Apprentice

APPRENTICE           B                                            

Singapore  Germany  France  Qatar  Hong Kong  (96 mi)  2016  d:  Boo Junfeng

Following on the footsteps of SANDCASTLE (2010), a nostalgia-driven Singapore debut feature film opening up the nation’s history to public scrutiny, which felt overtly modeled after the historical reflections of Hou Hsiao-hsien, who, it turns out, was one of the director’s teachers at the Asian Film Academy, this is a smaller, more measured film, premiering at Un Certain Regard at Cannes, taking on the subject of the death penalty.  Singapore has had capital punishment since it was a British colony, and while the United Kingdom abolished the death penalty, Singapore continues to rely upon long drop hanging methods that were introduced by Britain in the latter stages of the 19th century.  Between 1994 and 1998, Singapore led the world in per capita executions (CNN.com - Singapore 'top executioner' - Jan. 15, 2004), compiling shockingly high statistics relative to its small population of just over 4 million people, three times higher than the next country on the list, Saudi Arabia, where its drug laws are among the world’s harshest, with anyone aged 18 or over convicted of carrying more than 15 grams of heroin facing mandatory execution by hanging.  While the executions are carried out in relative secrecy, drug addiction remains a problem, with no convincing evidence that the high execution rates curbed drug use in Singapore.  Nonetheless, following the release of a study, SINGAPORE The death penalty: A hidden toll of executions - Refworld  (pdf file), which emphasizes the cruel and arbitrary nature of the death penalty and shows how it has been imposed on the most marginalized or vulnerable members of society including drug addicts, the poorly educated, the impoverished or unemployed, and migrant workers, the country amended some of the death penalty laws and the number of executions have slowed, where no one was executed in 2012 and 2013, only two in 2014, yet according to a 2005 newspaper survey, 95% of Singaporeans believe that their country should retain the death penalty.  Viewed in this light, writer/director Boo Junfeng has created a stunning morality play whose strongest asset is a complete lack of artifice, taking viewers into the prison itself (using unused prisons in Australia), developing a film from the perspective of the hangman who pulls the lever, where Singapore is one of the last 36 nations to actively retain the practice.

Working on the film for five years, the director spoke to priests and imams who were with condemned prisoners at their final hour, also families who lost someone to the death penalty, but he also spoke to a few executioners who took great pride in their work, especially the almost caring way they tried to make it as humane as possible, always looking to perfect their craft.  One of the starting points for the film is the 2010 book Once a Jolly Hangman, featuring an executioner (Darshan Singh) who worked in Singapore for nearly 50 years, once executing as many as 18 men in one day.  The book’s release was so controversial that the British author Alan Shadrake was arrested the morning after the book’s release and held in Changi prison (ironically the sole prison of executions) for a month, charged with contempt of court for insulting the country’s judiciary as he criticized the way the death penalty was disproportionately applied to the poor, while criminals with financial resources or wealthy foreigners escaped execution.  While this film is largely a character study, at the center is a former soldier Aiman (Fir Rahman) who is now a 28-year old corrections officer, seen shortly after he’s transferred to Larangan Prison, the nation’s exclusive maximum security prison that houses Death Row inmates, and the site of their executions.  For Aiman, he appreciates the uniform and the adherence to discipline, similar to the army, where he’s attracted to the idea that prisoners can improve their lives, at least those who want to change.  He’s living with his older sister Suhaila (Mastura Ahmad), where the two share an impoverished history of being apart during childhood, yet she has an Australian boyfriend that may be her ticket out of the country, something Aiman is less than thrilled about.  At work, he’s a stickler for details, always going by the book, where he builds a reputation for competence and self-motivation, though he’s a man of few words.  He draws the attention of white-haired Rahim (Wan Hanafi Su), the facility’s elder chief executioner, who’s interested in developing a replacement team equipped to handle the responsibilities, as Singapore (neighboring Malaysia as well) utilizes execution by hanging, where justice is delivered by pulling a lever.  Aiman needs a higher security clearance just to enter this section of the prison, curiously proclaiming himself to be an orphan on the application.  As he witnesses Rahim in action, standing by as an assistant, one gets a sense that this is a highly personal endeavor, as the prisoner meets with his executioner the day before in his prison cell, where the executioner reassures him “I’m sending you to a better place.”  On the final walk to the death chamber, led by prison guards, the prisoner again comes face to face with the executioner, who leads him into position, tightly placing a noose around his neck, where positioning makes all the difference.  An execution done right will immediately break his neck, “quick and painless,” which is viewed as the most humane method. 

Like the execution ritual, the film itself is a precision of choreography, a series of repeated movements, where in order for the system to work properly, these routines must be exactly adhered to, where there’s no margin for error.  Aiman seems to keep his thoughts in order in much the same way, never revealing his interior mood, every action planned and deliberate, yet the film allows the audience to see what no one else sees, slowly accumulating a series of revealing details about his secret inner sanctity.  While the overall mood is a picture of restraint, there are occasional moments that offer other ideas, never revealing what’s behind those moments until late in the film, where a few hidden surprises come to the surface, yet remain closely contained secrets.  This repressive interior atmosphere is rigorously developed, constructed like a piece of well-crafted architecture, suitable for this exact moment in time, completely in balance with all relevant issues.  While the overall mood of the film is a picture of restraint, there are occasional moments that offer other ideas, feeling completely out of place, never revealing the disturbing truth behind those revelations until the precise moment when they have the most dramatic effect.  Tense, often surreal, there are plenty of twists that lie ahead, but most all occur within the framework of a prison compound, with enlightening views of the siblings at home, where despite their occasional differences, they are intrinsically close.  Humanistic in every sense of the word, the film takes great pains to get at what lies beneath the exteriors, where the performances are all excellent.  Rahim is impressed by Aiman’s moral outlook, believing his inner calm fits the position, as he’s not one where the moment is ever too great for him, as he’s reliable and dependable.  Yet something unravels, where what’s supposed to happen and what will happen are on a collision course of mandatory obstacles in the way.  Aiman calls his sister reporting a life-changing dilemma known only to them, revealing a part of their history that can never be undone, which may, in fact, be the fabric that holds them together.  “I know you’ll make the right decision,” she assures him, “You always do.”  In the annals of film history, there have been extraordinary films made on the subject of capital punishment, where two of the best remain Kieslowski’s A SHORT FILM ABOUT KILLING (1988), an expanded sequence from his masterful The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988), and Stanley Kubrick’s exquisite PATHS OF GLORY (1957).  Few films match their greatness, but this film at least adds to the discussion. 

Ilo Ilo (Ba Ma Bu Zai Jia)

ILO ILO (Ba Ma Bu Zai Jia)     B-         
Singapore  (99 mi)  2013 d:  Anthony Chen         Official site

Awarded the Camera D’Or at Cannes for Best First Feature, where it reportedly received a fifteen-minute standing ovation, this is the first Singapore film to ever win a major award at Cannes, while several years earlier Chen was awarded a Special Mention prize for one of his short features.  Chen also won the illustrious 50th Taipei Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film, Best New Director, and Best Original Screenplay, beating out prestigious Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s 2013 Top Ten List #3 A Touch of Sin (Tian zhu ding), one of the best films of the year in two major categories, so this film comes to America with plenty of accolades.  Chen graduated from the National Film and Television School based in the Beaconsfield Film Studios in Great Britain in 2010, where one of his instructors was Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski.  Ironically Pawlikowski received the London Film Festival award for Best Film in 2013 with Ida (2013) while Chen won the Sutherland Prize for the Best First Film.  Heralded as one of the best films to come out of Singapore, though I much prefer Eric Khoo’s more starkly unusual BE WITH ME (2005), this was written, directed, and produced by Chen, a film that drew on his own childhood experience, inspired by a Filipino maid that worked for his family in Singapore, but despite an honest and unpretentious style, the film is overly predictable and cliché ridden throughout, copying from far too many outside sources, lacking originality or any profound underlying complexity, where it actually recalls the more creatively inspired Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret’s Israeli film Jellyfish (Meduzot) (2007) that similarly won the Camera D’Or at Cannes in 2007.  Both films feature a Filipino maid/nanny living abroad who is forced by economic circumstances to take care of other people’s family while their own children are looked after by family back home.  The theme is also repeated in Lucas Moodysson’s MAMMOTH (2009), showing how a 7-year old grows closer to the Filipino nanny than her own emotionally distant parents, while a similar theme is expressed with a Mexican nanny in one of the sections of BABEL (2006).  In each, the plight is the same as millions of service workers are forced to leave their families and countries of origin in order to earn an income that can support them all, always dreaming that this sacrifice will make a difference, where the distance creates heartbreaking circumstances when tragedy strikes at home, as they are powerless to do anything about it.  To this one could add personal experiences of traveling through various establishments on the East coast all the way up through Maine, where Jamaicans seem to monopolize the service industry of housekeepers, all of them separated from their families back home, but financial circumstances create this dire necessity, where their work visas don’t allow full-time work, which means they are excluded from receiving health benefits, while their schedules and worksites can be changed at any time, creating built-in pressures and anxieties despite working in this country for over 20 years.

ILO ILO follows the Edward Yang template, especially YI YI (2000, though without the novelesque scope), in attempting to create a powerful family drama based upon a series of intimate moments, where the secret is creating realistic characters in a natural setting, where the use of meticulous detail is a key ingredient.  This follows a similar pattern established in Boo Junfeng’s film SANDCASTLE (2010), where a Singapore director opened up his nation’s history to public scrutiny, which felt overtly modeled after the historical reflections of Hou Hsiao-hsien, who, it turns out, was one of the director’s teachers at the Asian Film Academy.  While these are both inspirational Asian directors, they have a unique film aesthetic that is not easily copied due to the highly personal nature of their filmmaking.  Nonetheless, Chen attempts to tell his own personal tale set against the historical backdrop of Asia’s 1997 financial crisis, where the father Teck (Chen Tian Wen) is a plastics salesman while his pregnant wife Hwee (Yeo Yann Yann, pregnant in real life, and winner of the Golden Horse Award for Best Supporting Actress) is part of a secretary pool for a large corporation.  This leaves their dysfunctional 10-year old son Jiale (Koh Jia Ler) unsupervised for large periods of time, becoming a Macaulay Culkin HOME ALONE (1990) nightmare, a perennial headache for both the school and the family, as he can’t stay out of trouble, forcing the family to hire a nanny Teresa (Angeli Bayani), who has come to Singapore from the Philippines leaving her own infant son behind.  Angry that he has to share his room, Jiale hates everything about her from the beginning, where she becomes Auntie Terry who feeds and bathes and dresses him, where she is otherwise attentive in every conceivable way, but he refuses to listen to her, avoids her at all costs, runs away every chance he gets, especially when she comes to pick him up after school, and continually jeopardizes Teresa’s job with neverending mischief, where she’s often forced to take the blame for his unruly behavior.  Most of the action takes place at the same apartment complex or Jiale’s school during an era when electronic gadgets were all the rage, like the Tamagochi game that remains glued to Jiale’s hand, and the everpresent Sony Walkman that is plugged into everyone’s ears, reminding us of a time before Facebook when people did not need to be connected online all the time.  Perhaps most striking is an incident when a man throws himself off the roof of their apartment complex, a jarring reminder of the dire impact of the tanking economy. 

Taking a page out of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s TOKYO SONATA (2008), and before that Laurent Cantet’s TIME OUT (2001), the father loses his job but fails to mention this to the family, continuing to leave the house every morning in his daily routine while he explores a series of temporary jobs, where shame and humiliation play into this, where we see him scrubbing his own clothes by hand, refusing to allow Terry to help, as she’d otherwise discover a night watchman’s uniform.  While Jiale plainly doesn’t receive the kind of attention he needs from his mostly absent parents, the only way he knows how to make sure they’re involved is to defiantly act up, by getting into constant trouble, where the school calls Hwee at her job as she’s typing out termination letters for staff at her job, which quickly downsizes in ever increasing numbers.  But when the school gets ready to expel him for punching another kid, and neither parent can be found, it’s Auntie Terry who shows up pleading his case before the principal.  A fascination with the lottery, of all things, gets him out of the school jam, as Jiale’s detailed scrapbook of winning numbers allows him to forecast winners with some degree of accuracy, something his teacher is able to take full advantage of.  Hwee’s desperate turn to a self-help scam seems like a blatant reference to the mother’s supposedly bogus spiritual regeneration from a Zen mountain retreat in YI YI.  As might be expected, Jiale slowly warms to his nanny, where their relationship becomes the primary focus of the film, as after all, she’s the one who’s around the most, who provides real affection, and has his best interests at heart, while he actually prefers her cooking to his mom’s anyway, so they eventually become fast friends.  This mutual fascination catches the eye of his mother, feeling left out and neglected herself, especially as she enters the latter stages of pregnancy, where things only deteriorate when she discovers the full extent of her husband’s deceit, where their resources are depleted.  No longer able to afford the luxury of her services, Terry regrettably must return back home to the Philippines, a move that plainly effects Jiale like no other, turning this sweet and slightly sentimentalized film into something of a heartbreaking tearjerker.  Somewhat of a mix between commercial and arthouse fare, the rhythm of the film is established by the accumulation of daily activities, an observational character study combined with an eye toward ordinary everyday experiences, all set within a nation’s denial of overwhelming evidence leading to a financial collapse, necessitating a new society with different requirements and expectations.  The film's title, as it turns out, comes from Teresa’s home province in the Philippines. In praising the film on awards night in Cannes, a jury headed by Agnès Varda said:  “This film didn't have any music – and after being assaulted by overblown musical scores in so many pictures, that alone was a welcome sign of finesse and sensitivity.”