Stranger Eyes (Mò shì lù)

 

Writer/director Yeo Siew Hua

director on the set with Lee Kang-sheng

STRANGER EYES (Mò shì lù)                     B                                                              Singapore  Taiwan  France  USA  (126 mi)  2024  d: Yeo Siew Hua

You just have to watch someone close enough and keep your eyes on him.  At some point, even if he’s not a criminal, he will turn into one.                                                                                  —Officer Zheng (Pete Teo)

If you love peering through windows, then this is a film for you, using Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954) scenario, but embellishing it in the modern age, becoming a moody, atmospheric psychological thriller that starts out as a conventional missing-child narrative to become a cerebral meditation on voyeurism, privacy, and digital surveillance in modern Singapore, emphasizing a theme that there is always someone watching.  Featuring legendary Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng, who broke onto the scene in Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God (Qing shao nian nuo zha) (1992), but was last seen in Days (Rizi) (2020), where the strength of his near-silent career in acting is in body language and in the power of his gaze, bringing an enigmatic quality and depth through silence, making him uniquely qualified to play a silent voyeur, typically viewed as the most interesting character precisely because he says the least.  Yet he actually speaks here, but just barely, bringing a rare interest to the film, as he’s literally grown up before our eyes in his screen roles, connecting him to a certain style of minimalist arthouse films, kind of an Asian version of French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud who did exactly the same during the 60’s and 70’s, both happening to meet onscreen in Tsai’s WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (2001).  Referencing other surveillance thrillers like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) or Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden) (2005), the abduction of an infant child is a gripping starting point for a mystery that explores societal isolation and loneliness as much as any police procedural investigation, where we might think Lee Kang-sheng is inhabiting the Peter Lorre role in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), but this unravels in multi-layered complexities that reveal themselves in surveillance footage.  After China, Singapore is the third most surveilled city in the world (Surveillance, 'Big Brother' government made Singapore ...), where the government also has access to the emails, telephone calls, and internet search histories of all its citizens, which might sound a bit spooky, but Singapore is also renowned for being one of the strictest and safest countries in the world, with zero tolerance for both violent and petty crimes, where its legal system relies on severe penalties, widespread surveillance, and swift enforcement to maintain one of the lowest crime rates globally.  This is the world that Singapore director Yeo Siew Hua, who curiously resides in Buenos Aires, chooses to explore, examining multiple secret lives among a group of interconnected characters, using a mostly Taiwanese cast, with extensive CCTV surveillance coverage becoming a central focus, shot by cinematographer Hideho Urata who beautifully captures the sterility of the screen.   

The first draft of this film dates back to 2012, but the filmmaker was unable to secure financing, shelving the project until he could return to it at a later date, recalling episode six of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89), which was later expanded to A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988), where the discourse surrounding surveillance has changed drastically over time.  Living in a densely populated area, it is now commonplace for neighbors in high rise buildings to be peering into the windows of other neighbors, becoming familiar with their schedules and routines, all part of a normal day, while at the same time the numerous government surveillance cameras are watching them as well, so they’re all part of a vicious circle.  At the heart of the film is a young couple, Junyang (Wu Jian-Ho) and his wife Peiying (Anicca Panna), along with his mother (Vera Chen), who grow distraught when their infant daughter disappears from a public playground right in front of the father’s distracted eyes, which only grows more mysterious when strange DVD video recordings of the family’s daily activities, both before and after the kidnapping, start appearing at their doorstep, including months-old surveillance footage from a visit to the supermarket, Stranger Eyes new clip official - Venice Film Festival 2024 - ½ YouTube (1:51).  The film makes smart use of the song “Endless Love” by Tsai Chin from the Shaw Brothers movie LOVE WITHOUT END (1961), one of the foundational classics in Chinese cinema, Tsai Chin/Cai Qin-Endless Love/Love Without End/Bu Liao ... YouTube (3:19), initially heard in romanticized supermarket surveillance footage, repeating later in the picture with devastating results.  Reporting the crime to the police, Officer Zheng (Pete Teo) is a calm counterbalance, trusting established police procedures, exuding patience and calm, immediately installing a camera outside their door to capture whoever’s leaving these recordings, which leads them to a suspicious middle-aged neighbor living in an adjacent tower, Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), who they begin following with an obsessive curiosity.  The protagonists and antagonists often exchange roles, like mirror images of one another, which begins a strange journey to uncover the truth, growing more and more layered and complex, as Wu’s identity is more complicated than it seems, where it’s often difficult to find one’s bearings in this unraveling web of differing intentions from each character.  This pattern only grows more ominous, trying the patience of viewers who are searching for relevant clues, as nothing jumps out at you, but becomes part of a long series of watching footage, sometimes at home, sometimes in the presence of the police, where the original score written by Thomas Foguenne only adds to the intrigue, offering a percussive Tindersticks-style (with a gamelan) undercurrent of restless contemplation. 

Ambiguous to the core, perhaps the biggest surprise is not a whodunit revelation, but the makings of a fractured marriage, where the strains of a kidnapped child and the endless hours of watched footage, revealing things they definitely would have preferred to remain hidden, where it’s not long before deeper secrets from their personal lives emerge and the foundation of their relationship completely disintegrates.  We follow Junyang’s strange, stalker-ish behavior, especially as he follows Wu, Stranger Eyes new clip official - Venice Film Festival 2024 - 2/2 YouTube (1:11), observed by his wife Peiying offering her own commentary, seemingly having her own connection to the stalker, yet we’re not initially sure who she’s speaking about, and how it is connected, which only adds to the mystery.  Each character seems to harbor their own secrets, with Wu developing a voyeuristic fixation on cameras and his own surveillance videos, while he spends just as much time simply watching and observing others, perhaps because he has no life of his own, so he lives vicariously through the lives of others.  Junyang mirrors his unorthodox behavior by following the parents of the children who were in the park on the day of the kidnapping, seeing how close he can come to abducting their children, desperately trying to enter the psychological mindset of the perpetrator, as in this way maybe he can better understand exactly what happened.  We also learn that Wu had started chatting shamelessly with Peiying long before the child disappeared, as she has a public persona she adopts as a live-streaming DJ.  By shifting the focus away from the police, however, and into the tangled lives of the affected family, we also get an understanding of what the kidnapper might have been thinking, like why they were targeted in the first place, as we hear the repeated phrase, “Some people aren’t meant to be parents.”  Rather than find answers, there are lengthy scenes that ruminate on each respective character’s existential loneliness, suggesting with newfound technology, we are all drifting apart into social isolation.   What’s unique about the film is the slow pace and how abstract concepts replace any standard narrative, with a meandering storyline with shifting perspectives and viewpoints, where viewers often wonder why a certain character is being watched or studied, but the filmmaker has his own agenda about shifting the tone of the movie from the mother’s manic desperation to a more contemplative examination of the interiority of the characters.  The father is shown to be frequently distracted, unfaithful, and even reckless in his parenting duties before the incident, but the later scenes show a transformed man, aware of his shortcomings and how it may have led to unintended consequences, where the act of watching others is fundamentally linked to self-discovery, ending on a surprisingly tender and more reflective note, which may be the biggest reveal in the entire film.  The missing child scenario is simply a framework to examine how modern society, technology, and constant surveillance alienate us from human connection, while highlighting themes of forgiveness and redemption.    

2024 Top Ten List #2 All of Us Strangers

Writer/director Andrew Haigh

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott

Haigh on the set with Paul Mescal

Haigh with cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay

ALL OF US STRANGERS                  A                                                                                 Great Britain  USA  (105 mi)  2023  ‘Scope  d: Andrew Haigh

Little things I should have said and done, I never took the time.                                                  —Always On My Mind, The Pet Shop Boys, 1987

British-born writer/director Andrew Haigh, creator of Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2016), and Lean On Pete (2017), has crafted his most mature and compelling work, a haunting meditation on loneliness that offers more than a few surprises, emotionally raw and deeply connecting, expressing a unique vulnerability that is brilliantly told, feeling very grown up, where nothing else like it comes to mind, as it really establishes its own unorthodox path, where the reflective originality is literally off the charts without using any cinematic trickery.  What truly stands out is just how achingly personal it is, where every single moment feels heartfelt, and the title tells all, poetically revealing how we all revolve around each other’s lives, like planets in alignment, reminiscent of that spectacular opening sequence in Béla Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000), Werckmeister Harmonies (Opening Scene - GR-EN sub) YouTube (10:12).  The degree of complexity in this film is surprising, as it starts out simple enough, with nothing out of the ordinary, where the realist aesthetic becomes ingrained with viewers, setting the tone for what follows, providing the building blocks of an intense theatrical exploration of memory and identity, loosely adapting Taichi Yamada’s 1987 Tokyo-based novel Strangers, the first recipient of the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize, changing the central character to a gay man with the blessing of Yamada (who died recently at the age of 89) and his family, who were incredibly respectful of Haigh’s vision of finding hope in dark places.  At the center of the story is Irish actor Andrew Scott as Adam, a reclusive writer working on a story that has to do with his past and his deceased parents, currently living alone on the 27th floor of a block high-rise building with a panoramic view of the London landscape below, where the clouds on the horizon offer a contemplative vantage point, recalling Sofia Coppola’s far-reaching hotel room vista in Lost in Translation (2002), or the quiet perch in Spike Jonze’s futuristic Her (2013), where the window in each case is a barrier to the world outside.  Despite the massive size of what appears to be a new building, it is strangely deserted, where it comes as a surprise that he is the only one exiting during a fire drill, an incident that allows Adam to spot his only neighbor in a window, Harry (Paul Mescal from 2023 Top Ten List #7 Aftersun), who pays him a visit afterwards in an excessively awkward flirtatious gesture that reveals his off-putting drunken state, with a half-empty bottle of Japanese whisky in his hands, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “Do I Scare You” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (54 seconds).  He’s younger and more gregarious, but Adam declines the invitation, as he’s largely a solitary figure, but has second thoughts afterwards, believing there’s something there, and a short time later the two reconnect as gay lovers, where the awkwardness of an initial sexual encounter is everpresent, yet there’s also a heartfelt connection that bonds them together, some of which comes from sharing the difficulties they each encountered from the realization they were gay.  Both are estranged from their families and share the same feeling of alienation and not belonging, with Adam confessing he lost his parents in a car crash thirty years earlier just before he turned twelve years old, with Harry sensing that kind of pain never goes away, leaving Adam suddenly flooded by memories of his past, while Harry is himself trapped by his own struggles with drugs and alcohol.  Rising to the surface are grief and loss, with elements of warmth, melancholy, loneliness, and sorrow, opening a dialogue between the past and the present, something that was previously explored in Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021), or more recently Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka) (2023).  But this is something different altogether, a profoundly moving experience that may leave some emotionally shattered, becoming a deeply philosophical Proustian essay on the power of love and the power of remembrance.   

Andrew Haigh films are known for being quiet, intimate, well-acted, and intensely real, where the root of them all is an emotional honesty expressed with extraordinary tenderness, where his eloquent use of music and camera movement feels effortlessly fluid and graceful, a bit like Xavier Dolan, luring us into an emotionally devastating fictional world that viewers are suddenly thrust into, as if we’re living it ourselves.  Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival, this is another LGBTQ story with a surreal aspect to it, bearing some resemblance to Enys Men (2022), as each is a brilliantly original exposé on loneliness, but things are expressed quite differently, conveyed largely through conversations, with regular bursts of humor in highlighting the absurdities of the situation, where it’s such a deeply personal and imaginative vision that it takes us places where we’ve never been, much of it stemming from the unique architectural blueprint from the Yamada novel.  While stuck on a page that simply reads “External, suburban house, 1987,” this film leaves audiences continually off-balance, as we question what we’re seeing, wondering just what to make of it all, taking place in a netherworld of memory and the imagination, where there’s a textured, indelible sense of pathos running through the entire film, which feels more like a metaphysical experience.  The overall weirdness may not work for everyone, but this is a director at the height of his powers pressing the artistic boundaries in pursuit of something completely different, where it’s a bit of a challenge to keep up with the dizzying turns in the road, but the place he takes us is something to be cherished.  Some twenty or thirty minutes into the film, Haigh pulls the rug out from underneath us, leaving us floating on air in a state of suspended incomprehension and disbelief, where it doesn’t matter if it defies all rational logic, as he instead creates an immensely satisfying alternative universe, with no explanation, and simply leaves us there to fend for ourselves.  While off on a long walk, Adam encounters a strange man (Jamie Bell) and follows him into the suburban neighborhood of Croydon, where we thoroughly expect an anonymous sexual encounter, but once they get to the door, the man happily introduces Adam to his wife (Claire Foy from 2023 Top Ten List #1 Women Talking), only to discover they affectionately call him their son, someone they haven’t seen in a long while, which is an alarming development, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “Hi” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (30 seconds).  Viewers are quick to think they may be stepparents, or foster parents, yet the strange thing is there appears to be little difference in their age as they immediately rehash childhood memories, which are in no way idealized or romanticized, but presented matter-of-factly, exposing the obvious discomfort that generation either failed to recognize or ignored.  As mind-blowing as this seems, blurring the boundaries of reality, they’re actually picking up their relationship where it left off decades earlier (“Is this real?” he asks), having conversations with his parents that he never got to have, where they all seem perfectly comfortable with the visit afterwards, as if it was a cathartic experience, which only elevates the emotional authenticity of the reconnection, a very unusual way to tackle the haunting memories of grief and death, like traveling through an invisible portal.  In this ghost story, however, Haigh leaves out any horror or supernatural elements, and rather than being about the dead, it’s about the living communing with the dead, tapping into feelings people didn’t know they had.  In a subsequent visit with just his mother at home, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “You Were Just A Boy” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (2:00), Adam confesses he is openly gay, which hits her like a ton of bricks, not really bringing herself to believe what she hears, as it’s not what she ever envisioned, yet this is the moment every gay kid has with their parents, and it’s completely relatable.    

One of the unlocking keys to the film is viewing the album cover of Welcome to the Pleasuredome by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, a pivotal 1980’s album that exploded onto the music scene in a wave of controversy, where the blatant sexuality was groundbreaking, dangerous, and exciting, along with its immersion into gay culture during the AIDS epidemic of the 80’s which took so many innocent young lives.  This film is caught in a time warp, carrying the distinct experience of a specific generation of gay people growing up in the 80’s, battered by the relentless homophobia of the Reagan and Thatcher era where they were meant to feel ashamed and abandoned, as no one cared, where it’s not nostalgia, which can often hide the truth, but the burden of alienation and self-loathing still carried around by generations of grown-up gay children who have been traumatized from the harm done by an unsympathetic mainstream that was not inclined to question or reshape the world around them but simply accept the status quo.  Moving away from the traditional ghost story of the novel, Haigh creates something more psychological and distinctly metaphysical that is intentionally abstract in its revelations.  While the film takes place in a contemporary setting, the sequences when Adam returns to his childhood home to see his parents returns us to a 1980’s version of their world, where time has literally stopped, which has the effect of stepping into a dream, or a hazy, nostalgia-induced memory, where one of the more haunting sequences is a Christmas they spend together, with his mom humming along to an old Elvis tune as they decorate the tree, yet the cover version heard on TV with a gay lead singer has a completely different, more heartbreaking connotation for Adam, Pet Shop Boys - Always on my mind (Official Video) [4k Upgrade] YouTube (5:12).  In order to accentuate the realism and deep personal connection, these scenes were actually shot in Haigh’s childhood home, beautifully expressed on 35mm by cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay, with rich colors and evocative lighting, exacerbating a feeling of being out of time, or in spaces inhabited only by the mind, while the eerie, mind-altering electronic musical score was conceived by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.  Haigh explores the complexities of both familial and romantic love, with Harry and Adam, in a moment of joyous abandon, heading out into the world together as a couple, where one of the film’s memorable sequences takes place in a nightclub, shot on location at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, an iconic queer London institution which is entrenched with local history and culture, where the neon-lit color scheme immerses viewers in the richness of a drug-induced experience, ALL OF US STRANGERS | “Will You Look After Me?” Clip | Searchlight Pictures YouTube (55 seconds), which is a dizzying and terrifying turn, set to the music of Blur’s Death of a Party (2012 Remaster) - YouTube (4:33), where their loneliness mirrors one other, two men adrift, lost souls brought into each other’s lives, trapped by invisible scars that continue to inhibit their ability to connect with others.  Easily one of the more original and important films seen in a while, as it speaks to something that simply isn’t being told elsewhere.  There are wow moments in this film, achieved through exquisite writing and tender emotional restraint, where some of the most stunning moments come from quietly intimate deliveries, where the vast majority of the film’s complexities rest firmly on the shoulders of Adam, where much of the emotional punch comes from the tender, heart-wrenching, and healing bond between Adam and his parents, leading to one of the more powerful finales in recent memory, exemplified by a moment of infinite beauty and the majestic quality of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power Of Love - Remastered - 4K - 5.1 Surround YouTube (5:05), suggesting that more than anything our lives revolve around the transcendent importance of relationships and the power of love.       

Andrew Haigh Answers All of My Burning Questions About ' ...  engaging Evan Ross Katz interview from Shut Up Evan, November 7, 2023