5 Centimeters Per Second 5 Centimeters Per Second
Sep
11
2005

TIFF Report: Be With Me Review

Posted by Todd Brown at 9:55am.

Posted in Film & DVD Reviews , Drama, Asia, Toronto Film Festival 2005.

bewithme.jpg

Singapore auteur Eric Khoo is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wong Kar Wai, and for good reason. He shoots similarly minimalist films that rely more on stunningly beautiful cinematography and careful structure than on dialogue to tell his stories. His latest, Be With Me, is a careful study of isolation and the longing for love in Singapore, intercutting three different stories. You have the old man cooking for his wife and feeding her as she lies ailing in the hospital, two teenage girls building a relationship via text message, and the compulsively eating security guard hopelessly in love with an entirely out of reach business woman who works in his building. For the first hour Khoo seems to have a masterpiece on his hands, but then he makes one horrible mis-step thatbrings the whole thing crashing down ...

Be With Me plays almost entirely without dialogue, relying on rhythm, imagery, body language, and embedded text to make its points. You step into its world without any introductions and have to begin by simply letting the images wash over you as you slowly build an index of who is who and what their connections are to one another. By the time things wrap up you see that there are three stories overlapping to various degrees, all of which deal with the quest for love in modern life.

Khoo’s camera work is simply stunning. Every frame, every single one, is flawlessly composed and beautifully lit. His actors are all wonderfully expressive - an absolute necessity with a film with such sparse dialogue - and Khoo edits things together with a wonderfully fluid rhythm. Even in the early going when you don’t particularly understand these characters you care about them. Khoo has managed to capture something universal, some instantly recognizable kernel of truth in each.

So where’s the problem? Well, after spending roughly an hour establishing his full range of characters and the rhthm of the piece, Khoo suddenly and inexplicably abandons them. He focuses in on one woman to the virtual exclusion of all others while streaming a huge amount of exposition - this deaf and blind woman’s entire life story - in subtitles across the bottom of the screen. It’s simply an inexplicable decision. Not only does this mean the abandonment of his other story lines but the back story isn’t even particularly necessary, it does virtually nothing to advance his point that wasn’t already being done simply by this woman’s presence in the film. He breaks his own rhythm to give us, essentially, nothing. He returns to his full complement of characters by the end and redeems the film somewhat through some remarkable imagery in the closing minutes but by then the damage has been done. What could very well have been a masterpiece has been broken into a frustrating and hugely flawed work.

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Reader Comments

  1. Todd Brown 09/11/2005 @ 4:08pm

    Just before anybody writes in to point this out, yes I am aware that the character the lengthy exposition revolves around is a real person and the inspiration for the film. I agree that it’s an inspirational story, but it’s HUGELY disruptive to the flow of this film ...

  2. Johnny Malkavian 09/11/2005 @ 6:29pm

    That I will agree. For starters I would’ve loved to see more of Jackie and Sam *grin*

  3. ben 09/16/2005 @ 7:21pm

    Hi Todd,

    Ben here, writing from Singapore where Be With Me opened on general release last week, and many of us here are very familiar with Eric Khoo’s body of work in features, shorts, TV and other projects.

    Was a little surprised by your opening salvo. I don’t think I have ever heard Khoo “mentioned in the same breath&” as the great Asian auteurs HHH and WKW, and although I know this makes me sound like a nay-saying curmudgeon but I don’t think many people would agree that he is anywhere near them in terms of developing a strong and original directorial voice.

    Khoo has made three features, all of which are extremely flawed by any standards, and his work has always had been derived heavily from other filmmakers - notably the Polish master Kieslowski, whose TV epic Dekalogue is still (with Be With Me) a massive source of inspiration, ideas, images, themes, structural conceits, and emotional.

    It’s interesting, because in Singapore, all the local people who have seen the film feel the exact opposite of your review. They find the first two stories in the film rather tiresome and trivial, but feel that it is only in the last story, about Theresa herself, that the film achieves any emotional weight. And I have to agree.

    Note to Johnny: In Singapore Jackie and Sam’s pretty innocent fumblings are actually quite ground-breaking for the local screen. This is a country where every single female kiss in The Hours was censored a few years ago. However, a poster for BWM that showed the two of them looking sexy, was banned!

    Cheers!

    Ben

  4. Todd 09/17/2005 @ 8:21am

    Yeah, that may just be the way he’s presented on these shores. I wouldn’t have called the Kielowski influence but now that you mention it, it’s definitely there ...

  5. Stuart Sue 09/27/2005 @ 10:44pm

    Don’t you feel that besides the Teresa story, all the other stories of people dreaming of emotional satisfaction and reliance just pales in comparison ? why look for such wavering strength in others, in such a fickle thing as love, when u can find such indomitable will to live within oneself?

  6. benjamin maury 10/02/2005 @ 1:51pm

    Sorry for my English, I am French…

    I have seen the movie and I completely agree with the commentary of Todd Brown. I don’t understand why the director has chosen after one hour to lay the emphasis on this deaf and blind lady during 30 minutes. There is completely no link with the other stories. This story is completely inappropriate with the movie. During the first part, we have a real movie, then we suddenly have a documentary on a woman. It completely breaks the rythm of the movie. It’s sad because the story of the two girls in love and the single guy were really touching.

  7. benjamin maury 10/02/2005 @ 1:53pm

    Sorry for my English, I am French…

    I have seen the movie and I completely agree with the commentary of Todd Brown. I don’t understand why the director has chosen after one hour to lay the emphasis on this deaf and blind lady during 30 minutes. There is completely no link with the other stories. This story is completely inappropriate with the movie. During the first part, we have a real movie, then we suddenly have a documentary on a woman. It completely breaks the rythm of the movie. It’s sad because the story of the two girls in love and the single guy were really touching.

  8. mandel 01/20/2006 @ 6:09am

    I agree the film was pretty flawed, like all of Eric Khoo’s works. The Teresa Chan’s story just don’t fit in the scheme of things.

    The other two are make-believe. Teresa Chan’s story is just documentary. They just don’t fit.

    I have to agree with Todd on this.

  9. mark 05/17/2007 @ 11:04am

    okie i’m singaporean living overseas, and i have to say yes i agree with todd brown. i wanted to see more of the sercurity guard and the female lovers. i cared for them and wanted more.

    tht shot though outside borders on the steps, it ranks as one of the best shots i’ve ever seen. it was beautiful in such a way i can’t put into words.

    i still loved the movie despite it’s flaws
    -----

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