Fridae

By now every lesbian and bisexual woman in Singapore has psyched herself up to see Be With Me, Eric Khoo's much-feted art film that opened the prestigious Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year.

The film weaves together four love stories, and one of them is a teenage lesbian romance between two adolescent girls. Because lesbian characters are rarely found in Singaporean cinema - let alone in a film directed by Singapore's most respected director - the buzz on the film generated in local lesbian circles is very strong.

And their enthusiasm should not dampen after watching the film. Eric's portrayal of lesbian romance is refreshingly unbiased and objective. There is neither judgment on their relationship, nor an attempt to explain the motives or psychology of two girls falling in love.

More conventional directors might be tempted to contextualise or psychologically justify a lesbian relationship or - God forbid - exploit its homoerotic potential for mainstream male audiences. Meanwhile, gay filmmakers would often choose to adopt a positive and affirming tone in their portrayal of same-sex romances.

Be With Me, on the other hand, remains coolly detached in its treatment of the subject.

Using a fly-on-the-wall pseudo-documentary approach to filmmaking, Be With Me remains insistently on the surface of these girls and their lives, depriving us of the usual psychological motivations for why movie characters behave the way they do. It's as if the filmmakers don't feel a need to explain the phenomenon of two girls falling in love, because same-sex love is not a shade different from any other love - which is what it is.

When we first see Jackie (wispy Ezann Lee), she has just met someone in an Internet chatroom. The two exchange phone numbers and begin text-messaging each other avidly. When they arrange to meet face-to-face, Jackie's romantic interest turns out to be a pretty girl with porcelain complexion and sparkling eyes, Sam (striking ing�nue Samantha Tan).

Their romance follows a typical story arc and the girls are seen sharing a 10-second kiss. But out of the blue, Sam's affections turn towards a boy (Jason Tan) instead. Sam emotionally shuts out Jackie, sending the latter into deep despair.

There is no explanation for Sam's behaviour - whether she was a confused lesbian, bisexual, or just a straight girl going through "a phase." Clearly, the film does not think that the characters' sexuality matters. It is the experience of finding love and losing it that counts.

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For audiences, the film's quietist and observational approach to depicting same-sex romance is considerably unique. What's also artistically distinctive about it is that the entire story is conducted in silence - we see the girls gaze into each other's eyes adoringly, but they never speak. It's almost a twisted visualisation of "the love that dares not speak its name." We read their thoughts from their chatroom and SMS exchanges instead.

Silence pervades the rest of the film too. The lesbian romance is only one of four stories woven together. A second narrative thread revolves around Theresa Chan, a real-life blind and deaf woman who has defied the odds by learning to speak, cook, swim, write, commute and live independently. It is her life story that served as an inspiration for a large part of Be With Me, and it is her story too that moved and impressed most international critics at Cannes. It's certainly ironic that it is she, the blind and deaf woman, who articulates the most unabashedly romantic thoughts in the movie as she types lines such as "Is true love truly there, my love?" on her typewriter for seemingly no one but herself.

The third thread involves an old shopkeeper (Chiew Sung-ching) who patiently tends to his sick wife in hospital. Though we never see him profess his love for her, his devotion is shown by the way he prepares delicious dishes at home to bring to the nursing home. This narrative thread has a rare tenderness, but it is Chiew's mournful face, with its deeply-etched lines and wrinkles, that draws your sympathy and attention rather than the thin storyline.

The fourth thread is easily the weakest and least compelling, as it rehashes a character that has been seen in other Eric Khoo productions. It tells the story of security guard Fatty Koh (Seet Keng Yew) who is infatuated with an attractive professional (Lynn Poh) who works in the same building as he does. Spying on her as she sips wine alone in her apartment, Fatty's character reminds me of the Mee Pok Man ogling Bunny (Michelle Goh) or the peeping tom in Eric's TV series Drive.

When the film tries to tie all the four story threads together towards the end, it doesn't work. What had all the while been various stories of simple characters and small incidents, silently observed and never explained, suddenly come together through a series of pat coincidences.

Ultimately, Be With Me might be seen by some viewers as a formalistic achievement rather than a dramatic one. Its stories of lonely urban characters yearning for love are brilliantly captured through the quiet camerawork and bleached-out colours of cinematographer Adrian Tan. Their failure to communicate their emotions openly is beautifully underscored by the fact that we rarely see them talk - their words are mostly conveyed through SMES-es, Internet messages, phone conversations, and typed and written letters.

But some audiences may find Eric's way of quietly exploring his stories and characters - instead of squeezing dramatic tension out of each of them - to be very dull and unsatisfying. It is not what people go to movies for. Very few people, I suspect, will enjoy the way these stories are stripped of their usual dramatic contrivances, leaving behind the elements and enigma of daily living.