Flower in The Pocket

By Lee Zhiang Yang

There is a great danger in judging Liew Seng Tat's maiden effort - for it will feel like you are judging children. As the man himself concedes openly, filming children in movies is a forewarned pitfall if you believe the things they tell you in film school. Having not been to one, Liew can at least be proud about being part of the oft-cited Malaysian New Wave of filmmaking, and that his quiet offering "Flower In The Pocket" has a strong case for having won some awards at Pusan earlier this year.

Art film aficionados will inevitably cite Truffaut's "Les Quatre Cents Coups" ("The 400 Blows" 1959) when watching this but a more accurate comparison would be the same director's "L'Argent De Poche" (better known as "Pocket Change" 1976). The goal is invariable - to make a movie about children without a value judgement, yet to make it interesting enough to provoke thought. Nobody wants to watch an art film with screaming morals being shoved down your throat. Nobody wants to watch a commercial movie that is decidedly boring and low-key either. Liew's modest accomplishment is reconciling the two.

However, while Truffaut's progress between the doggedly unflinching "Les Quatre Cents Coups" and the surprisingly softer "L'Argent De Poche" is one that relents to betray his sentiments for children, Liew still has far to go if he is to avoid the great director's weakness. While "Flower" manages to avoid sympathising with its characters, there is a steady stream of fleeting imagery that almost subversively suggests otherwise. Not to have an opinion is sometimes an opinion in itself.

Ideological lamentations aside, "Flower In The Pocket" owes its technical soundness partly due to the various Da Huang crew who oversee it, like producer Tan Chui Mui who directed the previous Pusan New Currents winner "Love Conquers All" and purportedly used the prize money to fund this in an interestingly circular state of affairs. It also benefits from the solid deadpan acting from another proponent of the local indie film front, the multi-talented James Lee. Playing the self-isolating but never self-pitying father of two boys who are motherless, Lee lends astute realism to a character we expect to only see and not hear, along with the enthusiastic performance of Amira Nasuha who plays a tomboy friend to the brothers. The two boys however (Wong Zi Jiang and Lim Ming Wei) did their best and probably went through some strenuous coaching by Liew but their sentient age gives rise to budding pride and nervous camera awareness.

The story in "Flower" is decent, perhaps even too decent, due to the offbeat character study that operates within it to a level of believability not immediately dismissible. Scenes of the two boys sucking ketchup sachets like ice-cream would invite empathy for the quaint and Liew's idea to have the self-resigned (and now celibate) father carry mannequins around in suggestive positions hint of the director's naughty but thoughtful signature.

However, aside from the deceptive 'message' scenes that will largely elude us, there is still a prevailing aura of optimism in "Flower" which lies. 'Backwater' Jinjang feels too quiet, too casual and even too beautiful to be true - but perhaps this is precisely what Liew tries to suggest it is like for the characters in the film who are long deadened by circumstance and are only trying to get from one day to the next.

So "Flower" resists the self-pleasing esoteric charm of something like Linus Chung's "A Note Of Love" but also refuses to discuss the darker side of things like Deepak Menon's "Chalanggai" - to end up holding its own in a year of many notable independent films. The proverbial flower is not as colourful as one would have expected but the cinematic flourish of films like these are mostly rewarding. Open and steady your eyes - you might leave with a pocketful.

Quote from:
http://www.cinemaonline.com.my/movie/movie.asp?search=flowerpocket

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