My wife insisted that we catch this in the cinemas and indeed it seemed like a good idea to support an artsy Malaysian film that’s enough good to win plaudits internationally. Indeed I really like how this is mostly set in Pudu, Kuala Lumpur and seemed to feature the lack of official identity documents in Malaysia as its driving theme. It’s the feature film debut of Lay Jin Ong who also wrote the script. However he was also a producer for Shuttle Life, film that I excoriated some time ago. This is far better than Shuttle Life but it falls into the same trap of being too old-fashioned where it counts and operates according to the principle that misery equals high art. Worst of all, it pulls a bait and switch in that it’s actually not at all about migrants in Malaysia nor the lack of identity papers.

Abang and Adik are two siblings who live in the Pudu area of Kuala Lumpur. Though Malaysian, they do not possess proper identity documents and must flee the authorities whenever there is a crackdown. The older sibling Abang is mute and accepts his lot in life. He works hard, is well liked by everyone and flirts with a girl whose family are refugees from Myanmar. Adik is more resentful of the unfairness of their situation. Eager to get ahead in life, he tries to make money in a variety of illegal and unethical ways, including cheating undocumented migrants looking for work in Malaysia. They are given help by Money, a trans sex worker, and Jia En, an activist social worker. It emerges that the two siblings are not actually related by blood and Adik has a living father who abandoned him long ago. Jia En is hopeful that Adik will be able to get an official identity card with the help of his father but he refuses to have anything to do with him.

This was critically acclaimed at the international level and even made a decent amount of money in Taiwan. The latter is probably attributable to casting a well known Taiwanese actor Kang Ren Wu in the role of Abang. The director gets around his being unable to credibly speak ‘Malaysian’ by having his character being a mute and it works very well. The cinematography throughout is fantastic, with a dynamic opening scene that instantly immerses you into its setting. It’s such a thrill to see a place like the messy Pudu market we are so familiar with brought to life in such vibrant colors on the big screen. Kang is a better actor than everyone else but the others don’t do too badly. In terms of production quality, this is a solid effort, visibly aping the style of Taiwanese cinema.

The problem is, well, everything else really. The film teases the theme of being undocumented in Malaysia and suggests the authorities as antagonists. Then it throws in a plot twist to throw all that out to revert to a very old-fashioned plot about sibling love and self-sacrifice. I can’t express how frustrated I am that it introduces this fascinating demi-monde of illegal migrants, undocumented refugees, trans sex workers, citizens who fall between the cracks of Malaysian bureaucracy and the unscrupulous fixers who prey on all of them, and then proceeds with a story that treats all that as preamble and the lack of documentation as just one of many miseries in the lives of the two brothers. For all the diversity it shows, all of the characters who matter in the story are still ethnically Chinese. Equally dumb is how it wants to focus exclusively on the duo yet is completely incurious about their familial background. It doesn’t want to tell us anything about where their families were from, who Abang’s parents were and why Adik was abandoned and so on.

This film could have been good but as it is, I consider terribly overhyped. It wastes the beautiful cinematography, the fantastic setting and even the strong acting to tell a safe, traditional story that shows no signs of artistic boldness at all. It’s neither a fair depiction of the Pudu area, since a realistic portrayal of it in the present day would focus on the migrants, nor of the experience of being ethnically Chinese in Malaysia. It’s a fair bit better Shuttle Life but it shares much of the same DNA to its detriment.