We’re continuing with the recent spate of Malaysian films I suppose as my wife insisted on catching this in the cinema to support local filmmakers. I admit that the idea of a Malay director, Tunku Mona Riza, directing a mostly Chinese cast in intriguing and I do like how it’s set in the town of Taiping. Unfortunately the material she has to work with is television drama level crap. It feels like something out of the 1980s with its moral conservatism and naive take on the human condition. I do want to watch something interesting set in Taiping but this isn’t it.

Retiree Choo has lived in the rainy town of Taiping his whole life and like to hang out with his friends in a local coffee shop betting on the chance of rainfall. His wife Aileen is Eurasian and their three children Isaac, Alex and Ruby are young adults trying to find their way in life. Though he claims to want what is best for his children, Choo is extremely patriarchal and insists on controlling every aspect of their lives. He scares away Ruby’s fiancé by questioning his plans for the future and is dismissive about Alex’s laziness and lack of ambition. Most of all he pins all of his hopes on the eldest son Isaac becoming a doctor and making the family proud. Alex is currently doing his housemanship in a local hospital and feels overwhelmed by the stress and the expectations placed on him. He would much rather pursue a career in music instead but Choo forbids it and demands that Alex tough it out. Aileen is sympathetic and asks her husband to go easy on Alex. But Choo insists that he has the right to determine what is best for him and even disparages Aileen’s white heritage as being too liberal and impractically idealistic.

Let’s be kind and start with the good things. The camera work is competent and does make Taiping look like the beautiful small town that it is. There are nice shots of its famous lake though it’s lacking in ground-level views, probably because of the difficulty of getting the general public into the frame. The acting is surprisingly decent. Veteran actress is Susan Lankester great as Aileen and everyone else seem to at least have some acting training. The director seems to want them to perform in a highly exaggerated and dramatic style. There’s too much exposition at the beginning too as every character is introduced but I like that the film shows a decent cross-section of Malaysian society. Whether the dialogue is in Cantonese, English or Malay, the delivery sounds perfect to me. This feat must have been harder than it seems because the director doesn’t speak Cantonese at all. This is a film that at least gets the basics right and has decent production standards.

The problem is its old-fashioned mindset and conservative values. It invokes all the usual tropes of the over controlling father as the patriarchal head of the family without shame or irony. The character basically has no redeeming qualities at all. He is a terrible father and an equally bad husband so the audience is left confused as to what Aileen sees in him. The worst thing is that the character never has to pay a price for this words and actions. There’s no dramatic confrontation and so no sense catharsis because the director cannot stomach a scene in which Choo has to apologize to his family. Their entire family situation doesn’t even make sense. Are we to believe that a Chinese family has three adult children who have graduated from college and all three still live in their parents’ home in a small town? Why is even going to KL such a big deal? Where did Isaac study medicine anyway?

This is an all round terrible film that I cannot recommend in any way at all. It’s bad directing that ramps the drama all the way up to eleven without any subtlety. As a portrayal of the town of Taiping, it rings false, like a not very convincing advertisement sponsored by its MP. It’s fine for it to be a beautiful small town populated mostly by retirees or very young children. Embrace the identity and revel in it instead or trying to spin it into something else.