For Art’s Sake!

Filmmaker Chris Yeo Siew Hua and co-producer and Asian Film Archive boss Tan Bee Thiam are crushed.

Their movie In The House of Straw, which plays on the tale of the Three Little Pigs, didn’t bring home any bacon.

Kidding. I asked them to put on their saddest faces for more drama. They’re actually cool about it.

I’m quite pleased myself at the results of the Southeast Asian Competition category. My younger brother Raya bagged the Grand Prix and the NETPAC award for his Independencia.

Thai Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Nymph got the Special Jury Prize while Malaysian James Lee’s Call If You Need Me and Filipino Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s Imburnal shared the Special Mention award.

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I watched Straw earlier today and it got me wondering if we’re witnessing a new kind of aesthetics being forged in Singapore cinema today – a Singapore New Wave that actually warrants the term because of the innovations made and not just referring to the “next generation”.

Plot-wise, In The House of Straw is about a teenager who decides to temporarily move in with two friends, one of which is a seminarian and the other, a bicycle thief (make way Wang Xiaoshuai and Vittorio De Sica!).

They spend much of their time wandering around Haw Par Villa, dressing up as the characters in The Wizard of Oz, playing quirky games and of course, stealing bikes.

But despite its deceptively basic premise, Straw is anything but simple. Yeo divides the film into chapters and sort of seesaws between hallucinatory moments (as when the main character’s has his internal existential monologue about his role in the film, in the surreally-lit carnival that reminded me briefly of Gaspar Noe’s recent foray into psychedelic visuals in Enter The Void) and extremely contrived acting in the more day-to-day scenes. And when I say contrived, I mean that in a good way.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive as the surreal occasionally seeps into the normal (there’s a scene where one of the characters – I forgot who – picks up a seashell, which suddenly “talks” to him).

I like the film even if I’m not quite sure what Straw is trying to “say” because it seems to be saying a lot of things at the same time (or saying the same thing in a variety of ways?).

What I’m pretty sure of is that the movie is speaking in a very interesting – and for many Singaporean moviegoers, “unconventional” — way.

Straw is structurally adventurous, unapologetically discarding the checklist of what a “proper” movie should have (the acting is so wooden it’s practically brittle) and, I suspect, Yeo treats the various elements of his movie the same way one assembles chess pieces in a game.

It’s a movie where one feels a certain emotional detachment towards. Despite the many interpersonal relationships, it goes for the noggin’ instead of the heart.

I’m thinking of Straw in relation to its fellow in-competition film Here, because there are some similarities between the two: contrived acting-as-performance for one.

Both also seem to favour that cold, clinical tact, insisting on the discursive rather than the entertainment aspect of the art form.

Both are uncompromising in their vision and insistence that the audiences keep up with them.  

Narrative-driven dramas/comedy/horror/action may still be what’s the favoured approach to filmmaking in Singapore, but Straw is one example of the more exciting things to come from the real New Wave that’s percolating underneath the mainstream.

Oh, and playwright Robert Yeo’s in it too – playing the “big bad wolf”. Woof.

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