The last feature length Malaysian film covered in this blog was the execrable The Journey. Since then several other Malaysian films have been widely acclaimed but I’ve skipped them all. This one has been promoted a fair bit on the awards circuit but the real difference is that its newcomer director Tan Seng Kiat somehow managed to persuade veteran actress Sylvia Chang to appear in his film. That’s enough for me to give it a chance but unfortunately I once again found myself disappointed on every level.

19-year old Qiang is a poster boy for the urban poor in Kuala Lumpur, despite being ethnically Chinese. He lives in a run-down flat and as his mother suffers from mental problems, he is forced to raise his younger sister Hui San himself. In the middle of a water crisis in the city, after hanging out with a couple of friends who are car thieves one evening, he is involved in a hit and run accident on his motorcycle. Qiang is only lightly injured but Hui San is killed. He has difficulty getting this fact through to his mother and to compound his problems he isn’t allowed to take the corpse out of the morgue as it seems that his mother never made a birth certificate for Hui San. His friends brainstorm on ways to help him but their plans invariably involve shady stuff and no matter what he does, Qiang only seems to dig his own hole deeper.

The best thing that can be said about this film is that the technical skills of the crew are not lacking so the production quality is quite decent. They also make good use of recognizable locales around Kuala Lumpur and at least a couple of shots can be said to be quite beautiful. Unfortunately the acting skills of the local cast are not up to par with the male lead Jack Tan being very inadequate and practically expressionless. No matter what travails befall him, the only thing he can do is muster a senseless, childish and utterly hollow rage that quickly peters out to nothing. He is certainly incapable of emoting any form of grief over his sister’s death or any remorse over his actions.

Most of my ire however falls on the awfulness of the script which I note was co-written by the director himself. Broadly speaking, the film commits two great errors. The first is that its essential formula is to pile miseries onto Qiang in order to curry audience sympathy and thereby magic an award-winning film into being. Hence, it’s not enough that they’re poor but his mother must have mental issues, that he be so uneducated, stupid and so blinded by rage that he employs the wrong methods to solve his myriad problems and that he continually falls foul of officialdom and the law. Despite he and his friends willingness to resort to crime, they still can’t make money and even the busybody neighbor gives him trouble. It’s a cheap technique that has zero artistic merit and only makes the audience loathe the character more. What kind of a person climbs a water tower to try and get water anyway when he has a motorcycle and can just get it from further away? A moron, that’s who.

The second complaint is that it’s set in a fake Malaysia that seems intended to look convincing to foreigners but would be alien to real Malaysians. It’s a kind of timeless, storybook version of Malaysia that doesn’t exist now and probably never really existed. While I don’t doubt that ethnically Chinese families like Qiang’s exist, this is extremely atypical. The reality of areas like Pudu today is that the dominant population there are immigrants and any film that pretends otherwise is being deceitful. This is not how typical Malaysian-Chinese live, this not how Malaysian society typically operates and even the Malay folk song that Hui San sings feels dated and utterly out of place. For a far better film that captures what Pudu really feels like, look no further than Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. Of course Tan really is Malaysian but what he lacks is the brutal honesty to truly portray Malaysia as it is instead of what a left-leaning artistic type envisions it might be. As further evidence, I submit its spurious references to MH370 which are clearly included only to loudly assert the film’s Malaysian-ness, suggesting how weak its real claim to a Malaysian identity really is.

Watching this, my wife posited a theory that we’re not meant to sympathize with Qiang at all, that he deserves whatever happens to him due to his own actions and that there is possibly some kind of Buddhist karmic theme tied into it all. While that would indeed be an infinitely more interesting interpretation, it seems to me that this is giving the director far too much credit as judging from the film’s title and how the character reacts at the rich person’s party he goes to, it really is meant to be a standard paean against inequality. It’s just that the message is so incompetently delivered that you end up detesting the main character.

Personally I would be delighted to see a director seriously tackle the subject of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia but the fact of the matter is that it’s almost impossible to do something like that without tackling the 800-pound gorilla in the room: the uncomfortable co-existence the Chinese share with Malays. The film would also need to acknowledge the fact that the Chinese comfortably middle-class for the most part but that doesn’t have to mean that there aren’t worthy stories to be told about them. Perhaps under the new Malaysia we will one day have the artistic freedom to tell such stories but judging from this film, we’re not there yet.