This camera position seems to be justified at the beginning of the film as the hero, Shin-nosuke, notices Oyu in the garden. He is looking at her, in admiration; he follows her—as the camera stays following behind him. Hence, this peculiar position seems to be a natural choice. Indeed, this semi-POV strategy is so meticulously calculated that we see (with him) Oyu, but not Shizu, her younger sister and the woman he was to meet that day for a matchmaking session, who somehow remains hidden behind somebody else for most of the sequence.

But very soon, the film reveals that concentrating on the backs is its visual strategy, even its theme, so much so that the semi-POV at the beginning was in part just a set-up for the audience to accept this style. On one very hot and sunny afternoon, Shin-nosuke encounters Oyu on the street of Osaka, struck by the heat and falling ill. He helps her to a house he know nearby, supporting her from her back. In the evening, as he remains at her bedside, he sees her sleeping and the desires within him is aroused. To suppress this forbidden desire, he turns his back to Oyu. Behind him, Oyu, who was indeed already awake, stares at his back, and she too turns her back.

Thus, Mizoguchi’s film reveals its dramatic structure, and its physical as well as visual scheme—it is a drama of three people, each of them forced to suppress his or her desire and emotion, unable to face the other two, even though they genuinely care for each other. It is their very goodness and naivety that prevent them to be honest, and since they are indeed so naively honest, they cannot face each other. Hence, all they can do is to turn their back to each other, as well as to the camera.

Shin-nosuke loves Oyu, but she is a widow, he cannot jeopardize her life. Besides, he is supposed to marry Shizu. Oyu is aware of his love, but because she is a widow, she knows that marrying her instead of Shizu would destroy Shin-nosuke’s social status (she knows better about such conformist conservative restrictions). Shizu, who loves both Shin-nosuke and her sister, follows her moral discipline of self-sacrifice and is determined to keep them together at her own cost, so that they can love each other and remain a “happy family.”

Thus, Mizoguchi’s film becomes about hypocrisy and disguise and, therefore, a film about faces that cannot be exposed. Because of their own sincerity and the incapacity of hiding their feelings, they are doomed, entrapped to remain in that physical position.

Entrapment is of course among Mizoguchi’s favorite themes; being trapped in social roles, social values, and social structures. In his pre-war mature phase, he often expressed the suppressed emotions of being entrapped by choosing to avoid directly depicting them.

Take The 47 Ronin for instance, in which the ‘hero’ Oishi, is always shown in long shots, his facial expression always deadpan, because individual desires have to be ignored in the formalistic universe of bureaucratic samurais. The Confucian moral code prevails; humans are mere representations of family honor. Hence Mizoguchi’s camera there also often remains on the back of the characters, showing the family insignias printed on their backs, instead of showing their faces. In The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, many would have noticed that even until the end of the film, they still cannot recognize the heroine’s face (no wonder, since the film barely shows her face). This happens in Oyu-Sama too, because the characters’ emotions are suppressed, need to be hidden, and so they literally turn their backs.

Still, there are also quite obvious stylistic features in Oyu-Sama that distinguishes this post-war Mizoguchi from his pre-war mature period, the first peak of his career spanning from The Sisters of Gion to The 47 Ronin (culminating with this nearly 4 hours, two parts epic released on the day Japan entered in war with the US). The pre-war Mizoguchi often preferred to use cinema as an observing art form, registering human behaviors in their full ambiguity, while the camera refusing to identify with the characters’ emotion, except for some very rare pivotal crucial moments (such as the sudden introduction of camera movements in the otherwise static The 47 Ronin when the camera makes circular movements around Takamine Mieko, or the sudden outburst of anger from Yamada Isuzu at the end of The Sisters of Gion).

After several years of struggling to adapt himself to post-war Japan, when he was perhaps too self-conscious that he was an old-fashioned, maybe rather misogynist (to the point of attempting to make three ‘feminist’ films), and not-so-highly educated ‘craftsman,’ Mizoguchi joined the Daiei studio and there met the cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa. Generally heralded for their collaboration in Ugetsu, Oyu-Sama was their first film together. Miyagawa was known for his bold and elaborate, yet spontaneous lighting style Kurosawa’s Rashomon (using mirrors instead of white reflection boards to enhance the contrasts of sunbeams coming through the woods quickly comes to mind). At the same time, he forced Mizoguchi to introduce elaborate choreography in his mise-en-scene, but also gave Mizoguchi the freedom of using the cinematic medium as a plastic art form, through which he can construct a more direct connection to the emotions that, though not directly appearing on the surface, are still definitely there within the characters. This allowed Mizoguchi to venture into more subtle, complex psychological dramas—a prime example being Oyu-Sama.

The precision of Miyagawa’s shots, of Mizoguchi’s placement of the characters within the shots, their choices of frame size, the proximity and the distance from the camera, as well as how to paint the frame with various level of lights and shades,became more important, not only to record the behaviors of the characters, but also to express what cannot be directly seen through the designing of the shots. Shin-nosuke marries Shizu, convinced by Oyu that by marrying her beloved sister, he can continue to see Oyu, the woman he is really in love with, to remain close to her as ‘a sibling’. On the wedding night, Shizu keeps turning her back to him, and confesses her reasons for accepting the marriage. The camera almost always stays on her back or her profile, but never entirely faces her. Nevertheless, in an elaborately designed long take, the camera goes so close to her, follows her in proximity as she is continuously followed by Shin-nosuke, sitting in one room, standing up, crossing a hallway, entering another room, where now Shin-nosuke has to turn his back to her (and both of them to the camera).

The proximity to the unseen emotions, the directorial precision that enables that, and the question of form, are indeed critical to Mizoguchi’s structuring of Oyu-Sama, since essentially, it is a story in which nothing happens in direct terms, therefore there is nothing to be seen directly.

In other words, it depicts a universe (the upper-class Osaka merchants) where nothing happens directly—another huge leap from Mizoguchi’s previous films in which his camera merely observed what happens and what the characters do – it is only through their actions that we are introduced to their dilemmas and suppressed emotions (maybe with an enormous exception of The 47 Ronin in which, too, everything happens solely in people’s mind or behind the thick curtains of politics, structured as a series of fragmented moral/political discussions).

Indeed, it is not only that this universe of the upper class functions solely through pertinent insinuations smuggled in gossips and casual conversations, the main characters, as good-willing and sincere as they themselves are in their struggles for the happiness of each other, also are unable to do anything directly, or even to say anything directly—as being too honest would immediately shatter their fragile artificial euphemistic illusion of pure love (and doomed to be mistaken as perverse).  Essentially, everything happens in their minds, expressed through what they can never directly say, or show. Everything must be hidden beneath their backs, the only part of their bodies that they can expose to the camera.

It is only in the epilogue, two years after the main portion of the story, that something happens – here, at first glance, Mizoguchi seems to have returned to his customary style of observational realism. Yet, one can quickly recognize that here too, Mizoguchi’s realism has become meticulously controlled and choreographed. The train going back and forth in the background, for instance, reveals how calculated each movement is in this sequence. Mizoguchi also chooses many actions important for plot information to be hidden, only glimpsed at, behind doors, windows, or the laundry hung in the garden.

Even here, important things have already happened therefore not to be seen: abandoned by Oyu, Shin-nosuke and Shizu have moved to Tokyo, and they became really man and wife, she is now pregnant. We are provided no explanation about Shin-nosuke’s economical downfall – he is now living in a rented old shack in the outskirts of Tokyo. He has lost his business of prized antiques and has become a merchant of old second-hand daily use objects. We are also not told how he finally convinced Shizu to become his real wife, nor how Shizu finally accepted her own desire and began loving her husband as a man.

The prevailing understanding of the history of cinema as an art of registering the human world in all its ambiguity, in film criticism terms defined by Andre Bazin and his theory of “realism”, is that Italian post-war neo-realism was a crucial rupture for cinema to reach its fundament. I would like to argue that the rupture from controlled environments to be shot mainly in studios, therefore the need to incorporate certain elements of artificiality, was already happening in the mid to late thirties, not in Europe but in Japan, with Kenji Mizoguchi as its chief engineer (not also to forget his peers such as Tomu Uchida, Hiroshi Shimizu, Sadao Yamanaka, etc. And this is not to discredit in any way the artistry of Roberto Rossellini, Visconti, and so forth; these pre-war Japanese films were rarely shown abroad).

With the stylistic boldness he explored starting with Osaka Elegy, already reaching perfection with the following Sisters of Gion, Mizoguchi had achieved the essential realism of cinema as an art form of registering human behavior. His continuous challenges reached its peak with The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, indeed stylistically already so close to the top-notch avant-garde films of the post-war or post-nouvelle vague cinema in challenging the form of cinema itself to its limit. Notice for instance the use of sound in this generally considered Mizoguchi’s pre-war masterpiece and his refusal of a conventional score, scoring the film mostly with incidental sounds and music played within the scene or heard in the distance, or the way he keeps long static shots, avoiding conventional close-ups to enhance dramatic moment, indeed the bold choice of almost never showing the heroine’s face. Even Antonioni was never that bold in these sorts of experiments. Even Bergman was never so boldly existentialist.

Or The 47 Ronin in which everything is presented as fragments of the complex reality of political intrigues and moral codes, in which what were happening are never communicated directly on screen, but always guessed through what the protagonists say about the reality – the only way to express a social system as a whole.

With Oyu-Sama, Mizoguchi not only returned to what he could do the best, the continuation to what he had explored; he also entered into another dimension of his art – a desire of perfection of the form of cinema, combining cinema as an art of registering the complexity of humanity, and cinema as an audio-visual plastic art, a sculpture of time, space, and light carved with human emotions.

Using a psychodrama of manners by Jun-ichiro Tanizaki as its platform, Mizoguchi started a new adventure in his cinematography with Oyu-Sama.

Tanizaki’s universe, filled with traditional and conventional details and depicting an upper class in which the matters of taste were of the highest importance, was indeed ideal for Mizoguchi at this point, for at this point his ambition was not only to make good emotional films, his honest depiction of how he sees the human society. Now, with Miyagawa, his ambition was also to make his cinema a perfect Japanese art form, equivalents of antique art pieces, paintings or tea objects, porcelains, etc. that he himself became an ardent collector around this time—in which tradition, innovation, simplicity and innovation, the matters of good taste, opens the viewer’s mind to philosophical meditation.

And all of that, without losing the realistic edge that he always was known for.

In that context, let us also not forget that Oyu-Sama marks also his first collaboration with Fumio Hayasaka the composer. Here the musical score itself is still maybe conventional film scoring, but minimal, reserved, coming in only when it’s absolutely necessary, not explaining or filling up the absence of direct emotional expressions, but underscoring with precision. As with the camera, the precision of the cinematic form is already established with the sound. As for what they would do in the future, like the almost total absence of themes and melodies in Crucified Lovers, with elaborate use of Japanese traditional instruments, in Oyu-sama, we may already have a glimpse of that musical adventure.

1.     Two Doors 

All the seats were occupied at the premiere of Two Doors for the distribution committee held on June 14 2012. When the documentary was nearing the end, a viewer in the back seat began to sob. It resonated in sync with another woman’s painful scream coming from the film.

“This is not even a trial. What kind of trial is this?” cries the woman presumed to be a bereaved family member of one of the Yongsan tragedy victims in court after the first trial. The scene depicts the court sentencing the six surviving protesters of the Yongsan tragedy to five to six years in prison for throwing Molotov cocktails and killing a policeman. Among six people killed, five were evictees and one was the policeman. Most viewers break into tears here out of frustration. These people, who have been evicted from their homes and have lost their loved ones, are now convicted of murder.

Two Doors cleverly combines court trial scenes and other materials carefully gathered and edited, including video recordings of the scene of the incident provided by online broadcasters such as Color TV and Sajahoo TV, footage from public TV networks, newspaper articles, and video evidence collected by the police. Many documentaries utilize library footages, but Two Doors sets itself apart from others by fully capitalizing upon them as crucial elements. This strategy makes the documentary even more intriguing by employing these images dramatically and drastically. The genre of documentary film is gaining greater importance these days, as other types of records in reality are losing strength of truth claim. Documentaries that employ a special method to reconstruct and deconstruct events are in particular expected to play an instrumental role in uncovering the truth.

The irony is that documentary films are gaining importance due to the failure of reproducible images to function properly. It is also thanks to an intricate relationship between the state and conglomerates. The recorded visual materials and their submission as evidence do not necessarily guarantee social justice. It leaves more room for documentary films to step in to claim.

New types of recorded images and sound also add to the influence of independent documentary films. CCTV’s produce recorded images around the clock; reality television replaces reality; smartphones create and store video images; and YouTube serves as a massive archive of video and audio content. The relationship between recorded materials and truth becomes more and more of a problem. Amid such floods of recorded materials, independent documentary now has growing responsibilities to make good use of such media and to overcome their limits at the same time. It is required to push the boundaries. They have to reconstruct events using transmedia method, instead of simply converting them into digital signals. They need to re-articulate the links between moving images and still images; sounds and noises; and documented evidence and testimonies. They must find radical breakthroughs for truth and social justice through the reconstruction of records.

I believe that Two Doors must be examined from two aspects: as a transmedia documentary and as a radical documentary.

2.     Transmedia Documentary

Two Doors is not the first of its kind. Aforementioned Bora (2011), which “first began by recording on-site health management practices for factory workers over the period of a year,” was also completed by “reconstructing” different video records. At first glance, this new category of transmedia documentary seems to contradict with the longstanding functions of documentary: rendering reality through filmmaking techniques, documenting different aspects of reality, and featuring people’s passion for community. Transmedia documentary spends more time in the editing room than shooting sites for instance.

However, this contradiction is inevitably derived from the need to respond to today’s media sphere entangled in digital images. Within this complicated contradiction, the belief in the possibility of pure recording is naivety. A transmedia documentary is mostly composed of existing images and sounds. It appears not so much removed from experimental fictional works taking advantage of found films and footage, but a transmedia documentary has a stronger tendency to remain close to reality than experimental narrative. Also, compared to meta-documentaries or self-reflexive documentaries, it does not spend as much energy on probing the specificities of media.

When Two Doors was played during the Critical Cinema even held as part of the Trans Asia Screen Culture Academy in May 2012, Directors Kim Il-lan and Hong Ji-yu mentioned that they were surprised to discover the many similarities between the footage from Color TV (alternative internet TV) and video evidence collected by the police. This mirrors how violent and fierce the clash between the police and the evictees must have been. It also points out the truth value of visual evidence are dependent upon not purely on the contents but  the context. Two Doors as a transmedia documentary places significance on the reconstruction of different records of the incident, rather than on offering criticism or comments. Reflections of lawyers (Yongguk GWON and Hyeongtae KIM) who were involved in the incident then and activist Jin PARK of the Pan-National Committee for the Yongsan Disaster are highly significant in this sense.

There is an obvious reason as to why Two Doors incorporates records of different sources into its context. The watchtower was burned down, the Namildang building was demolished, the surviving victims were sentenced to prison terms, and autopsies were performed without approval from family members. Prosecutor Byeongdu JEONG of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office, who received protests for sending the bodies of the deceased to the National Forensic Service on the day of the crackdown without seeking prior approval from the bereaved, said during an on-site interview that the details of their death would be identified once the bodies are “fully dismantled”. The prosecution refused to disclose 3,000 pages of its investigation records believed to support the use of excessive force. In lieu of video-recording the sites of the incident or interviewing victims, the documentary concentrates on interpreting, reinterpreting, deconstructing, editing, and reconstructing existing images; contradicting preceding claims through texts, subtitles, and white noise; and encourages viewers to infer what the missing 3,000 pages must implicate. The two co-directors of the film unfold the story like a private detective in a thriller, while also preserving the compelling traits of a factual work of art. What really happened on January 20, 2009? To respond to the question, the co-directors screen, select, combine, and add materials of different sources. The most striking feature of this documentary is its redefinition of perpetrators and victims.

While this film provides explanations on how victims were branded as perpetrators and sentenced to jail terms by the prosecution – another development tragic enough to bring back the wailing souls of the deceased, it offers the chance for viewers to reversely look at the situation. Riot police and the SWAT team that were ordered by the authorities to commit such violence appear to have also been victimized by high-ranking officials. The clue lies in the” two doors” stated in the title. This time, those who were supposedly assailants prove themselves to be victims.

The SWAT team was not even told which of the two doors on the top floor led to a storage and to the rooftop. The members were only shown an hour-long video of Namildang and the surrounding district before breaking into the building. Based on video footage provided by Color TV and Sajahoo TV and video evidence of the police, the SWAT team seems to have been far from well informed. The container box issue also raised a heated debate in court. According to witnesses, the original plan was to move in the policemen using two container boxes, but only one was used because the crane driver suddenly disappeared. It sounds like a grotesque farce. A police operation in a blockbuster film appears more plausible than this.

What makes this operation grotesque has to do with its scale. The SWAT team, trained for high-risk anti-terrorism operations, was sent in only 25 hours after the protesters first occupied the rooftop watchtower, but the team members were not given sufficient information required to ensure safety of both sides. The operation was too hastily launched that they failed to secure container boxes originally needed. Soon, the rooftop of Namildang turns into a living hell engulfed in flames and toxic gases. Both the SWAT team and the protesters are victimized by state-led violence. The film continues to take unexpected turns until the voice of activist Jin PARK is heard; the truth, buried when evictees were unjustly held responsible for the incident and the death of the policeman, will see the light of day when the policemen that took part in the crackdown finally muster their courage to reveal what really happened and heal the past wounds.

However, this film does not aim to blur the boundary between assailants and victims. It points to the state as the true perpetrator responsible for creating the aforementioned hell and stresses that the low-ranking policemen sent in for the raid were also victims, not beasts that guard the hell. Interviews included in the film touch upon different perspectives. For some, it is beyond deplorable that six people died only 25 hours after the sit-in started. Lawyers who represented the surviving protesters question why the police made no effort to settle the matter through talks before taking such severe measures. The police argue that the protesters were unwilling to enter talks. In fact, a “state of emergency” was created, similar to that resulting from an act of terrorism or war, instead of an attempt to negotiate. Evictees were then handled in accordance with this “state of emergency” and held responsible for the occurrence of the tragedy. This is a typical example of state-led violence. Two Doors tries to bring attention to this state-led violence. It guides us to the entrance of a living hell created by the state and landowners.

Just then, the film delivers a statement that contradicts its nature as a documentary. It comes from PARK Seong-hun, a video journalist of Color TV who managed to video-record the day’s incident. In PARK’s opinion, it is not important whether decisive images have been captured and preserved; the focus should be placed on the fact that citizens were forcibly suppressed by their own government while asserting their rights. The government took wrong steps, even under the assumption that the protesters were making unreasonable demands.

 PARK’s last remark that “video tapes” are, in fact, not quite necessary, when the documentary keeps exploring the traces of the incident mainly by using video footage, verbally exposes the plain truth of the Yongsan tragedy and testifies to acts of violence committed by the authorities, the intellectuals, the legal system, and the haves. This was made possible by the solid, elaborate reconstruction of events throughout the film. Two Doors offers access to the ehics to viewers at this moment of contradiction.

Bomba films vanished after 1972 only to emerge in various forms: the “wet look”film that saw the contours of the female breast through a wet white camison or female undergarment; the “daring film,” so-called because those who exposed their breasts through the wet white camison were underaged women; at the height of the political and economic crisis of the Marcoses, the “pene film” or penetration film that showed mostly underaged Amerasian or offspring of American servicemen and Filipina sex workers, doing sex films with inserted penetration scenes; during Corazon Aquino’s era, the “ST film” or sex-trip film that showed kolehiyalas, or convent-schooled women, doing prim-and-proper sex; in Fidel Ramos’ era, the “tt film” or titillating film that allowed for split-second exposure of the vagina and the penis of actors; and in former actor Joseph Estrada’s era, the “pp film” or private parts film that allowed a more liberal exposure of the actors’ sex parts.

During the time of Gloria Arroyo, the annual film output experienced a sudden decline:  from an all-time high of 200 films a year to just 36 films.  It is estimated that 60 percent of the film output, however, were bomba films. In 2004, two film-related events happened. First, the largest cineplex in the country, SM cinemas, that controlled 60 percent of number of movie houses, decided not to show R-18 or for adults only films. As the bomba films were R-18 films, it caused the decline and eventual disappearance of the bomba film genre. Second, the indie film movement started in the mid-2000, with the production and success of Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005) and the underground Duda (Doubt, 2003) by Chris Pablo. These were digital films that broke the dominance, at least in terms of film output, by the big studios. The bomba film genre did not die – only the heterosexual content did.  What took over were the gay indie films.

The heterosexual bomba film called attention to the sexual and global division of Philippine labor:  feminized, sexualized, domesticated, some set in provincial and feudal mode of production (with titles such as Talong (Eggplant) and Kangkong (River Spinach) that made famous the Seiko Films as the primary bomba film producer in the 1990s), and also liberated or sexually tolerant but all within the confines of melodrama that has its own moral universe. This in turn provides the retribution for overtly liberal women and men in the bomba film. The gay indie has found a niche market in outlets in Metro Manila.  A movie theater in Robinson’s Galleria, even the University of the Philippines Film Center, is devoted to the exhibition of indie films but only gay indie cinema brings in some box-office returns. These films find distribution in the larger gay market abroad, or in the local pirated market, or even in the viral media.

Neoliberalism has remapped the landscape of the Filipino economy, from Marcos’ attempt to do a welfare state and emplaced the government in crucial industries, to the Noynoy Aquino’s PPP (public-private partnership) that transfers infrastructure responsibility into the hands of private businesses.  What has also intensified is the reliance on overseas contract work that secured 10 percent of the population working abroad and regularly increasing remittance that sustains the majority of the Philippine population. Furthermore, the new sunshine industry in the country, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has already employed 200,000 mostly young people to service the call center needs of global businesses. It is expected that by 2020, some two million Filipinos will be employed in the BPO industry and is able to generate some $20 billion income annually.

What is also happening in the Philippines is the privatization of middle-class aspirations. Now, resting on overseas contract workers (OCWs) and young BPO workers and their families are somehow enabled albeit temporal consumer citizenship that allows access to technology gadgets, virtual identities in the Internet, simulations of time-space compression, and postmodern identities, among others.  If the Philippines’ migrant work directs to the feminized labor and the laboring of women, gay cinema alludes to the further ‘queering’ of Philippine labor:  to be experienced as niche, subaltern and underground, yet modern, educated, working and capacitated.

Gay indie films have proliferated in the last decade, allowing oftentimes straight muscular young men to portray gay roles, and engage in coming out and gay sex. The morality tale of the heterosexual bomba films still pervades, but becomes even more conservative in the gay indie films. In the film narrative, while sexual explorations are possible, the price of coming out, outing and being outed is usually very tragic. In Brod (2010), the neophyte in love with a fraternity brother dies in the hazing, and the fraternity, including the lover, decides to leave his body in an isolated place. In Ang Lalake sa Parola (Man at the Lighthouse, 2007), the custodian of a lighthouse falls for a yuppie gay. The custodian leaves his girlfriend, falling for the rich gay that brings him to Manila. In the city, the custodian is alienated by the ways and friends of his lover, returns to the lighthouse and ages, recounting to others about this great love.

Gay love, therefore, is projected onto the machismo of heterosexuality. It is there, but it does not need to come out. The presence is only to be experienced in the private sphere or the simulated public sphere, as in viral media that has sites for the uploading of sex and solo videos of young Filipino men. If it does come out, it is to be experienced in the tragic mode. The trespassing subject needs to be returned to the actual morality plot of the larger society. In other words, gay indie cinema becomes a heteronormative apparatus, allowing for the proliferation of gay sexuality but also reigns back this non-heterosexual desire as lowly and within the private sphere.

Within the context of an intensifying neoliberalism in the Philippines, gay indie cinema asserts a queer private identity on the one hand, and also substantiates this identity under an economic model, i.e. market demand and niche-marketing schemes. Gay identity, lifestyles and queer sex choices become the norm for young people in the work force. Gay fashion of low-waist jeans, one-size smaller shirts, hoods, accessory, hairstyle and care of the self dominates the consumer practice of young people.  Gay lifestyle of the stereotypical gimmicks, after-office hour drinks, partying, vacation trips, and casual unsafe sex or even orgies are supposedly getting popular with the BPO workers, increasing the HIV infection rate. Strip malls catering to the services BPO workers are willing to pay for are being developed.  More successful BPO workers are promoted, becoming trainers in local and overseas offices, and are further exposed to a global consumerist queer lifestyle.

Philippine gay indie cinema has proliferated alternative images of sexuality yet has also mobilized this niche cinema for the larger heteronormative and neoliberal project of a nationalized late capitalism.  In the films, gay roles are performed by straight actors emulating gay desire for a gay niche audience. In Philippine neoliberalism, queer lifestyle dominates the privatization of consumerist experience, allowing young working people to perform a transnational desire for an even greater promise of social mobility. This pessimism is not unfounded. As in the stories in gay cinema, the desire is built up in the narrative, always already contained in a tragic self-loathing resolution. Or maybe gay cinema has already speculated a wager to the national future: amidst the permeation of a queer lifestyle and heteronormative practices in the experience of global neoliberalism, the Philippine nation can only anticipate a tragic self-loathing resolution to this national drive in the present predicament.

1. The badge is like an ID card. Without it, it’s like you don’t exist at the festival. The ticket’s another thing. Even though a director doesn’t need a ticket to his/her own film, one director from Thailand still lined up to buy a ticket to his first show.

2. A huge poster makes every small director feel warm and fuzzy.

3. BELA TARR IS LOOKING AT ME.

4. At one of the competition film screenings, I sat behind Naomi Kawase by chance, so was able to see her working in the context of a jury member. She was very cool, staying to listen to the entire Q and A. She also took lots of notes in Japanese in her festival booklet. Finally, she has two translators. One to go from Korean to English and the other from English to Japanese.

5. The Sold Out status lets you know the culture of film-going in Korea. I wasn’t too surprised by the adults, but was taken aback seeing 9th graders lining up to see everything from mainstream stuff like Seven Something (which i co-wrote the script) to my own obscure experimental film 36. This wide range of taste is something I hardly see in Thailand.

6. The day after the first screening, a horrible review of 36 appeared in the daily Hollywood Reporter. I think it’s the duty of everyone who does creative work to accept all opinions, even if it’s akin to being hit by a ten-wheel truck.

7. This is CD (Pacharin Surawatanapongs – Assistant Producer) with two laptops. Coming to a film festival isn’t all that much fun. There’s always somebody asking you to do something somewhere. I never even went to the beach, just saw it from my hotel window every morning and every night.

8. Tongdee (Soros Sukhum) asleep. Tongdee is the foreign ministry for this film. Big festivals aren’t places to mingle with film goers and other directors. They’re more like places where producers like Tongdee talk and do business. Doing that all day is like running a marathon.

9. Walking on a red carpet past thousands of people makes me feel like a little ant. I try to walk as quickly as possible. But here, the red carpet is nice because the people on both sides are audience members. When they clap, it’s like they’re telling you to walk upright with your back straight. Don’t slouch, this place belongs to you. I was quite proud. Almost cried actually.

10. In my left hand I’m carrying the New Currents Award and flowers and in my right hand I’m carrying an iphone. I asked the audience permission to take a picture because I wanted to keep this memory. I don’t know what they said, but they were sort of cheering and waving so I took the picture. My hand was shaking and I only had one chance to do it. The picture I took is the one you are looking at. It’s not very clear, a lot less clear than it is in my memory.

“I’m a Malay as much—maybe more—than I am a Filipino. We Malays are governed more by space and nature than conventional time.” - Lav Diaz, Toronto International Film Festival

“[W]ith regard to the history of my people, we don’t really have a concept of time, we just have a concept of space.” - Lav Diaz, interviewed by critic May Adadol Ingawanij, Lumen Journal

Lav Diaz’s most recent film, Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, conveys many of the cinematic tenets that have made Diaz one of the Philippines’ most praised auteurs on the international stage. Images of roads disappearing into provincial horizons, scenes of documentary realism interspersed with theatrically staged tableaux, characters facing the systemic failures of infrastructures and the individual failures of human beings—all echoes of Diaz’s body of works, these familiar traits reverberate across Florentina’s six hour narrative.

While these issues of content certainly play an important role in Diaz’s films, questions of formal innovation receive perhaps the most attention. In particular, the idea of his films’ duration, often running between six and twelve hours, becomes a common point of reference among critics’ and curators’ descriptions. Indeed, in the Lumen interview quoted above, Diaz notes that questions of time are both the most common and most tiresome inquiries he receives about his work. As the comments above suggest, conventional ideas of temporality hold little interest for the director, who aligns his work with the cyclicality of nature and the fragmented, archipelagic geography of his home country.

These ideas of space are integral to the story of Florentina Hubaldo, CTE. The film’s eponymous, tragic heroine lends both her name and her disease to the title, suggesting the two facets of her identity in constant struggle with one another: her name, which she lives in constant fear of forgetting, and her degenerative brain injury, which will ultimately destroy her memory. Told in a non-chronological style that weaves from Florentina’s subjective fantasies into the primary stories of her attempts to escape her abusive father, her daughter’s illness, and the labors of two treasure hunters, the film asks its viewers to bear witness to the abuse that Florentina’s father unleashes on her and others. Florentina’s narrative revolves around ideas of captivity, depicting both the body and its natural surroundings as prisons, thus emphasizing the role of space as a key means of organizing cinematic narrative.

Florentina tells the story of its titular heroine, a young woman living in rural Bicol, whose alcoholic, abusive father keeps her captive by tying her to her bed in their small bahay kubo and occasionally whoring her to local men. Florentina gave her daughter, Loteng, to a kind local farmer; Loteng suffers from an unexplained, painful illness, which eventually kills her. The farmer is visited by two men from Manila who have heard stories of buried treasure amid the rice fields; they spend much of the film digging.  To escape her father, Florentina periodically runs to the woods, sometimes helped by her grandfather, who also suffers at her father’s hands. Her father continually finds her and returns her to her domestic prison. Her only solace is her ongoing fantasy of the gigantes festival, an annual fiesta that involves a parade of performers in papier-mâché costumes depicting giant human figures.

Diaz’s films often have an ambivalent perspective on the wilderness settings of the Philippines, spaces whose simultaneous beauty and malice mirror his portrayal of the human beings populating them. This is particularly the case with Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, in which the wilderness becomes a kind of prison, mirroring the prison of its lead characters’ bodies. Extreme long shots of workers picking rice dwarf the human figures against the enormous, silhouetted mountains. Florentina’s constant, fruitless attempts to escape her father’s abuses show her stumbling through the trees, finding few hiding places.  The labors of the two treasure hunters become increasingly futile; their hole in the ground grows larger, while their search yields only physical exertion. The natural landscape is inescapable and unmovable, an overwhelmingly vast, timeless expanse.

The uselessness of human attempts to interfere with nature arises in the treasure hunters’ battle with a gecko, whose cries increasingly aggravate them. Against sounds of pouring rain and shovels hitting earth, the gecko’s repeated croak loops endlessly. Despite warnings that the gecko has been around for decades, implying that it would be around for decades more, one hunter succeeds in catching it. However, as the treasure hunters rest with Loteng’s adopted father, he discusses the cruelty she and Florentina have endured. The treasure hunter instinctively releases the animal. Nature might be vast and unchangeable, but it is not deliberate in its cruelty. The film reserves that trait for human beings, and the treasure hunter’s release of the gecko suggests his acknowledgment of human brutality and his unwillingness to participate in it. He releases the creature into the water, and it quickly swims away.

While the film portrays nature as a vast prison, its images of roads and waterways suggest that its expanse is not infinite. When Florentina is in the forest, she frequently stumbles; when she is on the road, she often walks or runs swiftly. The opening shot of Florentina is a common one for Diaz works. It depicts a rural road, disappearing into a horizon cramped with hills. Slowly, two figures emerge in the distance. After several minutes, they become recognizable as Florentina and her grandfather, walking with three goats. The roads are not empty; on the contrary, motorbikes, cars, and trucks speed by, indicating the simultaneous existence of two worlds. One is static, slow, and on foot; this is the world of the film’s characters. The other is dynamic and moving; this is the world that exists out of frame, whose only representatives are the blurred, noisy vehicles that pass our protagonists by, unaware and perhaps unconcerned at their existence.  The sound of the road is omnipresent. Even when off screen, the filmic audioscape includes the noise of motors, intermingling with the roosters’ crows.

The roads offer the possibility of mobility and escape, while at the same time, highlighting the hopelessness of that escape for the characters the film follows. When Florentina hallucinates her interactions with the gigantes, she stands on a drizzling, nighttime street, backlit by a streetlamp. She reaches towards the camera, and the film cuts to silent shots of the gigantes parade, as Florentina tries to grasp their passing hands. In her final hallucination, we see her on a rural road, dancing with the gigantes. The long shot begins with Loteng dancing, and in the midst of their carousing she becomes Florentina. The small parade is in constant motion, moving along a street, providing a fitting image of illusion and memory. It becomes a fusion of the two modes of imprisonment in Florentina’s life—the rural landscape her monstrous father inhabits and the injured mind that allows her the momentary consolation of fantasy.

Nature is not an enemy in the film, however; its own “road,” that of the river, becomes another means of melding two different kinds of flight, physical movement and fantasy. A small boat takes the dying, invalid Loteng down the river. Slow, sun-dappled shots of the view beneath the trees indicate the small craft’s movement. On the shore, we see versions of Loteng and Florentina standing in an embrace, watching the boat that carries Loteng pass. When Loteng passes away, a shot composed like a painting depicts Florentina sitting in the river’s flowing water, cradling her adult daughter’s body as she looks directly into the lens. The river offers nature’s own means of escape, and the only access the characters have to it is death.

Florentina’s inability to escape her own, destroyed body is the film’s primary depiction of captivity, her disease imprisoning her with hallucinations and memory loss. Her disease provides fantasies of escape, as described above, and dismantles conventional temporality through its erasure of Florentina’s biography. Florentina spends much of the film repeating her biography—her name, her birth in Antipolo, her family’s move to Bicol, her mother’s unexplained death, her father’s subsequent transformation. Her disease has chipped away at her grasp on objective reality, and her repetition of her biography is her only means of keeping hold of her identity.

The film transitions from the objective perspective of the characters’ world to Florentina’s own, subjective hallucinations. Rather than showing her and her grandfather’s beatings, we see the outside of the house as the relentless soundtrack of screams, blows, and sobs provides an audio portrait of horrific violence. In contrast, the scenes of fantasy are utterly silent. Towards the end of the film, we see the shots of Florentina’s subjective hallucinations from an objective perspective. Rather than looking lovely in a dress as she reaches for the gigantes in silence, as she appeared in prior scenes, we see that as she reaches out, she is covered in blood, her face a mass of bruises as she whimpers. It is the night that Loteng’s adopted father described earlier in the film, when Florentina would stumble across his house and ask him to take her daughter, out of fear. The film ends at this primary, origin scene, her effort to provide escape, if not for herself, then for her daughter. As the viewer knows however, Loteng’s fate has already been written into her own corporeal prison. As a bloody and abused Florentina repeats her biography to the camera in the final shot, it includes full acknowledgement of her father’s monstrosity and becomes, for the first time in the film, a true account. Rather than being locked into a cycle of endless repetition, existing outside of linear time, this version of the story brings the listener, and Florentina herself, into the horrors of a present too terrible to face.

Over its six-hour narrative, Florentina Hubaldo, CTE contemplates the nature of human beings’ capacity for cruelty. Its lead characters’ fruitless struggles to escape their existence implicate the viewer, whom the final scene positions as a witness hearing Florentina’s biography-cum-confession. As the screen fades to black, the audience exits the darkened theater, liberated from their own position as spectators. While the characters are trapped in an endless cycle of violence, the viewers are free to retreat. The film’s six-hour duration heightens the contrast between cinematic diegesis and the off screen world, between audience movement and the forced stasis of the characters on screen. The day trip to the cinema does not fill empty time, but instead, ensnares the viewer in a world whose violence outweighs its beauty.  Exiting the theater becomes a moment of disentanglement from that cycle, a moment built on the privilege of mobility.

Paternal Power and the Straits Chinese Family

Once tightly held together by these three authoritarian qualities, the Wee family now threatens to fall apart under the pressure of repressed truths that can no longer be contained as secrets. As Bak Chuan looks for the truth surrounding his own mysterious death, he gradually discovers—or perhaps comes to accept what he has always known—that his family’s personal struggles to keep up the appearance of wealth, power, and respectability have demanded unbearable levels of self-denial that have led to resentment, estrangement, and profound unhappiness. A highly structured and hierarchical set of rules, expectations, and obligations governs this upper-class Straits Chinese family of anglophiles, whose members shield themselves behind crisply enunciated self-deprecatory wit and bury their pain under heaps of stiff-upper-lip irony.

These rules, expectations, and obligations were animated by the enormous paternal power that Bak Chuan wielded in life. His office, opulent and majestic, resembles a columned throne room. Erected behind his throne is a grotesquely proportioned golden pineapple statue, a phallic symbol of his potency that blends into, yet grates against, the mansion’s suitably baroque peranakan aesthetic. Eldest son Teck Liang, forced to take charge of his father’s company, describes the expanding and conglomerating pineapple business as “just an extension of Pa’s massive ego and his need to control everything, including this family”. Indeed, Bak Chuan was constantly worried about his sons’ ability to live up to his legacy: “I ran a tight ship. And I expect the two of you to do the same… I’ve mapped out the company’s future… I spent my whole life building this thing. The two of you had better not screw it up!”

As an invisible presence no longer in direct control of worldly affairs, Bak Chuan’s ghost continues vainly—and in vain—to assert his self-importance, interrupting his only daughter Pei Shan’s mealtime prayer, “Father, we thank you for this meal”, with a characteristically presumptuous acknowledgement, “You’re welcome Shan”. Self-absorbed, arrogant, and contemptuous, Bak Chuan is a classic narcissist, blaming everyone but himself and expecting total obedience to his tyrannical will with absolutely no regard for the feelings and needs of others, since their function is merely to augment his ego.

One of his first lines in the film is, “Just do as you’re told!” Later, he snarls, “Don’t you question my judgement. I built this company out of nothing. Nothing, you hear? I think that makes me pretty damned qualified to decide what’s best for the future!” Like other tyrants, Bak Chuan sees himself as a benevolent despot, doing what he does to others not to inflate his own ego but for their own good and for the greater good of the family. Flustered about the mess in his office in the opening moments of the film, he immediately acts to restore perfect order, pushing back into place a book on Confucius displayed on his bookshelf between the biographies of Lee Kuan Yew and Mao Zedong. In doing so, he perfectly aligns himself with the transfigured glory of the fathers of authoritarianism: the arch-purveyors of political authority, cultural discipline, and social-familial order, to which individual subjectivity must be ceded.

When Bak Chuan was alive, his phallic power was near absolute, exercised in the Wee household without effective moderation by any countervailing maternal or feminine power. Instead, it was reinforced by the most dominant female figure, Bak Chuan’s wife, Siok Lin, who bears a stern countenance, perpetually furrowed brow, and erect posture, and is disdainfully intolerant of what she considers to be the foolishness of her effete children. Teck Liang reveals that it is she who “calls the shots” in the family business, and Pei Shan describes her as being “as manly as any of the directors working under her”. It is also she who—together with her husband—mounts the harshest objections to her children’s “irrational” marriage choices, unashamedly justifying these objections in racist and class-conscious terms. And it is she who assumes the phallic role immediately after her husband’s death, honouring him by suppressing a feminine inclination to cry with a manly determination to “put the house in order”.

The blue mansion, which is the physical setting for the entire story, is in many ways like the Freudian “unconscious” to which the father knowingly or unknowingly repressed all the things that have caused him shame and pain. For instance, he disavowed his two sons’ sexuality, which mocked and threatened the generative and procreative phallic power of the father: Teck Liang is a closeted homosexual and Teck Meng, who has not had sex with his wife for several years, does not have any children. As a boy, Teck Liang was refused the opportunity to pursue his passion as a violinist, not only to mould him into his father’s legacy as a successful businessman, but also to force him indirectly to repress his homosexuality and form a heteronormative family through which Bak Chuan’s originary phallic power may be reproduced and honoured. Teck Meng, unable to achieve libidinal fulfilment within the family that he so despises, illicitly turns to a woman from China for sexual gratification. Thus, he is unable to perpetuate his father’s power within a legitimate family structure and is, in fact, bypassed for the company’s leadership position that he craved. Yet another threat to the perpetuation of Bak Chuan’s phallic power was Pei Shan’s one true love, an Indian man from a lower socio-economic background, found in the chauvinistic eyes of her parents to be entirely unsuitable for inclusion into the Wee family. Forced to break up with him, Pei Shan has since lived the life of a virgin spinster, turning to Christianity and alcohol for comfort and distraction. By imposing a phallic order on the blue mansion to create a harmoniously hierarchical domestic space emblematic of his virility, the patriarch of the Wee family has dehumanized his children, robbing them of their happiness.

But continually threatening this phallic order—fundamentally vulnerable as much as it is powerful—has been the maternal power that is expressed ubiquitously in the building itself. Archaic, engulfing, and womblike, it consists of labyrinthine corridors, dark chambers, and hidden compartments containing secrets, sorrows, and feelings of resentment and guilt, which always threaten to return and confront. The agent of this maternal power is the ghost of Mei Yi, Teck Liang’s first wife who, in life, was constantly criticized by Bak Chuan and Siok Lin for her social status that made her not good enough for their son, for influencing her husband to give thought to his own happiness, for instigating him to question the demands of the Wee family, and—perhaps most damning of all in a patriarchal family—for bearing them a disabled grandson. Enduring constant abuse, Mei Yi was potentially the transformative feminine power in the household, until she succumbed to suicide when Bak Chuan and Siok Lin cruelly arranged for her son to be taken away and put in a home. Years later, in a confrontation between father and son, Bak Chuan tells Teck Liang, “She could have ruined you”, to which he replies, “No, Pa. You ruined us”.

The circumstances surrounding Mei Yi’s death are among the most repressed of secrets in the family. In the psychoanalytical tradition of interpreting horror films, ghosts represent a return of the repressed. Mei Yi’s ghostly return to confront Bak Chuan’s ghost with the truth culminates in a most dramatic and horrifying revelation: his direct culpability in her death. Bak Chuan insists that he cannot remember what happened that night; but Mei Yi, pointing to the very essence of repression, retorts, “You can. You just don’t want to”. In the eventual acknowledgement of this truth, guided by a feminine power that he once overwhelmed, Bak Chuan comes to terms with himself, finally freeing his family to get on with their own lives, the possibility of redemption and happiness glimpsed in the closing scene.

Social and Political Criticism

The natural homology between father and political leader (or the state itself), especially in Asian contexts, strongly encourages a reading of The Blue Mansion as not only a critique of patriarchal families but also a critical commentary on patriarchal societies and the paternalistic and hyper-masculinized states that govern them on similar terms. Through a depiction of an authoritarian and dysfunctional family, the film points to the larger tragedy of authoritarian cultures of conformity and dependency, enforced not only by an egotistical and infantilizing state but also by social peers who have internalized the language of fear, compulsion, obedience, order, and comfort. In rigid mono-cultures that demand compliance with a narrow set of national goals dictated from above, individuals who are different and have different needs and aspirations are cruelly suffocated and—if they have no means to create an alternative life elsewhere—are forced to live lives of complete self-denial and hypocrisy in order to survive.

The film also shows the folly and danger of chauvinistic attitudes that fester within society. Prejudiced perceptions of racial and class inferiority can result in needlessly unfulfilled lives of unhappiness and resentment. Although the film makes this tragically clear in the example of the Wee family, it also playfully inverts the power relations surrounding race and class. Firstly, a Hokkien-speaking funeral coordinator takes full advantage of Siok Lin’s vanity and fear of “losing face”, supplying her with expensively large funeral props to buttress her insecure ego and compensate for her dead husband’s phallic vitality, thus showing up the aristocratic foibles and foolishness of an upper-class mercantile family enslaved to its public image. Secondly, through Detective Suresh Maniam, who is assigned to investigate Bak Chuan’s death, the power relations between upper class and working class are temporarily inverted as the Indian detective speaking a thickly-accented English questions members of the family with increasing boldness: At the beginning, he expects Teck Meng to serve him coffee and, by the end, he actually interrogates Teck Meng while sitting on Bak Chuan’s throne. At one point, he says with contemptuous nonchalance, “A lot of these rich people are fucked up beneath the surface”. However, his accusatory conclusions turn out to be wildly off the mark, confirming what Mei Yi said earlier about the police being “a joke”. Ultimately, the film is complicit in presenting the “ethnic” working class as bumbling figures of slapstick and comic relief, momentarily gaining an upper hand but perpetually consigned to their inferior station.

The references to Singapore politics are tantalizingly obvious to anyone who pays any attention to the republic’s current affairs and rumours about the establishment. This is hardly surprising as the writer, Ken Kwek, is a former journalist and not new to writing political satire. For an audience, identifying the parallels between the family/corporate world in the film and the family/political world in Singapore is, in fact, one of the film’s many pleasures. References to merger, law suits, foreign journalists, racial prejudices, Confucianism, pragmatism, and even rising from the grave resonate clearly with local political rhetoric, at the heart of which has been the control of leadership succession. Even opposition politicians who sometimes launch speculative criticisms of the political establishment are lampooned in the comic figure of Detective Maniam and his fanciful yet off-the-mark accusations.

Art and Artifice

Many politically critical works of art in Singapore manage to avoid political censure and retaliation by establishing safe distances between what or who is being referenced or criticized and the art works themselves. The fragile task of reflecting difficult and dangerous truths to the powerless and the powerful is often protected by the artifice of fiction and satire. In the case of The Blue Mansion, a protective artifice is constructed using a potent combination of high production values, genre ambiguity, and a deliberate theatricality that one might describe and appreciate as camp.

The Blue Mansion is undoubtedly one of the most beautifully and inventively photographed made-in-Singapore films. The attention to aesthetic detail in the gorgeous mise-en-scène is a reflection of remarkable visual intelligence and sensitivity to genres, themes, characters, moods, and local history. By dramatically playing with light, shadow, and watery reflections cast over a predominantly blue tone, various effects are achieved, not least of which is a heavy stylistic reference to film noir.

Unified by a narrative that is basically classical in structure, the film nevertheless slips in and out of a number of different genres and styles, making it difficult and perhaps unnecessary to categorize it. Readily identified are stylistic and thematic elements of the murder-mystery detective film (complete with red herring), family melodrama, black comedy, slapstick, horror, and Shakespearean tragedy. The slippery nature of the film is also a product of its strong resonance with, and even borrowings from, other texts. Some of these are directly cited in the film, such as the biographies on Bak Chuan’s bookshelf, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Murakami’s appropriately surrealistic and alienation-themed novels. Others—such as Shakespeare’s King Lear, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and the biblical parable of the prodigal son—are not mentioned explicitly.

The heavily constructed film employs a deliberately playful and exaggerated style, defying and exceeding simple and stable categorization. Its theatricality (in large part due to the theatre backgrounds of Goei and Kwek, as well as a strong cast consisting of experienced actors of the stage) combines perfectly with a highly effective and appealing musical score. Featuring chamber music textures (scored basically for a string quintet with various solo instrumentalists), irregular meter, syncopations, dotted rhythms, sudden tempo changes, and dramatic modulations, the score is versatile in its ability to create contrasting moods and effects, and to mimic musical styles using the same basic motifs.

The ghost device also offers ample opportunities for dramatic irony, fully consonant with the film’s darkly comic tone, the revelatory narrative, and the horrific truth revealed at the end. Critics who value naturalistic depictions of everyday life will naturally tend to regard the “excesses” of The Blue Mansion as flaws, even as they praise its high production values. However, the film’s artifice, I would argue, is vital and effectively “ghostly”, not only in presenting audiences with phantasmagorical imagery that mocks and eludes the certainties of style, genre, morality, and truth as we know it, but also in the way it can enable the film—like Mei Yi’s ghost—to speak and show a deeper and therefore more confronting truth, confidently and without fear of reprisal.

The Blue Mansion DVD can be purchased here.

Image: TigerTiger Pictures

For its seventh instalment, the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (ASEAC) returned to Singapore, the location of its inaugural event in 2004. Taking as its theme “The Politics, Practices and Poetics of the Archive”, the conference organisers sought to strike a balance between social history, aesthetics and the practical experiences of film preservation, with archival professionals from Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore, Australia and Italy in attendance alongside a very healthy number of academics from around the world. Hosted in the Gallery Theatre of the National Museum, conference attendees enjoyed a number of screenings of rarely seen films alongside four days of papers and panel discussions.

Perhaps, most eagerly anticipated among the screenings was the recently restored 1953 Indonesian drama Lewat Djam Malam (After the Curfew), which was presented on the opening afternoon and preceded by a number of presentations outlining the context of the film’s production and restoration. Ekky Imanjaya of Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, highlighted the historical significance of the film—set amid the revolutionary turmoil of the immediate post-war period—and the importance of its restoration and return to public exhibition. Davide Pozzi of the Cineteca di Bologna then spoke in detail about the technical challenges involved in resurrecting films suffering from the ravages of time spent in less than ideal storage conditions in tropical climates. In its rich, clean new print, the film itself can now be seen as a remarkable piece of work, an intelligent and ambivalent account of social change at the inception of the independent Indonesia—evidence that little-known cinematic treasures produced in the region in the post-war period deserve their place in accounts of the history of world cinema, and an encouraging sign of how good decades-old reels can be made to look when the facilities, expertise and money are available to do so. Yet for every archival success story there is a corresponding tale of disaster: in a subsequent paper, Lisabona Rahman from Friends of Sinematek Indonesia estimated that around 80 Indonesian films produced in the mid-1990s no longer exist in celluloid form after the bankruptcies of their production companies in the 1997 financial crisis—a clear demonstration that archival preservation is far from “only” a matter of films dating from previous generations.

While the presentation of Lewat Djam Malam offered an example of film academics, curators and preservationists identifying common cause and working towards a well-considered goal, elsewhere in the conference a constant and ultimately unresolved tension was evident between a desire to treat prominent films as archives of social conditions and archivists’ concerns for the survival of neglected material the value of which may not be immediately obvious. That is to say that the analytical desire to locate “the poetics of the archive” in each and every act of recording or collecting sat awkwardly alongside the practical need for archivists to prioritise, select, and justify decisions to preserve material whose public recognition and commercial or artistic value may appear limited or even negligible. Plenary speaker Bliss Cua Lim of University of California, Irvine spoke eloquently of the influence archives exert over social memory, but elsewhere the interpretation of what it means to suggest that filmic artefacts play roles in the archiving of political history and social memory, and what exactly those roles might be, remained rather woolly, allowing certain superficial notions of “the archive” to proliferate. Leaving aside arguments that personal collections of pirated Hollywood DVDs or purchased Criterion Collection editions are serving significant archival purposes, it often felt as if discussions of fictional representations of historical or current events were being stretched to try to fit the archive theme. A paper about recent Thai horror films revealed the frequency with which such genre films have taken real-life events—public safety disasters, the discovery of thousands of aborted foetuses in a Bangkok temple, even the 1976 military coup—as backdrops for their narratives, but failed to convince that these highly genericised, often studio-shot films can be understood as significant archival documents of those events. (Certainly they constitute one kind of repository of cultural responses to events but it was suggested in response, are not of particular note in a genre that has, in Thailand, always involved allusion to social and historical conditions.) Rolando Tolentino of the University of the Philippines negotiated this tension much more astutely, arguing for a reading of Lino Brocka’s location-shot, “neo-realist” Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975) as a critique of Marcos-era nation-building and therefore “an archive of the conditions of possibility in an era.” And in a panel on religion and film, Arnika Fuhrmann of the University of Hong Kong subtly drew valuable conclusions as to how both fiction and non-fiction films made about the political situation in Thailand’s South have archived the “affective dimensions of citizenship” during this period, in terms of failed multiculturalism and curtailed sexual freedoms.

It was very noticeable that the vast majority of speakers attended to the archival dimensions of very recent films. With so many works of cinema in the region being originated on digital media and never being transferred to celluloid, there was much concern among the archival practitioners that filmmakers are insufficiently aware of the shortcomings and fragilities of digital storage. This is certainly something that cannot be repeated often enough. But perhaps more remarkable was the number of papers emphasising current filmmaking as an effort towards the creation of an archive of memory. In a certain sense, this is obvious: filmmaking is often enough an attempt to capture a moment of time for posterity. But it was clear that particular regional dynamics lay behind the extent of this emphasis. Khoo Gaik Cheng of the Australian National University noted that in locations such as Singapore, where the built environment is in constant flux, filmmaking plays a vital role in archiving landscape – something that was further underlined by a separate presentation of footage shot by the late Ivan Polunin in a very different Singapore of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Such attempts to archive the present appear all the more urgent now that it is widely realised just how much Southeast Asia suffers from eroded and incomplete film archives, and in many instances, the responses to this realisation have been creative and unusual: think, for example, of the efforts of Filipino director Raya Martin and his Indonesian counterpart Edwin to create silent films in place of those which have long been lost (or perhaps were never made in the first place).

The conference’s in-depth discussion of the case of Cambodia raised a comparable but even more extreme case of eroded archives—the huge, unfillable holes in the national archival record as a result of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal destruction of cultural artefacts and the people who created them—which has again created a particular dynamic in which contemporary art forms are used to imagine, recreate or substitute for archival records which do not exist. With this in mind, the conference presented Davy Chou’s film Golden Slumbers (2011), a documentary which attempts to record the story of the golden age of Cambodian cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Almost all of these films are lost—Chou recounted the unexpected discoveries of a very few prints in émigré communities in Canada and the US—and so the film resolves to tell a story of cinema in ways which circumvent the absence of concrete evidence (the films themselves) and relies instead on memory. As such, it becomes a profoundly odd film, one rich in allusion to so much more than just the films themselves, revealing, for example, much about the migrant experiences of émigrés, returnees, and foreign-born Cambodians such as Chou himself.

The notion that much current Southeast Asian filmmaking attempts to archive the past and the present simultaneously is perhaps all the more relevant given that a number of countries in the region—Thailand, Myanmar and Malaysia, most prominently—appear to be going through quite sudden and rapid processes of political upheaval in which entrenched structures of power and knowledge are being challenged. Hence there is an urgency in documenting new political processes and shifting political consciousness, to ensure that current events do not become lost to social memory, as key events in recent political history often have been. Achieving this in restrictive public spheres—which it seems fair to say all three of those named countries have—has also been a spur to aesthetic creativity, and in the cases of Malaysia and Thailand (one hopes Myanmar is on the verge of something similar), there is a sense of a vibrant chapter in film history accompanying political events. Arguably, film has become politically relevant to an extent unprecedented in recent years, and, properly preserved, will offer an archive of rapidly developing political speech. Indeed, a paper by Fiona Lee of City University of New York (CUNY) about Malaysian documentarist Amir Muhammad’s exploration of the cultural legacy of the communist “emergency” in his country provoked the interesting response of whether the techniques of articulation, which characterize an important, ground-breaking film, made as recently as 2005, might already be seen as belonging to a specific, narrow era of (film) history which has come to an end. In investigating an aspect of Malaysian political history, which for party political reasons (among others), is largely excluded from public debate, Lelaki Komunis Terakhir (The Last Communist) adopts an elusive strategy in which political figures are discussed but not shown, interview testimony comes mainly from a current generation of Malaysians, who are barely aware of the emergency, archival footage is conspicuous by its absence, and the deliberately amateurish visual style of the film is highlighted in an effort to deflect from the seriousness of its content. It would be too much to suggest that Amir’s film has become a museum piece already, but with Malaysia’s political environment seemingly opening up, his elaborate, ironic approach to representing the unrepresentable may be on the verge of becoming archaic—an outcome which, if borne out by events, Amir would presumably not regret, especially if it was deemed that his film had played even a small role in the process of liberalisation.

A concluding plenary panel summed up some of the ongoing challenges for archives in the region. Many of these will be familiar to anyone who has visited a working film archive anywhere in the world: too few resources (human and financial) trying to make sense of seemingly endless deposits; archivists’ painstaking investigations leading them to uncover valuable footage just too late to prevent its irreversible physical deterioration. But Southeast Asia’s young archives also suffer from a lack of independence, often excessively beholden to the ministers, who hold the public purse strings but fail to understand the decisions archivists make. Chalida Uabumrungjit of Thailand’s Film Archive reflected on the difficulty of persuading anyone of the importance of preserving footage of the 1942 Bangkok floods—that is, until last year’s inundation of the city, which came perilously close to the vaults of the archive itself. Clips of the footage uploaded to YouTube were viewed hundreds of thousands of times in a matter of days. Fortunately, however, a long-sought organizational restructure has recently given that particular archive a greater degree of autonomy. And there was other good news: visitors from Cambodia’s Bophana Audiovisual Research Centre demonstrated that it is becoming established as a valuable and unique repository in the region, and Clodualdo del Mundo reported that the Philippines finally has a National Film Archive on its statute books as of 2011. It is to be hoped that ASEAC’s gathering of interested parties will have helped to inspire these fledgling institutions in their forthcoming projects and long-term ambitions, and that it has further raised the profile of film archiving efforts in the region.

The seventh Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference is co-organised by the Nanyang Technological University Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information with sponsorship from the University’s Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and in association with the Asian Film Archive and the National Museum of Singapore.

Who on Earth is Lilia Cuntapay?

She’s possibly the most famous Filipino face you’ve never heard of. She’s a minor actress who has appeared in forty films and television series to date (plus a few that the Internet Movie Database might have missed). She’s one of the more outré characters I’ve met on the fringes of the Filipino movie industry—never got her name completely right, but never forgot her, either. And she’s the unlikely, bizarrely brave yet startlingly serene heroine of Antoinette Jadaone’s 2011 feature debut mockumentary Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay.

Jadaone probably takes off from the parlour game “Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon” invented in 1994 by three Albright College students, their model in turn possibly being the brilliant 1990 John Guare play of similar name (Bacon didn’t figure in it), the play in turn inspired by the true story of David Hampton (who convinced people that he was the son of Sidney Poitier), who in turn exploited—in all likeliness unknowingly—the idea first proposed by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a collection of short stories in 1929, that everyone on Earth is separated by six degrees of relationships from each other.

Jadaone gives the concept (or parlour game if you like) at most a cursory nod; the film opens with the question “Do you know Lilia Cuntapay?” with most people answering in the negative, and traces a tortuous web of relational links (but are there any other kind?) from Cuntapay to Chuck Norris, Claire Danes, and (of course) Kevin Bacon; what this network has to do with Cuntapay herself other than to provide the intriguing title, one isn’t quite sure; perhaps it demonstrates the roots and cilia one develops spending so much time at the fringe of a community. She does enjoy a kind of fame all her own: everyone remembers her in the “Yaya” episode of Shake, Rattle, and Roll 3 (1991) as the toothless old hag with the endless fine white hair streaming up and out in every direction (no digital effects here; filmmakers Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes simply strapped her to an upside-down swivel chair and used a fan to blow her hair around). The film’s main premise goes something like this: after thirty years of near-obscurity in the film industry, better remembered for her many horror films than for her acting talent, Cuntapay has finally been nominated for an AFTAP Best Supporting Actress award (fictional) for her performance in a film titled Sanangdaan (fictional), and she’s all a-flutter trying to prepare friends, family and herself for her coming moment of glory.

Whether anything else in Cuntapay’s life is fictional or not, Jadaone never lets you definitively know. The visits to home, friends, and family seem real (to be fair they’re the easiest to stage and shoot), but her adventures on film sets—where she comes early, memorises all her lines, waits for hours to step in front of cameras only to be told (after half a day’s waiting) that she’s been rescheduled—feel scripted (putting dramatization issues aside, the latter scenes are actually dead accurate, as anyone who’s ever been involved in a film production knows). Jadaone muddies the waters further by introducing real people who know her (Kris Aquino, Dingdong Dantes, directors Reyes and Gallaga) and don’t always remember her (Aquino being a particularly dim example) and fictional people who don’t know her but have to deal with her (the directors and actresses of the film productions she visits)—in a way the inversion only serves to burnish her fame: she’s such a cult legend you need to invent people who don’t know who she is.

Real or reel, it all doesn’t really matter; Cuntapay is sui generis, a force all her own, by turns charming and infuriating, cunning and clueless, totally out-of-touch and completely plugged in. To paraphrase what director Gallaga said about her “She’s not like a demon, she is a demon.”

The film has it all: deadpan comedy (Cuntapay arriving at a film shoot that doesn’t quite know what to do with her); domestic chaos (Cuntapay bossing family, friends and neighbors around on the eve of her televised interview); unabashed pathos (Cuntapay and friends waiting for the interview, which is running late). There are moments when Jadaone simply poses Cuntapay in front of a lectern, in some kind of fantastic empty auditorium of her mind, the clothes and props cluttering the hall desaturated of color, our heroine standing there and saying nothing, the faint sound of applause echoing in the wings. A moment of delusional fantasy? A pause out of respect for our heroine? Or an excuse to wallow in monumental self-pity? Perhaps not the latter; Cuntapay’s life is nothing if not tragedy on a small scale–she’s spent years playing bit parts in this or that film, often cheap horror flicks, and she’s hardly ever  paid well (or even fully) and she’s rarely given the due respect accorded to industry veterans (they treat her like the senile old grandmother no one wants to talk to). And yet she never gives up, never comes to a shoot late, never fails to learn her line or wait forever for a scene that might never get shot, or if shot might never make it to the final film. She has something of the pathos of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, a belle heroically waving a flag to a parade long past, only she never even enjoyed the glamor Norma did in her halcyon days.

With Six Degrees, Cuntapay finally has her moment under the spotlight, and Jadaone for one is not shy pointing it in her direction, not afraid to allow the actress pull out all the stops, drop the necessary tears for a Best Actress trophy (one of my problems with these horse races is the unimaginatively restrictive criteria: you always need a crying scene, a requirement Jadaone parodies brilliantly—when samples of the actresses’ performances are screened, they’re all crying scenes, of mind-numbing uniformity). At the same time Cuntapay rises to the challenge of the film’s real best moments: on the film set, when she finds herself in over her head, unequal to the task of both playing her role and promoting herself to the people around her (the one essential skill of a movie actor), yet somehow finding the strength to soldier on. Cuntapay may or may not be playing herself, but she looks most fully herself in these scenes, all the while mixing comedy and pathos with deft skill, all the while advancing Jadaone’s themes—the elusive nature of fame, the elastic nature of identity—with the greatest of ease.

One thinks of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and his tragicomic, surprisingly cogent final meditation on his own gullibility. Gimpel’s final words on his approaching end reveal an almost divine sense of acceptance, an epiphanic awareness: “When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.” Singer through Gimpel could have been talking of Cuntapay when he talked about his destiny; both have the innocence, courage and faith to face what happens next, come what may.

Of particular note to readers of this publication is Paul’s longstanding commitment to Asian cinema. I am not qualified to write a detailed historical account of all of Paul’s many achievements or his biography. But I do want to take the time to remember his special place in English-language scholarship on Asian cinema, and to think about the continuing urgency and relevance of his work. Paul’s focus was global long before globalization and transnational cinema were fashionable topics. Furthermore, he not only refused to reduce to cinema to an expression of society or the economy, but also insisted on thinking about how all those things are connected long before the financial crash put such issues back on the agenda.

For some people, Paul is remembered best as one of the remarkable “Screen theory” generation of British scholars. Their interventions in the 1970s and 1980s cut through both the precious aestheticism of earlier years, which embalmed cinema in the discourse of art and appreciation, and the clumsy classical Marxism that reduced the so-called superstructure to an expression of the base. This is the foundation of Paul’s career-long commitment to both cinematic specificity and the social and economic. For him this was a socialist project bound to an understanding of history not as mechanical but as achieved through struggle and amidst all manner of disjunctures.

For those with an interest in Asian cinema, Paul is remembered as the co-editor with Behroze Gandhy of the pioneering BFI dossier on Indian Cinema (1980); the co-editor with Jim Pines of Questions of Third Cinema (BFI, 1990); the co-editor with Ashish Rajadhyaksha of the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (BFI, 1999); and the co-editor with Valentina Vitali of Theorizing National Cinema (BFI, 2006). During his period as editor of Framework, he also made that journal a prime vehicle for scholarship on Asian cinema. Of course, Paul wrote about cinema from all over the world ranging from experimental to popular genres. Who else would theorize the zoom by comparing the first ever Oscar winner, William Wellman’s Wings (1927) with the film series based on the Turkish superhero, Tarkan¹?

But it is the way he wrote about and included Asian cinema within his larger project that continues to be so important today. Paul’s interest in Asia was not driven by an interest in the “other.” He had no interest in using Asian cinema to prove either the superiority or corruption of the West, and he was not searching for some ideal cinema somewhere else. Rather, as he wrote in the unpublished introduction to a book project, he advocated a comparative film studies “concerned with the elaboration of a better film theory by paying attention to the differential encounters with capitalism and the consequent modulations of cinematic ‘speech’ or discourse.”

Paul’s advocacy of a comparative film studies grows out of his long engagement with theories and discourses of Third Cinema. In his (I believe also unpublished) “Historical Memorandum: Notions of Third Cinema” we can find the traces of the development of his thought. First, following Solanas and Getino and most other major authors on the topic, he insists that Third Cinema is a radical response to Hollywood’s industrial mode and to national cinema. Furthermore, he goes on to argue that it is not only to be found in the Third World and certainly not to be conflated with the Third World Cinema. Although he admired Teshome Gabriel’s embrace of a diversity of Third Cinema modes, subjects, and styles, Paul also noted that Gabriel’s work on Third Cinema was “still confining it de facto to the so-called Third World areas (nearly always excluding Asia)…”

Perhaps here we can see why Paul chose to work at once on a global scale and at the same time to place a particular emphasis on Asian cinemas in much of his work. This is of course speculative. But what is clear is the special regard he and his work are held in by many scholars in Asia and elsewhere who saw in it a way to cut through the perils of Orientalism and to build a radically alternative scholarship of global cinema that was neither reductionist nor formalist. At this historical moment when we have been reminded so forcefully of the continued power of materiality and the market, his work is more relevant than ever. I believe plans are afoot to publish his unpublished manuscripts and it is my deepest hope that this work will help to guide us now that he himself is no longer here to do that.

1. “The Zoom in Popular Culture: A Question of Performance,” New Cinemas, 1, no.1 (2002): 6-13.

The 13th Jeonju International Film Festival was bookended by two films about family – its opening film, Sister, and its closing film, A Simple Life. Both films brought new perspectives on the family structure, exploring the shifting roles within the family unit.

Sister recalls the films of the Dardenne brothers at times, although it is much more polished and less realistic than the Dardennes’ films. This style adds to its dramatic tension; although on the surface, the director seems to be coldly observational, his sympathy for the film’s characters is palpable. We can see this especially in the character of Mike, as he teaches and takes care of Louise’s brother, filling in for the absent father. When it is later revealed that Louise and Simon are actually mother-and-son, we realize that she is merely a teenage single mother trying to escape from her responsibilities.

In a reversal of roles, it is the young son who feeds the mother, stealing in order to support the family. It is only when the son reveals their relationship to his mother’s boyfriend that she finally begins to fulfill her role as a mother. This sudden change comes pretty abruptly in the film. It is especially puzzling because, in an earlier scene, the mother wouldn’t even give her son a hug unless he gave her money. This abrupt shift in tone, however, gives the film warmth and directs its focus to being about two people struggling to survive in a cruel world.

Midway into the film, another mother figure appears. The son befriends a mother and her two children who are holidaying at the ski resort. The new mother figure’s wealth and love towards her children are undoubtedly attributes of the ideal mother that the son has projected onto her. Eager to have the love of both his real mother and his ideal mother, the son steals again, thinking he can win their love with money. This shatters his dream instead. The mirroring of the two mothers suddenly becomes a conflict between classes. The son’s real mother is his ideal mother’s maid, and his theft makes her a thief too. Because of this, their source of income – the ski resort – has to be shut down, leaving both mother and son high and dry.

At the other end of the spectrum, A Simple Life can be seen as a nostalgic ode to the morals of old Hong Kong. Toh-jie has been working as an amah in the Lee household for decades. When the family migrates overseas, they leave Toh-jie and Roger behind. Although Toh-jie is Roger’s servant, they seem more like mother and son; Toh-jie takes care of Roger and even nags at him from time to time. The pair becomes a substitute family, a fact made all the more special because they are not related by blood. When Roger’s mother returns, her relationship with her son seems estranged, despite her kind words to him. This might well be Ann Hui’s intention for the film, but it also reflects the real-life relationship between Deanie Ip and Andy Lau, who are as close as mother-and-son.

Although A Simple Life follows in the realist tradition, this realism is severely undermined by the famous cameos in the film. However, Hui depicts Toh-jie’s life and death extremely movingly without being overly sentimental. Roger even takes care of Toh-jie after she suffers a stroke, reversing the roles of master and servant – in a substitute family, everybody can be treated equally.

The relationship between the two mothers in this film again shows the difference between classes; Toh-jie is respectful towards Roger’s mother because she understands her place in society, a marked difference from the class conflict in Sister. Toh-jie’s loyalty and dedication stems from the celibacy vow that amahs traditionally undertook in Hong Kong, a practice that is now lost in contemporary society. When Roger is looking for a new maid after Toh-jie asks to be put in a nursing home, he can’t find anyone that lives up to Toh-jie’s standards. This is perhaps the film’s lament that the new generation is only a pale shadow of the old. As time progresses, we see how Toh-jie goes from living in a big mansion to a small apartment, to a nursing home, eventually dying by the end of the film. In the midst of all this, she travels between public and private spaces, meeting people from all walks of life. As we see Toh-jie’s laboured footsteps after the stroke, we get a sense of transience not unlike that in the shot in Sister, where the son drags a stolen sled across the snow. One is old and one is young, but they both struggle to make family feel more like a home.

* An amah (traditional Chinese: 阿嬤) is a female domestic helper employed to clean the house and look after children.

This article is translated from Chinese by Daniel Hui.

Original article:

高海拔少年*（Sister) 與桃姐（A Simple Life)—家庭的「揭幕」與「閉幕」

赵嘉薇

第十三屆全洲國際電影節的開幕電影《高海拔少年》與閉幕電影《桃姐》不約而同探討家庭制度的轉易，家庭成員角色的流動不居，在家庭的基礎上另賦新章。

《高海拔少年》有達頓兄弟（Dardenne Brothers）的影子，但《高》片在鏡頭及燈光方面更為修飾，沒有達頓兄弟的粗糙感，從而也削弱它紀實的感覺，反之在情節上更有不少戲劇性，導演的鏡頭驟看似是冷眼旁觀，其實處處關顧和憐憫兩姊弟／兩母子，塑造Mike這個關心及教誨弟弟的角色就可見一斑，亦彌補了片中缺席父親（Father Absence）的角色。這個家庭的秘密就是人稱兩姊弟的關係，原來姊姊是弟弟的親母，這無疑是現實少女單親媽媽的一般處理，這種角色的掩藏固然在逃避道德的責難及責任。片中只見兒子雖然只是個男孩，卻要照顧母親的起居飲食，也靠偷竊去承擔家庭經濟的支柱，這種在核心家庭中角色的易轉，讓兒子處處遭受道德的懲罰。在兒子對姊姊男友公開兩母子的關係後，「正其名」而令姊姊就開始慢慢履行母親的責任，雖然這種改過自新在片中不無突兀（尤以最後一場母親到滑雪場找兒子，與早前母親要兒子給她錢，才讓兒子抱抱她的一場戲，簡直南轅北轍），鋪敍欠奉，影片突然變得親情洋溢，與影片一直營造「在殘酷現實去掙扎求存」的不仁相違。

更而言之，片中出現了另一個母親的形象；兒子在滑雪場結識了來度假的兩子之母，她對子女呵護備至，而且富有，無疑是理想母親的投射；兒子渴望其生母及理想母親的愛，卻扭曲地以為用錢就可以贏得她們的愛，最後因兒子再度偷竊而理想破滅，兩個母親微妙的鏡像（Mirror Image）對照突然變成了階級對立（他的生母是理想母親的鐘點女傭，而兒子偷竊更令生母成為賊媽媽），最後連兒子「維生」的滑雪場亦關閉了，餘下的只剩痛改前非的生母與兒子，渴望回歸正常、各安本位的家庭亦呼之欲出。

而《桃姐》可以說是對香港舊時代美好價值的一種緬懷。桃姐數十年以來在李家當傭人，帶大李家的兒女，一家移民後只剩桃姐與Roger 在港，縱使兩人是主僕關係，卻相濡以沫，親密得仿似是一對母子，桃姐既照顧Roger，亦時而囉囌他幾句，兩人組成了一個替代家庭，沒有血緣關係，倒更見人情味。反而後來Roger的生母回港，雖然母子無不噓寒問暖一番，但始終掩不住點點疏離；也許這是許鞍華刻意經營他們的疏遠，又或者是銀幕前後，桃姐（葉德嫻）與Roger （劉德華）的確感情深厚，親如母子，根本毋須扮演。

片中亦不無具紀錄寫實的拍攝風格，但不少名導演及演員的客串演出，實在令影片描繪的寫實大打折扣。可是毋庸置疑，影片將桃姐的生與死都拍得感人至深，又毫不濫情。桃姐與Roger的相處是真性情，Roger甚至在桃姐中風後照顧桃姐，主僕的關係可以消弭，替代家庭的成員可以平等相待。可是兩個母親的形象卻突顯了階級的壁壘分明，桃姐面對太太（Roger的生母）必恭必敬；而這種階級的對立，與《高海拔少年》的兩個母親形象的對立又截然不同，桃姐對太太是多年老僕的知遇之恩，是她敬重太太，知道尊卑有別的身份。桃姐的那份忠誠專注的傳統精神，「梳起唔嫁」其實是當僕人一生一世的承諾，現今幾近蕩然無存；尤以片中桃姐要入老人院，為Roger物色新女傭，但全都不符合桃姐的要求，大有新不如舊的慨嘆。時代不斷變遷，桃姐的棲身之所也由大宅、小樓房、老人院及醫院，最後溘逝；當中她在私密與公共的空間游走，遇到的都是跟她非親非故的人，一片浮萍的感覺盡顯在桃姐中風後步履蹣跚的背影，不經意以推拉長鏡頭捕捉高海拔少年在雪堆中拉著偷來的雪橇並置，一老一少，都為生存而竭力寫滿痕跡，為了讓一間屋住得更像一個家。

*香港國際電影節的中譯名。