Padmaavat

Of all the words I could describe this movie with, I believe ‘colorful’ is apt; with the

visuals, the set pieces, the costumes, the structures and terrain, the dances, the portrayal of high

Indian culture at the onset of an invasive, yet equally colorful Muslim kingdom, the movie never

failed to dazzle me with its aesthetics. This made it appropriate to its source material, an old epic

poem about the legendary Queen Padmaavati, as it captures the aesthetic side of it.

Never mind the problematic nature of jauhar, or the savage caricature of Alauddin Khilji.

This is their epic, their lens, an adaptation of a poem that was a product of its time; and therefore,

I think, should not be judged by our current standards of morality and portrayal of history. For,

looking past that, I saw a story of faith and loyalty, contrasted with hedonism and greed.

The film’s titular character shows the most vibrant, fulfilling examples of the former. Her

Rajput husband portrayed the same characteristics as well, but Padmaavati’s faith and loyalty is

in the epitome, for this film. She leaves her freer, more adventurous life in her kingdom’s forests

for her husband, and whatever rebellious streak she was possibly meant to have in her initial,

amazon like appearance is only shown to be for her loyalty to her husband in the subsequent

section of the film. This loyalty and faith, not only to her husband but to his kingdom and to her

duty as the queen, culminates in her final act of defiance, stirring up her fellow widows to join

her in their escape from the rapacious Muslim invaders.

Alauddin, in the film, is the personification of the latter in their extremes, as he danced,

drank, murdered and raped through his conquest to have all that is precious, ‘for all that is
precious belongs to Alauddin’. His drunken gait, eccentric speech and manners, unpredictable

acts, and unhinged violence was clearly shown in the first few minutes of the film, and though I

feel that few were ever this cartoonish in their exploits, many of us can see his debaucheries

being espoused by many in real life. Adulterers, drunkards, anarchists are rife in our own world,

and in some cases can be as monstrous as Alauddin, if not more so. We ourselves have our own

guilty pleasures and obsessions, that in excess are destructive, but which we cannot help but

indulge in; in my case, there was gaming. Nowadays I see it as simply a breath of fresh air or

reward after a long day’s work, booting up Morrowind every now and then. But way back in my

elementary to high school years, it deprived me of precious time for sleep and academics, even

food. I played hours on end, from dusk until dawn, obsessed on levelling up my character or

clearing a stage. My grades were in a slump, my work unfinished, my health even heavily

affected as my life revolved around it, and it quickly turned into a destructive habit I could not

get myself to change; it took years of endless chastisement and introspection before I finally

restructured my life treated it as it should be: a breath of fresh air, not worth something throwing

your nights and responsibilities out the window for. This would not be for Alauddin, though, as

he saw the object of his obsession spite him with her act of sacrificial defiance, with the flames

denying him any worth, any essence from his victory; a harsh lesson suited for those who would

wish to go down that path of unbridled pleasure.

 Hero

I must admit, the martial arts films I grew up with were never my cup of tea. Its over-

commercialization and, especially by the West, degradation into nothing more but great, even

funny looking fight scenes from an exotic land. Perhaps it is because I had barely seen any kung-

fu film treating kung-fu and other facets of Chinese life as any more than an overly stereotyped,

fancy looking martial arts that enabled small, Chinese fellows beat up a group of gangsters or

boxers in an overly humorous manner (Rush Hour films, for instance), spattering them with

some philosophical sayings to make them feel deep and authentic. I knew Jackie Chan, Jet Li,

Donnie Yen, to be part of this faddist treatment in Hollywood and even China, for unfortunately,

their movies over the last decades were a part of this treatment; whether they willingly agreed to

this typecasting or not, I cannot say. But I remember a statement by Jackie Chan expressing his

dislike for the Rush Hour film series, or the series that made him a household name in

Hollywood. He did not find the jokes as hilarious as its Western audience did, saying that he did

not understand much of its humor. Not to put words into his mouth, but who would, I imagine?

Who would find the portrayal of his people, culture, and the discipline that he learned for much

of his life, into a ‘funny Chinese man who can beat up people with fists and chairs and vases’

humorous?

Then I watched Hero, and was pleasantly astounded. A Chinese made film dealing with

important Chinese history for a Chinese audience. The difference was clear, vivid, and wide;

every facet, every set-piece, every droplet of rain, every sound of striking blades, every duel, had

meaning. With every blow, with every meeting of fists and blades, there was emphasis, a
philosophical argument in every clash. It is clear why there was considerably little dialogue

throughout the film; their movements, stares, even the environment around them spoke for them.

For instance, the palace of Qin Shi Huang, showing us a king whose dreams were grand

and monumental, but in which he is entirely alone, shrouded in darkness, too far for people like

Nameless to see and, therefore, to comprehend. Over the course of the film Nameless is invited

closer and closer, and each time I felt the weight on his shoulders from his eyes, even in his stoic

manner, as he struggled whether to carry out his revenge or listen to Broken Sword’s advice and

spare him. Whether to succumb to the individual, or to think of the collective, the future.

In Nameless’ and Sky’s duel, I saw and felt art. How their battle moved and was marked

by the sound of the old man’s music. How they used their fight to test each others’ wills, and in

Sky’s defeat, his relent. I felt the rage between Moon and Snow, in their hypothetical duel over

Broken Sword, the former the spurned mistress, the latter a vengeful lover. Even Nameless and

Broken Sword’s hypothetical battle, in honor of a fallen Snow, more a dance than a duel. Or the

resolve of the calligraphy writers to hold their ground and see their art, to them higher than their

own lives, to the end, even as they were felled by arrows one by one. There, I realized,

everything was tied together, what pushed Broken Sword to spare the king that fateful night, and

Nameless to change his mind. All these duels, battles, and deaths, whether hypothetical or not,

made sense to me, as I saw Nameless calmly accepting the rain of arrows that washed over him.

That they all, without hesitation, chose to hold something, someone – China, higher than

themselves.
 Mukhsin

In its entirety, the film is a simple one. A love story between a vacationer and a local in

their early teens, ending in angst as the vacationer, Mukhsin, leaves without having a chance to

say goodbye to Orked, never seeing each other again. The film ends with Orked, the protagonist,

speaking of love’s kindness, giving those who failed their first love second chances, wishing that

Mukhsin found his as she had hers. I found this authentic, speaking of the reality of young love;

its brief delights, and the heartbreak that it gives you when it finally ends are your first forays

into the stormy depth that is love. To have Mukhsin, Orked’s love interest, as the title rather than

herself is a subtle but well-executed device to drive home the film’s message; Mukhsin is a brief,

teachable episode in Orked’s life, lasting only a summer. Orked, at the end of the film a

disembodied voice that accepts her first, painful experience of love as inevitable, that ‘love is

kind’, and that we’d find our second chances somehow.

Heavier themes pepper the film as well, such as what we see of Mukhsin’s brother, lost and self-

destructive, trying to fill the void their mother leaving them created, trying to find a way to

return to her, only to be broken at the end at her death. Here, I admit to have believed, is how I

finally predicted that Mukhsin would have to be just an episode in Orked’s life; having to take

care of his brother and himself, now that they are all that are left for each other is the true fruition

of the development of his character arc - rather than his love for Orked, which he must now leave

behind. Even Orked’s spiteful neighbor has her own share of failure in love as well, as her
husband fades from her and her daughter to follow his desires with a younger woman, an

example of how fickle love can be.

But the film’s treatment of love was not what made it memorable to me - it was the little things,

the nuances of a child growing up and finding love in a quiet Malaysian countryside, with the aid

of her loving family. Orked’s life, family, and village is so vividly painted in the film that it

tugged at my nostalgia for my own childhood, even with the difference in our cultures and

geography. I enjoyed Orked’s feistiness, as she trudged through life with her nose up against

bullies and naysayers, throwing schoolbags and pushing boys larger than her around. I loved her

family, the sweet and unabashed close relationship between her father, mother, and Kak Yam, as

they rejected Malaysian cultural/gender roles, and allowed their daughter to play, fight, and love

to her heart’s content. I laughed heartily at her father’s method of both entertaining and

comforting her with football matches, and her mother faking the punishments she doled out to

appease the mother of a bully, and admired Kak Yam’s role as a grandmother, or aunt, or both, to

Orked, so similar to my own small, doting family. In many scenes I saw my own childhood, as I

remembered us leading cats away to Saguiaran when they got too overpopulated in our backyard,

building makeshift kites and flying them in the golf course, and watching sports with my entire

family, cheering madly for our own sides. These little things, these brief moments in the film,

made it more than just a story of love for me, and were what, I believe, would always make me

remember this film.

 Okuribito

Of all the movies, this was arguably the most poignant film for me. Under the mildly

humorous coming to terms of Daigo with his job is a story of forgetting, repression, and

acceptance, one that is carefully hidden, but when finally addressed at the end was one of the

most emotion-evoking scenes for me. I watched as his long hidden sadness at losing his father

and his regret at his mother’s death slowly rose up from inside him, for which his cello and

orchestra was at first his only refuge. I saw this most significantly in his nightly playing, where

he releases all his sadness with the slow, mournful music he plays. Finally, as he finds himself

working for Ikuei in a delightfully humorous manner, as he began to appreciate the careful,

beautiful, aesthetic ritual of preparing the body for burial, as he began to find a slow semblance

of redemption in a business the Japanese still considered controversial, so did I. I found beauty in

the slow, precise, and deeply meaningful treatment of the dead, so much that I could see why

Daigo fought long enough to stay and, eventually, be reborn.

I admired how Ikuei, in his quiet manner, shows Daigo the beauty and significance of

death in reviving one’s life with his earnest efforts to help the latter, and the grace and care with

which he handles the bodies of loved ones that, in the end, would always reconcile differences

and heal wounds in the deceased’s families. He helps instill back life in Daigo by dealing with

the dead, a feat that sounds so paradoxical yet has worked. Daigo’s final ritual performance in

the film would always be one of the saddest yet uplifting scenes I had ever witnessed, as his
caring treatment of his deceased, once-hated father showed his acceptance, his catharsis, of his

father’s choices and fate, enabling him to finally show his wife, through the smooth stone, the

peace of mind and contentment he had neglected all these years, and celebrate the arrival of new

life, this time in his wife’s womb.

My Magic

I cannot deny that this film is the film that was hardest to watch for me – not simply for

its subject matter but more so for all the physical torture and body piercings Francis subjected

himself to; just as painful to watch as knowing the reasons why he settled for such measures in

the first place. Why he lived in such squalor with his son, why he drank without end, why his son

had to do other students’ homework for them. The revelation of the mother’s true fate, to me,

was reminiscent of a crisis that plagues my own country, one that has taken many lives under the

guise of ending it, the drug plague that has destroyed families both in its propagation and the

government’s brutal efforts to stop it. To see such a dark end for the father, just like the mother,

after being preyed upon and exploited by a sadistic gang was despairing, a different picture of

Singapore than what I had first envisioned it as: a sprawling metropolis, free of the practice of

heinous crimes under its strict authoritarian rule. It seems that, even in one of the strongest

economies in Asia, exploitation and abuse is still an inescapable reality.

The painful feats of bodily abuse Francis endures is perhaps an aspect that meant to

reveal that reality. Piercing himself with long needles, strangling himself with thick ropes,

walking on broken glass, and in his fateful end enduring a beating, were disturbing scenes to me.

I could not call it magic, and could not find it as in any way appealing or exciting, or in any way

not akin to torture. But his boss and audience clearly found it quite entertaining, paying Francis
good money for his death defying acts. This I found truly disturbing; to enjoy such ‘magic’. Had

society abandoned its grace and love for man, turning to such sadistic pleasures for its fix?

Francis’ acts were a distortion and corruption of the more humane, conventional magic he

used to do, which he only does with his son in the film, but he probably found them necessary as

society wanted less convention and more daring, less safe and more dangerous, less kind and

more painful. The ‘magic’ that would suit the predatory forces that claimed his wife. Pandering

to a society desensitized by materialism and hedonism has led them to find entertainment in the

shocking feats Francis dares to do, rather than wonder at a better form of magic as Francis’ son

did. Through that son’s wonder he learned the same magic, and was able to capture the wonder

of his own abusive schoolmates, as I realized what the film wanted to say, as well; that, even

while subjected to the same environment, the children are not yet corrupted by a society that fed

and entertained itself with the suffering of others, that they can still be shown a different way

before they go down a path of abuse and doom, just like Francis did. Knowing this, perhaps,

gave me some semblance of comfort in his final sacrifice, and hope for the redemption of their

society and my own.

 Children of Heaven

I remember sitting in the university’s old theater room (in the UVS) as a grade schooler,

as our teachers found it apt that we watch this very movie as some sort of field trip. Back then, I

did not even know the title of the movie, and barely remembered any scenes after I watched it.

All I remembered was the race Ali ran, his determination to end up in third place no matter what,

and his disappointment as he failed and won the race instead. I recalled being amazed at his

effort to win shoes for his sister, and saddened that he had to come home empty-handed. But that

was it; as a child, I didn’t really find the rest of the movie interesting. I missed many details,

details I did not miss as I finally watched the movie as an adult, and the weight of these to the

film. Such as how they had to share a pair of shoes just to go to class, how their father had to do

odd jobs with Ali just to feed his family, how they didn’t even have money for another pair of

shoes, leading to Ali and Zahra having to conceal their loss. That, including their environment

and the squalor they lived in, compared to the lovely subdivision in the city that Ali and his

father would find work in, finally made me realize their abject poverty, the miserable conditions

they had to combat just to survive, with little opportunity to have any more. That, for me, made

Ali’s efforts more than just to pay for his losing his sister’s shoes, more than just his love for his

sister. The barriers of poverty that Ali had to overcome gave his efforts an amazing depth for me,

a nobility. As an elder brother to my own sister, I could only hope that I can muster the same

fortitude as Ali did, when such a time ever comes for us.
 This, and also a kind of sadness; in the reality that they are children trying to have a

childhood in such an unequal world. Even if there were not fully aware of it, the film showed

glimpses of their longing for a better childhood, as Zahra wistfully admired and longed for her

classmate’s shoes, only to find out that the latter’s father had bought her a new one and discarded

the old. Zahra’s despair at this hit home for me, as I realized how she would have asked to have

her classmate’s old pair, even in their tattered, used state. Or Ali’s wonder at the stately

subdivision they visited and worked for, as he played with the house’s daughter. But for this, I

grew to admire the siblings more, for never once did they complain about their lack. Not even

once did they express jealousy, or spitefulness for their having to contend with poverty, and

remained closely to each other as siblings. What a fool I was, complaining about not having

some toy or food as a child, when those who cannot even afford one of each never muttered any

word of complaint. If only I had seen all these, as a child, when I first watched this movie. If

only I had understood the weight of their lives and the lightness of mine compared to them. I do,

now; and I only hope that it is not too late for me to instill the same for my own sister.
 Three Seasons

This film had, to me, a truly impressive plotline. To have been able to fully develop the

arcs of all four major characters, and weave their stories together neatly in old Saigon to finally

show Vietnam as it comes to term with rapid materialism and modernization is a feat I found

monumental. I was glad, as well, that this film about Vietnam barely referenced the war for

which most Western oriented audiences associate it with. I found it refreshing to see Vietnam not

as the communist, Kalashnikov carrying farmers Hollywood has stereotyped it with, but a

glimpse of its everyday life in Hai’s and Woody’s city, of its poetry as shown by the story of

Kien An and Teacher Dao, and a ghost of its past in James. Although the film leapt from the

viewpoints of character to character, and though their paths rarely even met, I found it all tied

together with one creeping theme, the rapid modernization of Vietnam and what this leaves

behind.

Kien An’s story, for me, drove the impression that Vietnam’s rich literature and culture

was fading quickly, in the personification of Teacher Dao’s leprosy and impending death, and his

lotuses’ loss of significance in the urban world. I could not help but be saddened as the once

popular lotuses were ignored for cheap, plastic, scented competition. I found this reminiscent of

my own world and culture, as our literature has all but faded into the background, while

commercialized entertainment that folks from the north, in turn the West, supplant the minds and

hearts of my fellow youth. I saw the replacement of any semblance of depth in our culture by
cheap, monetized, and quick entertainment, as hollow and devoid of feeling as the plastic lotuses.

I could only hope that there would be a Kien An, to reclaim the poetry of old, rewrite it anew,

and send true lotuses down the river for the whole word to bask in splendor of.

James’ search for his daughter, born out of an affair with a Vietnamese woman, seemed

to me a symbol of the West trying to reckon with its place in a region they did not deserve to be

in, and would forever be locked out of. But I did admire his resolve, in spending much time and

resources to try and make amends with his daughter, when other soldiers who did the same thing

would not have spared any thought for what they had left behind. Still, I surmise that he would

have a lot of amending to do, in making up for his daughter’s loneliness and fate.

Woody’s adventures showed the exploitation that would have inevitably been part of the

effects callous materialism always brought. Being used as a mule to earn income for a child labor

ring, he is deprived of much of his childhood as he tries to survive out of a meager box of items

to sell; which, stolen from him, would cause him much despair as he struggles to find them. His

difficult, dreary life was, to me, symbolized by the rain he always seemed to bring with him in

every scene, one of the three seasons denoted by the title. To finally find his box was a breath of

fresh air in his story for me, and so was his new companion, but realizing that his fate would still

be mired and marred by his being a child slave to an exploitative world, as the rain still poured in

on them in the last scene he was in, was still depressing.

Hai’s story, though, was truly the heart of the film for me. I was impressed Hai’s efforts

to aid the woman he fell for, his struggles in taking her from her work to home, accepting the
nature of her work, while still trying to bring out the human in the otherwise defeated Lan, who

at first wanted to succumb to the material yoke and lifestyle. Especially during that scene where

he seemingly pays for her services after winning a race, but in a sweet, loving twist reveals that

he only meant to give her the undisturbed, air conditioned sleep she always dreamed of. It was

Hai as well who would reject the plastic lotuses for Kien An, see through James, and aid Woody

in an escape, further strengthening his character for me as one with pure intentions, even from

the beginning. I especially loved his final scene with Lan, finally giving her the freedom she

always did need, letting her wear the white ao dai and frolic in the lush red forest, letting her

finally reclaim her own humanity.

 First They Killed My Father

This film was the last movie I had watched, and it was quite a coincidence that I had just

finished reading the God of Small Things