Love Conquers All

Love, that many splendoured thing, is the source of much joy and angst. (And many an embarrassing pop song.) At once selfless and selfish, love makes martyrs of us when it waxes, and monsters of us when it wanes.

Love is the great subversive force.

You are no longer you when you fall in love. Bewitched, you are Possibility.
Love is why Winston risked it all, even if in vain in the end, in Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four. It is what makes Bogart's non-committal cynic Rick Blane a hero, despite himself, in the fight against the Nazis in Casablanca.

Love transcends difference, reduces to nonsense the admonishments of old fogeys, makes possible the impossible, as Romeo and Juliet demonstrate, tragically.

Wading into this timeworn but eternal subject is Malaysian filmmaker Tan Chui Mui, with her feature debut Love Conquers All.

Love, so the title of her film suggests, will overcome, and indeed its story of A Boy and A Girl has that transcendental quality. But this is so only in the most ironic of ways, for the metaphor for the lovers is not the bee and the flower, or even the maiden and the knight.

No.

It is the toilet and the scrub.

This low-down, dirty symbolism emerges midway in the film when love has finally blossomed. The two lovers stand before a mirror, he embracing her from behind, she in a new dress. They admire the vision of them.

His stubble rubs against her neck.

She says it tickles. In fact, feels like a toilet scrub.

He says, don't call yourself a toilet.

"Toilet scrub,"she teases him.

"Toilet,"he rejoins.

Still in that giddy state of discovery, they continue to exchange the newfound endearments. But thereafter, as foreshadowed, their love threatens to sink to that level of depravity, whereupon the motif of the toilet resurfaces.

Love debases itself in this film, normalises the unthinkable. Behind innocence, there lurks cynicism, behind sacrifice manipulation, behind the seeming spontaneity cold calculation: What price love?

This is the question at the heart of Love Conquers All.

Tan's film is an angry film. Or more accurately, it is an exasperated film. Its leanings are feminist, and its concerns are the credulous young women we read of so often in the papers, lured into prostitution, sometimes willingly.

This is Tan's bewildering story about them.

The form of the film follows its content, moving from love's uncertain but exciting early dance to its ugly revelation. It is structured to put us in the girl's shoes, as she travels from small town to city, experiences love's quickening and is revealed to its dark side.

Tan Chui Mui may be ironic, and often she is oblique in the way she tells her story, but you can never accuse her of being coy about what her story is about. From the opening scene, she telegraphs to us that Ah Ping (Coral Ong) is in for a tough time. This is her bus ride to the city, a bumpy ride made comic by an old man with too many baggage who abruptly bursts into tears.

Not good.

In the city, Ah Ping meets John (Stephen Chua), and they engage in a courtship ritual that is strange, often indirect, frequently funny. It is refreshing. Even riveting. Tan has a deft touch when it comes to the dynamics of character interaction, and we are drawn into the push and pull of boy and girl.

And then come the hints of John's true intentions.

"Girls are basically stupid,"says the brutish-looking "anti-hero" to Ah Ping. "And the prettier they are the stupider."

He tells her this after they bump into his Indian "cousin" and his girlfriend. His cousin, John explains, finds a new girl every few months and prostitutes her. He tells Ah Ping the man's m.o. and how invariably, the girls acquiesce.

Love. It isn't always sugar and spice.

Love. It is very much in the air, from the parallel story of Ah Ping's young cousin's infatuation with an anonymous pen pal, to the corny TV series Ah Ping and her aunt watch nightly. But between fantasy and reality, there is a big gap - men are conspicuous by their absence from her aunt's household.

And John is not what he seems.

When the indecent proposal comes, it is scarcely a surprise. Ah Ping finds herself confronted with the self-same dilemma faced by the stupid, nameless girls John has told her about. She mulls, she looks lost, she misses him.

What will she do?

Does she even need to think about it?

Love. The viewer is bewildered, for Ah Ping remains an enigma, beyond scrutiny. We are not privy to her thoughts. We observe, she says little, and we can only guess. Is our bewilderment with the girl the filmmaker's?

I'm inclined to think so.

I can't shake off the feeling that Ah Ping, as bravely and soulfully rendered by Ong as she is, is a mere pawn in Tan's social drama; there to make a point: the character is subservient to the message.

As artfully made as it is, Love Conquers All is, in the final analysis, merely a cautionary tale. It is a warning to all girls of the pitfalls of love.

This makes it more of a "message film" than anything else, and not especially compelling stuff.

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