A Film a Week - Come & Go

 

Lim Kah Wai is a Malaysia-born Japan-based filmmaker best known for his drama movies that frequently revolve around people living in a country and in a city which is not of their own. With “Come & Go”, he has completed his “Osaka Trilogy” that he started almost ten years earlier with “New World” (2011) and continued with “Fly Me to Minami” (2013). In “Come & Go”, which premiered last autumn at Tokyo International Film Festival, he uses the so-called hyperlink plotting to paint the complex texture of a big city that is not always kind on its inhabitants and visitors. The film also played at Tallinn Black Nights, in the non-competitive programme called Current Waves.

A body of a dead woman is found in the Osaka’s neighbourhood of Nakazaki-Cho, but the police investigation about how she died and ended up there is just a small part of the film’s plot, while the neighbourhood itself, its inhabitants and visitors and their lives are the things Lim is interested the most. The victim’s neighbour lists himself in the adds as a “middle-aged man to rent” for any one who needs an odd job to be done. A Burmese student is about to be expelled from the university because she cannot make enough money for the tuition fee despite working on two jobs and withstanding her boss’ sexual advances on one of them. A girl new to the town almost ends up in the pornography ring, before deciding to try her luck as a nightclub hostess. A bi-racial Japanese-American feels under pressure from his colleagues at the parking lot job. A Vietnamese worker gets in trouble with his bosses and the law for insisting that, despite his contract, he should be allowed to take a break and visit his mother. A Nepalese immigrant has a dream of success in the restaurant falls for his Japanese teacher who also happens to be the wife of the police investigator. On the other side of the spectre, we also have a Malaysian businessman who came to give a lecture about the possibilities for the tourism sector, a lonely Chinese man dissatisfied with the shopping-based guided tour he came with, a Taiwanese pornography enthusiast who visits the shops and cafés specialized in certain kind of goods and services and a Korean pimp and his squad of girls posing as Japanese AV actresses in order to swindle some shady Chinese business people…

The sheer number of subplots and characters involved (who might have or have not met one another until the end of the film’s over 150-minute runtime) is a dead giveaway that Lim is not interested to go in depth with any of them. However, he goes quite wide with his script, followed by the functional directing style, in painting the complex landscape of the second-largest Japanese city and a hub of sorts for people from all over the Asia-Pacific region. The variety of languages and dialects spoken pretty much defies the traditional vision of Japan as a mono-cultural country, reveals a number of social issues and personal consequences in a highly globalized world.

The series of switches between the vignettes does not do much favour to the actors who can hardly leave a mark playing their under-developed characters in the circumstances of inflation of both characters and events, but at least on the technical level “Come & Go” is a decently done film. The ever-present funk-rock soundtrack by Takashi Watanabe goes quieter and more down-tempo as the film goes on, following the general mood. The cinematography handled by Kiochi Furuya exposes the glamour and the skid row of a big city neighbourhood and Lim’s own editing makes this mosaic story at least followable if not particularly involving and borderline exhausting due to its runtime and entanglement.

Some streamlining in the writing process would make “Come & Go” a more efficient film, but even convoluted as it is, it has a considerable informational value as a landscape painting of the city and the people and their destinies in it.

A Film a Week - Metro Maalai

previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Statistics say that roughly 7% of the population of Malaysia, 1.9 million people, are of Tamil origins. Community that big must be dynamic and is somewhat integrated to the society, although its cultural representation could be wider. "Metro Maalai", the debut feature written and directed by Haran Kaveri and Shobaan, revolves around a hint of romance between a Malaysian Tamil man and Indian Tamil woman in Kuala Lumpur. We got it through our Submit Your Film program.

"Metro Maalai" is structured in chapters, chronicling the romance between the anonymous guitarist (first-timer Satish Kumar) and a married woman Nithya (Punitah Shanmugam). First two chapters serve as an introduction where we meet our characters and their daily life routines. The guitarist is recovering from a painful break-up from his girlfriend, trying to land as much gigs as possible in precarious work conditions to survive the harsh economy, but also the loneliness. On the other side, we have Nithya, a bored housewife who feels lonely in her marriage with workaholic businessman Jay who does not care much about her needs and feelings. Unlike the guitarist's precarious living conditions, hers could be described as financially stable, but the detail of a caged parrot in her modern and tastefully decorated apartment serves as an on-the-nose metaphor to remind the viewers that Nithya strives for freedom she cannot achieve.

Their meet-cute moment happens around the 35 minute mark after one of his gigs in the bar and the two hit off really well over the course of dinner and a long walk along the river bank. She keeps visiting his gigs and the two spend more and more time together. But Nithya is conflicted between her cosy life and the new passion she finds in the man whose name she does not know. And her husband's job opportunity might take her far away, all the way to Germany.

The amateur approach of both writer-directors is obvious right from the start and the introductory title card where they thank the universe. The trouble is that the romance never gets past the superficial level because we never learn much more about the characters outside the most general data about their cultures and class affiliations. Unfortunately, the duo does not get deep enough into it to make something out of it, so the motivation of the female character is shaky at best. In the end she comes out as yet another woman who does not know what she wants in life, and he as a victim of her hesitancy.

Acting is probably the best thing in the film, since Kumar is quite natural in his role (as it can be the case with non-professional actors), and Shanmugam works her best with a roughly drawn character, usually avoiding the contraptions of over-acting. The two even show some chemistry, which is a success in a screenplay that plays too safe from page one on.

The directing solutions also seem a bit random, and they rarely work, which is obvious with the succession of hand-held and static shots. Fortunately, the duo was lucky enough to hit the right tone and emotion at certain places, like when they employ abrupt cuts, for which the editor Gogularaajan Rajendran should be commended, in the scene of the couple's first dinner together and the subsequent scene of their walk filmed in one long take, giving the sense of real time and channelling the energy of Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise".

The cinematography by David Yanez can be attractive, especially in some of the aerial shots of urban vistas, but those situational shots are few and far between. Kaber Vasuki's music, combining the acoustic guitar occasionally with electronic beat is not problematic per se, but is overused throughout the film, while the sound design is so obviously artificial that it seems completely fake, making "Metro Maalai" more a rough sketch than a proper movie experience.