Call If You Need Me

"...instant noir classic!"
John Krich, TIME

"Lee builds a slow-burning drama full of romance and despair that is unlike any other recent crime film." Travis Miles, LA Film Fest

Synopsis

Gentle, easy-going Or Kia moves from the countryside to Kuala Lumpur to work for his cousin and best friend Ah Soon, a mid-level gangster and enforcer. While Or Kia works hard to put a sister through school, Ah Soon cares for an unstable girlfriend prone to mysterious disappearances. As they both sink deeper into a nocturnal world of debts, drugs, and betrayal, Or Kia?s loyalties are strained when Ah Soon falls out of favor with the bosses and tries to escape the business.

=> Read more!

Camcorder Capers in Malaysia By John Krich

James Lee has finally come of age, and with him, independent Malaysian film (or more accurately, digital video).

=> Read more!

"Lee builds a slow-burning drama full of romance and despair that is unlike any other recent crime film." -- Travis Miles

Gentle, easy-going Or Kia moves from the countryside to Kuala Lumpur to work for his cousin and best friend Ah Soon, a mid-level gangster and enforcer. While Or Kia works hard to put a sister through school, Ah Soon cares for an unstable girlfriend prone to mysterious disappearances. As they both sink deeper into a nocturnal world of debts, drugs, and betrayal, Or Kia?s loyalties are strained when Ah Soon falls out of favor with the bosses and tries to escape the business.

James Lee's low-key gangster epic is a major work from the Malaysian independent film scene, centered around production company Da Huang (formed by Lee, Amir Muhammad, and Tan Chui Mui). Shooting on digital, often at night, Lee composes a series of immaculate set pieces of his beautiful losers smoking, waiting, dancing and drifting. Opening with a casual dinner sequence that is one of the most sublime representations of innocence before the fall in recent memory, Lee builds a slow-burning drama full of romance and despair that is unlike any other recent crime film.

Here's the complete Q&A Session after the screening, with (from Left to Right) lead actor Sunny Pang, director James Lee, and moderated by Tan Pin Pin.

=> Read more!

HKIFF 2009: Capsule Reviews By Brian Hu James Lee's latest, Call if You Need Me reminds us that he can make solid films, even genre films, when relaxed of any commercial pressure. There's nothing new about the premise (cousins mixed up in gangs and drugs are forced to make tough choices about their loyalties) or the style (slow paced long takes which let us see and hear their everyday world in stark detail). In other words, it's the sort of gangster film pioneered by Hou Hsiao-hsien's Goodbye South Goodbye and which has become a staple in Asian art cinema. But Lee does everything right: that is, he cares little for the machinations of gang life, favoring instead what it's like to hang out with the low-level bosses, their girlfriends, and their cronies. Call if You Need Me is able to so effortlessly wade through the various underworld interactions because Lee sets up everything we need to know about the characters in the two efficient long takes which begin the film. From them, we know that Ah Soon and Ah Peng can't keep their hands of each other, though Ah Peng has a dazed frown that suggests that she doesn't belong. We know Or Kia is a decent guy despite the cool frazzled look because he's willing to dance with the fat girl. Most of all, we feel the clan's fraternity and good-will, expressed through drunken banter and druggy dancing, topped off with a nice pop song which takes us into the night and into the opening credits.