lands

Let me bring you there

Where the world is fair

Let me take you by the hand

And escape to fantasy lands

I will bring there

Fly Merlion Air

– Merlion Air advertisement jingle (written by Kevin Matthews)

Warning: Spoilers ahead, but not in chronological order

After watching visual artist Brian Gothong Tan’s first foray into feature film-making, Invisible Children (2008), it took a while for me to pin down exactly what I felt about the work – a sensation that was remarkable yet ordinary. It was in all the little details and at the same time the way in which it was put together as a whole… and then it struck me, it was simply familiar, everything of the film was perfectly recognisable, to me, as a local, a familiarity not borne out of stereotypes however, but bordering on kinship. One problem with making ‘local’ films and television has been how to make the action, dialogue and motivations natural. We’ve been so accustomed to bad acting, clumsy exchanges and awkward moles, that sometimes it takes a while to realise how effortless these things can actually be (of course it takes work to make it effortless). Often portrayal of Singaporean-ness is presented in amplified cultural ‘essences’ of petty squabbling with neighbours, expensive driving, gruelling mugging (studying, not robbery – that’s for another post), relentless scheming to make money, ghosts and cursing in Hokkien, that renders this land more alien than it is; although even in normal circumstances for some individuals perceptions might be quite far off from reality without any movie intervention – such as for those with elite faces, peanut salaries and as seen in the differential treatment of chips, depending on which block they come from, overseas or local… Ah, the joys of inside jokes, for those we have lost along this textual path, google your way to enlightenment.

From starting block Tan’s film sets a local tone, weaving in in different languages the premise of the story, beginning in Tamil, “The police have mobilized a nation-wide search… if the public has seen these people, please help and call this hotline.” Continuing in Mandarin, “Two children went missing on Wednesday, a 15 year old girl and her 10 year old brother… (in Malay) left their house and haven’t returned. They were last seen in Ang Mo Kio Ave 5… (in English) Hundreds of people in Singapore go missing every year. Most of them are eventually found but many are gone without a trace.” Even though the film begins with the use of the reductive bureaucratic practice of racial categorisation – Chinese, Indian, Malay, Others, the rest of the film unfolds with language use shifting quite naturally, from English with a ‘western’ accent by the Merlion Air stewardess, English spoken with a Singlish lilt in the army scenes, to a combination of English and Mandarin between the girl and her younger brother on the run after having brained their mother humorously enough with a Merlion statue.

Produced with Zhao Wei Films, the independent production company headed by Eric Khoo and James Toh, Tan shares that Invisible Children began quite simply with Khoo asking if he would be interested in making a feature-length film. In this work, the fine art, multimedia and animation trained Tan makes reference to Khoo’s earlier work 12 Storeys (1997) where the lives of flat-dwellers are the focus. In a similar thread, in Tan’s work, mass living quarters are also the backdrop, likewise suicide by gravity (attempted), and in perhaps a playful reference to Khoo’s earlier Mee Pok Man (1995), here bunny, in the transmuted form of the boy’s rabbit doll, dies again.

The stories that circle around each other in Invisible Children, like children playing, are of a civil servant (played by Lim Poh Huat, originally also in Khoo’s film, and who has published a book Confessions of a Struggling Actor (2002) about working as a TV extra) whose world revolves around completing his job one Sisyphian day at a time, and who falls in love with an air stewardess (played by Isabella Chiam) desperately trying to find escape in the foreign; living in the same block with a mother (played by Karen Tan) trying her best to contain her frustrations caring for a family within the confines of her flat, who beats her son for not doing his math assignment, her only recourse to assuring her child’s future in a world she cannot otherwise control, while admonishing “money doesn’t grow on trees”; her children Peishan and Xiaoming (played by Kimberly Chia and Kyle Chan) wrestling with their own problems of long-winded mathematical questions, cruel school mates and rebellion; a man (played by Chee Chuan Yang) whose administrative job of keeping order in the army regularly thwarted by an army private (played by Leon Lim) slowly saps his will to live, and whose girlfriend cannot meet with him because she is stuck at work; the girlfriend (played by Cindy Teo) who cannot leave the office because of an inexplicably conflicted and sadistic boss; and the boss (played by Jonathan Lim) who is the brother of the civil servant.

From merlions, campaign signs, Japanese slippers dragged along the floor or slapping against ones soles while running, obsessions with cleanliness, cats in flats, ski-masked mosquito foggers to the surreal logic of army authority and punishments, these everyday signs are played out with familiarity in Tan’s world, neither intensified to explicit critique nor rationalised, and all done in exquisite editing. Tan frames and elicits a profoundly natural expression from his cast thus prompting empathy from the film’s audiences, his characters become memorable because they fail to be merely stereotypes. Instead they are recognisable in the sense of the anonymity of the common individual, never quite stating their thoughts about their plights, never truly known yet comprehended in their brief moments of expression and the gaps in between where imagination takes over, like the neighbour one exchanges a 15-second conversation with while riding in a lift. In the absence of prescriptive readings, the details Tan deftly inserts into one’s visual field then become sensuously enigmatic and richly polysemous, embodied in the single floating slipper at the mouth of a storm drain.

Filmed within two weeks, for Tan the film is about control/conformity and escape, the struggle to follow the meandering path of one’s life, but without the exoticism of gritty opposition to bureaucratic and corporate idealised identities that is found say in Khoo’s (and others) works. Rather, things are a little less confrontational, a little softer around the edges, where laughter does not bear the strained tinge of its opposite, but is less fraught, more at ease and also more ambiguous. Humour requires complicity in Tan’s work, embedded as it is in local knowledge and sensibilities, such as while on the run from home, the two children escape into Malaysian land, the train tracks where the two nations are a hair’s breath apart. Walking down the empty tracks, the boy asks his sister, would they be in trouble if they are caught without passports, and she replies quite nonchalantly that they are simply crossing borders to get to the estate on the other side. Or in another moment when the civil servant turns away for a couple of seconds his hand on a remote, and viewers hear the unmistakable double-beep sound of the turning on of an air-conditioner (split-level no less) beyond the camera frame. And again in the painstakingly assembled miniature model of a plastic Chinese garden, perfected under microscopic scrutiny by the civil servant.

Like his visual art work, Invisible Children presents a reality that is nuanced and ambiguous, where actors and subjects are complex and sometimes inexplicable at least within a single narrative. These sensations, actions, intentions and desires are however prolonged in the film as opposed to the more fast-paced action in Tan’s other video work. With extended shots where figures are assembled almost to sculptural effect, little moves. In this stillness, seconds pass, expressions undergo minute changes and thoughts layer, and then without moving a finger, perhaps what has gone missing becomes visible.

(what became visible you might ask, well, there is a public interest in this issue, but that my friend is not a good reason for providing you with an answer)

All Image Captions: Brian Gothong Tan, Invisible Children, 2008, 85 min, Screenplay by Brian Gothong Tan and Liam Yeo, Directed by Brian Gothong Tan, Produced by Zhao Wei Films (Gary Goh, Tan Fong Cheng and James Toh)

Invisible Children (2008) has been screened at the Singapore International Film Festival 2009, the Bangkok International Film Festival, the Toronto Singapore Film Festival and the Asian Hotshots Film Festival in Berlin. It heads to Tokyo next month for the Sintok Film Festival.

(JY)