Writing in the second issue of the Southeast Asian film magazine MARG1N, Singaporean wunderkind Yeo Siew Hua lamented the incongruence between filmic and lived reality, averring that insofar as “the acceleration of renewal surpasses the cementation of memory and identity,” what is eventually captured onscreen resembles “not so much a document of the present but an archive of the past.” In the context of revisiting — some seven years later — his second feature, A Land Imagined (2018), these words pronounced not so much prescience as they did hindsight: even as the film’s protagonist, the sullen detective Lok (Peter Yu), sails past a reclaimed beach and surveys the mounds of sand in the background, his prevailing thoughts, one imagines, return to the fate of the missing worker whose absence he has been tasked with investigating. Though it concludes on a somewhat cryptic note, with a scene of moving, tactile bodies steeped in egalitarian symbolism, A Land Imagined fundamentally sought to interrogate, if not redefine, the arbiters behind this imagination; if the faceless bureaucrats planning the island-city’s future weren’t to hold complete sway over the process, some other group or individual would have to join in meaningfully.
Much like Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, who declared poetry “a luxury we cannot afford,” Yeo prefaces his essay with its bold titular proposition: “there is no future in nostalgia.” Tautological at first glance but tinged with no little irony, the statement morbidly ascribes an empty valuation to nostalgia as a signifier twice removed, both from any meaningful action in the present and from any meaningful way of thinking about the time to come. Much can be made of this. With respect, foremost, to the erstwhile distinction between document and archive, do our modes of recording transform irreversibly over time, such that a document only traverses the present and an archive only what already has been traversed? Must this transformation proceed in tandem with technological movement? We could, in addition, invert the proposition to ask if there is no nostalgia in the future: across an increasingly digital landscape marked by digitized forms of representation, would remembrance and history reside solely within obsolete analog media, or are the pittances of human sentiment spread throughout the virtual realm, in flattened and homogenous surfaces on which individual avatars dwell only in name?
These lines of inquiry, speculative they may be, are ripe for philosophical picking, and Yeo — no stranger to philosophy — has often taken the abstract as a starting point for his divinations into the Singaporean soul. His first feature, the low-budget, rarely-screened In the House of Straw (2009), loosely adopted the fabulistic plot of “The Three Little Pigs” into an amorphous and keenly bewildering parable of youth and conformity in which three housemates exchange their identities, both conversationally and literally, among themselves. Released in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the film channeled anxieties both personal and societal, its blend of convoluted metaphysical verbiage and amateurish mise en scène reflecting a clumsy if earnest attempt to articulate the tensions of modernity: between flux and continuity, layman and professional, experimentation and orthodoxy. A Land Imagined, considerably more polished in execution but retaining its filmmaker’s penchant for mystery, flirted with a similar exchange or doubling of identities between the insomniac detective and his equally sleepless subject, whose waking moments, as with their dreams, encircle and intertwine down an irresolute rabbit hole. Again, Yeo’s obsessions litter his filmic substrata, demanding of the viewer less a conclusive apprehension of their working ideas (capital, migrant labor, the flimsiness of national identity etc.) than they do a cool appreciation of their contextual import.
Having thus precipitated (in part) a new wave for Singapore’s national cinema, especially among its more topical and aesthetically attuned variants, Yeo has since scaled up his ambitions and, enlisting the acclaim from A Land Imagined, returns to contemplate the lives of ordinary Singaporeans with Stranger Eyes. Notably the first Singaporean film to play in competition at Venice and boasting a majority-Taiwanese cast, Stranger Eyes is materially a work of co-production, funded like many of its ilk by a wide corpus of producers and fêted internationally as a potent indictment of urban dystopia uniquely Singaporean. (Yeo himself is based in Buenos Aires.) It is also a statement on co-production, at least on paper. Seeing another in a society is an undeniably intersubjective act, and the multiplicity of social gazes suggests intensive production, not just of individual performances and subjectivities, but also of relational and iterative ones. The conceit, therefore, that overdetermines the film but largely underdevelops its plot is one of mutual surveillance; following closely behind are the twin specters of voyeurism and exhibitionism, perpetrator and victim, seeing and being seen.
Stranger Eyes begins with a riff on Michael Haneke’s Caché: a young couple, Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna), are examining home-video footage in a bid to find their missing child when an unmarked series of DVDs is slid under their door. Unsuccessful in their search and unable to discern the motivation behind the DVDs, which feature similarly candid family moments (albeit shot unknowingly), they turn to the police, who are of little help in cracking the case. “Traditional mediums. Still the best. Untraceable,” remarks the officer, before wryly back-pedaling when asked about the copies he’s made of the discs: “Traditional mediums… you can’t trust them.” A pointed sentence in an otherwise oblique script, this observation also delineates the point where Stranger Eyes and Caché diverge. Where trust and traceability form the cornerstones of modern society’s uneasy dialectic, Haneke’s film explores the implications of this dialectic for bourgeois morality, setting Georges (Daniel Auteuil) on a downward trajectory as he confronts long-repressed guilt over a childhood incident. In contrast, Yeo’s critique of moral reason firmly embeds itself in a skin-deep web of exposés and contrivances just as it loosely lays claim to the state of national surveillance culture.
These contrivances run aplenty in a headless ouroboros of a narrative which flounders almost as soon as the perpetrator behind the DVDs is introduced. Undertaken by veteran Lee Kang-sheng (whose countenance of seasoned brooding nullifies all need for explicating interiority), the role of Wu, a supermarket manager living right across Junyang and Peiying’s apartment unit, is a timorous blank slate which Yeo pads with elements of growing incredulity. Wu, it is implied, has observed the comings and goings of the unhappy neighboring family for some time and, upon sighting Junyang flirting with one of his subordinates, has taken to fueling his voyeuristic habit. Or maybe it was only after the disappearance of little Bo (Anya Chow), the couple’s baby daughter, that Wu’s pre-existing fixation on the lives of others was grafted onto their own. His own loneliness is largely trivial, reduced (until a late-act sudden reveal) to such tepid signifiers as the languid and plaintive expressions he emotes — clearly imitative of Lee’s long-standing collaborations with Tsai Ming-liang — and the equally hyper-stylized images he captures; a steamy threesome scene, tonally removed from the wider film and excised for its local release, attests to the flamboyant pretensions underpinning its direction. For most of Stranger Eyes’ runtime, people look at one another, directly or indirectly, with little else to know, think, or say.
More concerning, however, is how shockingly little Yeo has to offer on the question of seeing. While ostensibly just as immersed in the particularities of Singaporean society as A Land Imagined was, Stranger Eyes is blind — or at least indifferent — to their constitutive experiences beyond the inchoate depictions of genre stereotypes. Lonely hearts and pixie cuts, much as Wong Kar-wai romanticized them, serve here as mere endearments in a moodboard of affects that neglects to entertain psychology, and having revealed the infidelity of both husband and wife, they settle numbly into the background, in anticipation of more melodramatic scenarios. Though Celia Mattison, reviewing for MUBI Notebook, astutely notes the similarity between Stranger Eyes and Caché in how their male leads are “terrified […] of any introspection” whatsoever, she misses the point by overstating the degree to which the same digital analog “manifests the parental guilt that Junyang is unable, or unwilling, to feel.” There is little to these images, precisely because the film glosses straight over them in its bid to conjure all other manner of personal and familial dysfunction.
As a summation of sorts of its director’s existing oeuvre, Stranger Eyes therefore betrays the awkward but open-eyed curiosity that shaped its predecessors, staging a lazily derivative interpretation of everything paranoid (from money shots of CCTVs to a Rear Window-esque review of Singapore’s urban housing) and sewing together its many concurrent threads with the evasiveness of an oversized kris. The stilted acting of its young leads, who are awash in the torpor of their misery, presents a tentative response to our aforementioned proposition: nostalgia in the age of mobile phones and mediated screens is as glossy as a dead fish-eye, leveled from inquisitive character study and into insouciant surface critique of our screen-dependent societies. Likewise, we might hazard a resolution to the document/archive conundrum in gleaning from the film an interplay of both mediums. Stranger Eyes is as much a document of tired, clichéd sensibilities as it touts an archivist’s approach to contemporary ills. Its title harbors a fair bit of ambiguity: the eyes of a stranger seeing the world anew, or eyes stranger than those of a human and consequently (like the city’s cameras) more present and powerful. In both cases, the Mandarin connotations impart a certain heft, whether as the “silent witness” the archivist embodies or as the Book of Revelation the documentarian inaugurates. In both cases, what is hidden is uncovered, but little is seen.
DIRECTOR: ddd; CAST: Wu Chien-Ho, Lee Kang-sheng, Anicca Panna, Vera Chen; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; IN THEATERS: August 29; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 6 min.
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