Yesterday (9 Aug) was the Singapore National Day. It was a national holiday and there was not a soul to be seen on the roads/campus. There was a SG movie Be With Me and a photography exhibition showing at the University Cultural Centre, I bought a ticket to while away the noon. Vinay and Divya also gave company. The movie is directed by Eric Khoo. It was Singapore’s entry to the 2005 Oscars in the Foreign Film category. Interestingly, it was turned down later since it didn’t have enough of foreign dialogue (according to the Oscar judges).
The movie has 4 stories whose characters’ lives will intertwine by the end. The wife of an old man has died and he is suffering his new loneliness in silence as he goes through the motions of everyday life. There is a security guard who has fallen in love with a lady executive who stays at the apartments where he works. There are 2 schoolgirls who discover each other on the Internet, meet and fall in love. And finally there is Terence Chan, who is old, deaf and blind who is writing her autobiography. This is the status quo and all their lives change as the movie progresses. Some of them will lose their love and some will gain it. The search for love is the theme of the movie.
Stories involving people’s lives are always the most absorbing and this movie was a good example. I loved the cinematography (top notch, especially the colors) and the background music in the movie. (Checkout the stills or the trailer.) The movie is very silent, there is very minimal dialogue (I don’t think it is more than a handful of sentences). The acting by everyone (especially the old man) is very good. There is a few minutes of extremely boring narrative about the life of Chan in the middle. Though her life is definitely inspirational, it breaks the flow of the movie which was interesting upto that time. Thankfully it gets over and we are sucked back into the lives of the main characters. Except for that boring part, this movie rocked.
(via Vinay)