Fridae

From 2002 to 2005, I used to make short films with my classmates (we called ourselves "The Video Renegades") and as a consequence, kept up with plenty of indie flicks by other amateurs, hobbyists, and film students which Kuo Pao Kun's The Substation screens every first Wednesday of the month. You see, it isn't enough that you learn how to make a good film. You have to learn how good ideas and the best intentions can translate into bad films. The Substation was where we cut our teeth as simultaneous consumers and producers of film because indie filmmakers come with so many good ideas and are never short of good intentions, yet end up with stilted, self-indulgent pieces.

While written, produced, and filmed in the US, Where the Road Meets the Sun manages to play like all those courageously creative, angsty indie films I used to watch at The Substation back then.

For starters, observe the instant cosmopolitanism where a multinational cast is sorted into a formalist typology, and then thrown together in a convenient locale. There's the Japanese hitman who recovers from a coma and uproots himself to LA. He's paired with a middle-class manager whose wife's suicide drives him to take a job as a motel supervisor. The roommates across the hall are a Mexican illegal immigrant earning cash to feed his family across the border and a British overstayer who being rich, youthful, and irresponsible, just wants to have a lark of a time doing semi-legal stuff.

Why is everyone in the same place? Why is everyone a character type that despite the length and ambition of the film and their personal demons, doesn't develop beyond a theoretical character type and its antithetical opposite you expect in an indie short film? Aside from meeting the expectations of formalist character construction, why are these characters paired the way they're paired, and do their interactions bring anything unexpected or meaningful to the way we see them at the end of the film? Like most indie films I've seen at The Substation in the last decade, Where the Road Meets the Sun feels like a film whose narrative is unable to justify itself.

Then there is the misguided derivativeness. I remember in a certain year, it became fashionable for every other indie filmmaker showcasing their work at The Substation to make a reference to a Wong Kar-wai film because you know, he's 'arthouse' and he's the only thing a lot of Singaporean makers of short films at that time knew about. Here, the Japanese character keeps telling a pseudo-folk tale about a magic mushroom which confers the blessing of complete memory loss when ingested, as an allegory for his inner angst and of course the inner angst of every other character in this film. You know, much like Tony Leung kept telling in Days of Being Wild that tale about the bird that once born, must fly until it dies.

Where the Road Meets the Sun is a slice-of-life movie so stilted and artificial that the episodic accounts of the life and angst of its characters don't really add up to much compelling viewing. I know because in my years as a short filmmaker, I did write a film like that too.