Shirkers, a film about Singapore and life

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Two-thirds of the way through Shirkers I was ready to shirk.

The protagonist, Sandi Tan, was not that likeable and the villain, Georges Cardonas, not that interesting. The story seemed nauseatingly melodramatic. In 1992 then forty-year old Cardonas disappeared with the raw footage of a film, Shirkers, that then nineteen-year old Tan and contemporaries Jasmin Ng and Sophie Siddique had wanted to make with him in Singapore. Distraught, they eventually get on with life, albeit without some of their “spirit”, says Siddique. In 2011 after Cardonas’s death, Tan finds the original footage he had painstakingly preserved. And thus is born Shirkers, the 2018 documentary about Shirkers, the 1992 fictional film never finished.

The original Shirkers was to be our city-state’s first indie film, one of several suggestions—that flit between irony and vaingloriousness—that Tan and crew were pioneering artistic prodigies in a hopelessly stuffy society.

Tan’s mentor, director and collaborator made off with their collective work, snuffing out her teenage silver screen dreams. Tough, even heartbreaking. But there seemed a limit to how much sympathy one could feel about a summer project by privileged students matriculating at some of the best universities in the UK and US.

In one scene Siddique writes letters to equipment suppliers, trying to sound like a seasoned, older producer. They ultimately get to use cameras sponsored by Kodak. In another the production is in danger of stalling for lack of funds—so the scheming Cardonas convinces Siddique and Tan to withdraw S$10,000 from their ATMs.

Tan presents both incidents as evidence of their steely resolve and resourcefulness. Yet both could be seen through the prism of privilege—did things come that easily to them? They could only drain their “life savings” because of, presumably, bountiful parental backstops.

I wasn’t convinced there was enough here for a film. There is a surfeit of good content out there competing for our time. The Shirkers plot is not nearly as compelling as other investigative excavations (am on The Innocent Man now). Cardonas is a cardboard character, a caricature of the talentless neo-colonial out to plunder fawning Asians. He has nothing on the gloriously complex anti-heros and nut jobs being revived on screen—like Darren Criss as Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace’s killer. If artistic theft was the point, then Big Eyes was the better story; if artistic rehabilitation, then Searching for Sugar Man.

Shirkers seemed valuable only for its widely-acclaimed documenting of a Singapore now gone. But even that ultimately depressed me. Sure, all Singaporeans know that our city’s facade is relentlessly changing, that no structure is safe from the wrecking ball of insatiable GDP growth (except for a few holy shrines, like the one on 38 Oxley Road). Yet seeing footage from 1992 is like entering a developmental time warp—surely we couldn’t have destroyed all that in just twenty-six years?

Worse, perhaps, is the realisation that few people care. By 1992 (already rich) Singapore probably had a higher fancy-video-camera-per-capita rate than anywhere else on earth. Was nobody filming Singapore? Why is the Shirkers footage treasured like some ancient Hikayat?

I grumpily stayed awake through these grievances and somehow, in the last thirty minutes, the film came together for me. It clicked. It works. I’m a fan.

Continue reading “Shirkers, a film about Singapore and life”

Malaysia and Singapore: Here we go again

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Malaysia’s and Singapore’s governments at each other’s throats? We’ve been here before. One of the reasons why Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) and, until May this year, Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional (BN) have won national elections more consistently than any other party in democratic Asia is their ability to ratchet up domestic nationalist sentiment against the other.

The PAP has ruled Singapore for almost 60 years while the BN era (including its Alliance predecessor) lasted 61 years. BN may no longer be in power, but Malaysia’s current governing coalition, Pakatan Harapan (PH), has as prime minister ninety-three-year old Mahathir Mohamad, a former BN leader and persistent thorn in Singapore’s side. There is a tiresome familiarity to it all.

We can be sure of three things. First, once the sabre-rattling is done, the governments will eventually resolve all aerial and maritime boundary issues amicably.

Second, the big losers will be us, the citizens. In a world struggling to deal with nativism, and the dangers posed by demagogues who preen their exclusive identities at the expense of our common humanity, it has been worryingly easy for politicians to ignite dormant antagonisms against the other.

Malaysians and Singaporeans are essentially the same peoples—in both countries one finds the same ethnicities, the same religions, the same cultures, the same cendols (almost). If even we can be so easily turned against each other, what hope do other more conflicting identities elsewhere in the world have?

Politicians on both sides have exhibited passive-aggressive tendencies. Rais Hussin, a supreme council member of Bersatu, the Mahathir-led party that is part of PH, wrote an Op-Ed that combined a conciliatory call for cooler heads with a bald-faced threat that Singapore was at risk of “pain by a thousand cuts”. It was remarkable not least because one rarely sees a Malay channelling a punishment from Imperial China.

Tan Chuan-Jin, Singapore’s speaker of parliament, reposted on Facebook a potentially incendiary video that suggests Malaysia may have nefarious motivations for its actions, such as inciting racial disharmony in Singapore. He also asked followers to keep Singaporean soldiers “in our prayers”, a divine exhortation one usually associates with boots on battlefields. He ends off saying that “no one is trying to be jingoistic”, which is precisely the sort of disclaimer that makes one worry about jingoism.

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The third thing we know for sure is that the big winner from all this will be the PAP. Continue reading “Malaysia and Singapore: Here we go again”