There is a good deal of sentimental value, both real and inflated, in Michael Kam’s The Old Man and His Car, most glaringly clued in by its titular reference to Hemingway. Sentiment and simplicity are a kindred pair, Kam seems to say, as his protagonists lumber and stagnate across the lightly tinged streetscapes of the unceasingly nostalgic Singapore. The old man, Hock (Lim Kay Tong), wears a tired, wearily ironic countenance, fraught with sadness and no little disdain. His car, a sedan of the Mercedes-Benz stock, moves along more reliably than its owner, its coat of champagne paint sleekly plastered over a hunk of metal and age. Both are weathered from memories: infused with painful, autobiographical immediacy, Kam’s debut feature offers a sincere meditation on the possible inner life of an older generation beset by the unnerving, unmoved tides of change.
It’s certainly an unabashedly melodramatic feature, although Kam quietly instills in his mise-en-scène the moving furnishings of grace. Widowed by an ailing wife and left alone in his one-room apartment, Hock is a shell of a former, equally reticent self — a coach and teacher in a long-demolished primary school — who nonetheless persists in holding on. As he prepares to sell the car and home, bound for his son’s abode in Canada, things go south. The car won’t be sold; a gay and vivacious prospective buyer, Junie (played by transgender actress Kristin Tiara), has latched herself onto it, but Hock resists, motivated less by any conservative worldview than he is by a withering yet dogged ego. His bespectacled, wiry frame tells us all we need to know: this English-educated family man, forged in the reliable crucible of nation-building, now clings onto an empty ideal, a dream that never arrived. Though songs in dreamy Hokkien percolate from the old radio, the film’s imago of modern Singapore is an unsettled walking contradiction, some time between the fake Nokia ringtones overlaid onto Hock’s smartphone and the sepia accentuations of the sleek urban expressways.
The broad humanist strokes of The Old Man and His Car might register as an ideological cop-out among its ilk, whose convenient heartland signifiers have all but inundated independent feeling. In the film’s case, however, their import genuinely betrays a slight, quivering emotion. Hock and Junie, in its penultimate sequences, stage a dramaturgical showdown between two lost and fragile souls that wells up in a display of much-deserved pathos. Hock’s past, his turbulent relationships, his recalcitrant character: all these briefly come to light, less in Kam’s sketchy use of real-life Super 8 (featuring the director’s own family) and more from the old man’s gentle reckoning with the shared struggles of others. Where Woo Yen Yen and Colin Goh’s Singapore Dreaming had, some two decades prior, topped the box office with its grappling of the everyday man’s difficult aspirations and pipe dreams, The Old Man and His Car approaches the subject more subdued and with a dulled hindsight. The strain of loneliness and language gulfs is at once wry and wistful; and, in a place where cars are owned up to 10 years at a time, subject to both rust and renewal, one can both yearn to remember and to forget.
Published as part of Singapore International Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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