Reel Asian

Flower in the Pocket (Director: Liew Seng Tat): Just before the screening, I over­heard someone praising the Malaysian film­makers’ ability to tell inter­esting stories on min­is­cule budgets and then when the film was intro­duced, it was revealed that this film was made for US$10,000-$15,000. After seeing this, I can concur with that judge­ment. In his dir­ect­orial debut, dir­ector Liew Seng Tat weaves a remark­ably rich and evoc­ative por­trait of an unusual family with an unex­plained core of pain. When the film begins we meet Ma Li Ahn and Ma Li Ohm, two young Chinese-speaking brothers living in Kuala Lumpur. We observe their impish play and their dif­fi­culties at school, and how they depend on one another. When they do finally get home, the older boy, who appears to be about 9, makes three bowls of soup. The boys eat theirs, and leave the other bowl covered up as they head off to bed.

Later that night, their father Siu comes home. A single father, he works as a man­nequin maker, and seems pro­foundly cut off from human con­tact, even con­tact with his own sons. Remarkably, father and sons aren’t even in the same frame for almost an hour. But the boys are resourceful and have each other. They seem to be happy. When they meet the tom­boyish Ayu, she takes them home to meet her mother, who feeds them like the almost-feral creatures they resemble. It’s only at this point that the audi­ence real­izes how neg­lected the boys are.

Their father isn’t exactly uncaring, but he almost seems incap­able of expressing love. Only later do we get a hint of the wound at the heart of the family, when Siu takes an old photo of a couple out of a shoebox, tears it in two, and tries to swallow the half with the woman’s pic­ture. I assume this is the boys’ mother, but they never seem to ask for her. All this would seem unbear­ably sad except for the won­der­fully impish per­form­ances of the brothers. As well, near the end, Siu seems to be making an effort to recon­nect with the world, and most import­antly, with his sons. There is also a good amount of humour in the film, some of it bor­dering on the zany.

I believe this may have been my first exper­i­ence watching a film from Malaysia, and it was enlight­ening to observe just how multi-racial and multi-lingual a place like Kuala Lumpur is. With so many dif­ferent cul­tures clashing, there is plenty of room for mis­un­der­stand­ings, many of which the dir­ector plays for laughs. But it’s also a place where people can fall through the cracks, and the scenes where the younger boy struggles in school because he can’t under­stand the Malay lan­guage point out that without family or friends, the modern mul­ti­cul­tural city can be a scary place for children.

(7/10)

Tagged as: #reelasian08, children, fathers-and-sons, malaysia

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