| Yawning
Bread. October 2006
Short Circuit 2006 - for the record, part 2
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Part 1 recounted how the one-night film showcase PLU Short Circuit came
about and why. Here in part 2 are some personal thoughts about 5 of the
films featured. Beware, plot spoilers ahead.
* * * * * The screening opened with a bang. A naked heterosexual couple is seen copulating, bed and bodies quaking away. Sun Koh's Bedroom Dancing was inspired by a news story from a few years back, when a man was fined S$6,500 for masturbating with his apartment window open. Someone in a flat on the opposite block spied on him and reported him to the police. At the initial planning meeting, when I first asked Sun Koh whether her film was gay-themed, she said it wasn't. Yet after watching it, to me there is something queer about it. The couple in her film has sex every night with the window open and the lights on. They're not inhibited about their bodies nor about their sexual desires. The husband wants it more than once daily, but has to be content with masturbating every morning before he goes to work. He likes doing it by the window; he even does kungfu naked. On the other hand, the voyeuse in the other flat is characterised as sexually repressed and conflicted, spying on him yet also making a complaint to the police. Despite the fact that all the characters there are heterosexual, the short film can still be said to be queer, for Sun Koh masterfully turns her audience's sympathies towards the sexually liberated couple. Within 20 minutes, you're sharing in their delight of being free, and you begin to question why sex should be hidden. You ask who is the pervert in such situations. (Some will also start asking themselves, what is the role of the police and the State in all this, and no bad thing asking that too.) Yeo Lee Nah's Crocodile Journals was the other film which at first was also said to be "not gay". It's true, it wasn't overtly gay, but I think almost no one in the audience failed to see its relevance to gay people. Her animated Crocodile lives in a cellar, scurrying away to hide each time someone walks past the high window. He puts on a human mask each day to go to work in an office populated by humans. Then one day, he gets to attend a masquerade party where everyone else, all human, put on crocodile masks for the fun of it. Our Crocodile, of course, doesn't have to put on a mask, but everybody else at the party thinks he has. However, at some point in the party, people start ripping away their masks to show their true identities, and they try to rip off Crocodile's "mask" too, except that it's really his true face. Realising this, they flee in shock and horror, leaving Crocodile alone and depressed again. Naturally, the gay members of the audience were able to read a common gay dilemma in this tale -– that of passing off as straight in daily life, with the constant threat of exposure. In our society, playing gay for entertainment, e.g. in TV sitcoms, is fine, and good for a laugh or two, but when these same folks encounter real gay people, they're suddenly not friendly after all. But I suspect a funny thing happened to heterosexual members of the audience at Short Circuit. Most likely, they would not have read the film this way if they had seen Crocodile Journals in any other setting, but at Short Circuit, aware it was a queer event, they could not have failed to read in this film its subtext of alienation, passing and rejection faced by gay people. Thus, by sitting in at a gay event, straight people would have seen a gay framing that might not have occurred to them otherwise.
Yet, because it was so entertaining, few might have noticed how layered and skillfully directed it was. Brian reveals ever so subtly that she's really a maid. At the same time, he makes references to the legendary peccadilloes of the former Philippine First Lady. Thus, from beginning to end, the imagined rich splendour of life in Malacanang is foiled against the dreariness of life as a domestic maid. That being the case, you cannot but help think about how the kleptomaniacal Marcos regime impoverished the country. There's not a single word of dialogue, and everything takes place within the space of the song Dahil sa iyo [1]. This itself was one more layer that most members of the audience missed, for unless one was familiar with the political history of the Marcos era, one would not have known that this song was Imelda Marcos' favourite song. She used to entertain visiting heads of state by crooning it herself at State functions. If ever there's an example of how even a low-budget short film, deceptively funny, can pack a political punch, this is it. Loo Zihan's seven-and-a-half-minute film that doesn't even have a title was another powerful one. It too does not have dialogue; it doesn't even have a song. A nameless guy is first seen cruising in the five-foot-way of old shophouses at night. A car comes by and he is picked up. Next, he's the bottom in a rough session of anal sex. He showers in the partner's classy apartment, then he goes home. He gets a drink from his own kitchen as if nothing important has happened in the hours previously, brushes his teeth and takes another shower. He scrubs himself more and more agitatedly, finally collapsing as he sobs. This film received relatively tepid applause from the audience, but I knew why. It wasn't because people thought it was poorly made, but because they were left shell-shocked. It's hits home very hard, a painful portrayal of what many of us, straight or gay, have gone through. There is desire, and the realisation of that desire in physical sex. But sometimes that turns out to be little more than mechanical, and we deal with it through denial (it's no big deal, we say). But there are times when denial doesn't work and we may feel dirty or used, ending up regretting and chastising ourselves for doing what we did.
A young girl is filling up a form, probably from her school, and she asks her older brother Sergio what "sex" means. This sets him off reminiscing about a time when he was about her age. He remembers the family posing for a photograph. There was his father, mother, the baby sister, himself and Uncle Jose. He also remembers the night he chanced upon a threesome in his parents' bedroom. And in that memory he finds an answer for his sister. Un Retrato de Familia is such a well-made film, you can hardly believe that Junfeng was only 19 when he wrote and filmed it. And in Spanish too, a language he does not speak. During the Q&A, Boo told the audience that he's not had an easy time finding opportunities to show the film. It was made while he was an exchange student in Barcelona, and so the film was a kind of "bastard child" of two film schools. But after going on a bit, he finally revealed something from his heart -– why he made this film. He reached into himself and told us that in a sense, it was made for his mother, as a way of telling her he was gay and what that meant. Well, it succeeded. She got the message when she first saw it, but like all mothers who first realise their son is gay, it was a difficult truth to absorb. But the film has since won Best Short
Film and Special Achievement awards at the Singapore International Film
Festival 2006, and has also been shown at various film festivals abroad.
Mother has since become very proud of her son. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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The program notes, listing all the films
shown, are archived at 
Brian Gothong Tan contributed 4 short
clips. One of them would probably be among the most memorable to the
audience: Imelda goes to Singapore. It was a delightful gem
in which who we at first think is Imelda Marcos turns out to be a foreign
domestic maid in Singapore.
It was hard to match the power of Sun
Koh's raw heterosex in Bedroom Dancing, or the emotional punch of Loo
Zihan's untitled film. Amazingly, Boo Junfeng's Un Retrato de Familia (A
Family Portrait) did. It was the last film of a superb buffet spread, and
what a final choice it was!
