Babi thinks the message behind the movie is fucked up. I'm not quite so unforgiving lah. After all, the movie did deliver its entertainment value. I don't usually bother to scale the moral high ground over a film unless morals are the main driver of the plot (e.g., A Time To Kill, Lions For Lambs, etc).
Wong Li-Lin reprises her usual intellectual-girl-next-door persona, and delivers. Nadya Hutagalung and Paula Malai Ali thrown in as token BFFs make happy campers of the general, undiscerning male population (my babi included). No shortage of eye candy aside, I thought the use of soft focus in the cinematography captured the essence of the movie. And Corinne May is such apt choice for a soundtrack that rings of bittersweetness and reminiscence.
Sure, I did wonder...
1) How come Li-Lin's BFF entourage are all half-ang moh ang mo pai kantangs (reflect the average Singaporean demographic meh?).
2) How Li-Lin and her seamstress mom can afford to live in a typical expat abode (KNN, do the producers actually know how much it costs to live in a shophouse?!!)
3) How come the skanky kantang Nadya and the chee na pai Qi Yuwu can ever in this lifetime hook up (unless he marry down lor) is quite beyond me.
4) How Qi Yuwu can be as 潇洒 and 伟大 as to help his former love rival score the girl he lost to him (he stopped Wong Li-Lin's wedding so that she and Ananda could have the chance to ride off into the golden sunset together). Seriously lor, if I were Qi Yuwu, I would smirk, just drive on by, and then smirk some more. Even if he weren't the comeuppance type, c'mon lor, men just don't pull dramamama stunts like this in real life. It goes against their very nature.
5) How come Ananda Everingham's eyesore of a mole went MIA in old age.
6) How come women in movies seem to fall for the nomadic, tortured artist type with skeletons in his closet...complete with Jesus Christ hair, beat-up leather satchel and that journal de rigueur to pen his intellectual musings down at cafes (no Starbucks please...too corporate sellout, too wannabe wannabe).
7) How come women in movies seem to prefer #6 instead of Jason Chan (Raymond, Li-Lin's dumped-at-the-altar bridegroom). I mean, c'mon, the guy is the epitome of safe (right down to his neatly combed hair and his witty repartee). He looks polished and confident, having arrived early at the upper echelons of his station in life. He also looks exactly the type of profession the Singaporean woman aims for in her life partner (i.e., doctor, banker, lawyer). You think any smart modern Singaporean female with an ounce of brain would go for the mangy pariah when she can have The Status Provider meh? Unless she's a starry-eyed teenager lor.
Now, if you can suspend all disbelief and chuck common sense at the door, you will enjoy the ride. But this is, after all, a chick flick at heart...it would appeal to the emotional, the dreamer and the escapist (i.e., not the gender with the dangly bits, excepting the broken-wristed or the man-trapped-in-woman-body types lah).
Babi is spot on about the message being...it's ok (romantic even!) to long for another when your fiance is on her deathbed, notwithstanding the probability that the one yearned for is your soulmate and the one dying is the one you settled for. An affair romanticized and glossed over with the whole fate/destiny shebang is still an affair, my ever-logical babi reckons. He's not wrong, coming from an analytical point of view.
Being typically charbor though, I am dead sucker for the whole agony-of- soulmates-kept-apart-by-damning-circumstances shit. I sniveled through Happy Birthday, wept buckets at Legends Of The Fall, bawled out loud at Cinema Paradiso (the kissing montage at the end is definitive romantic cinema)...but every molecule of every fibre of ME enjoyed every snort-filled, runny-nosed moment of 'em all.
A sin romanticized is still romantic. Romance doesn't have to be realistic. Romance doesn't have to make sense. Romance certainly knows neither scruples nor is it capable of the rational. Romance is never painted in black and white, but steeped in myriad shades of greys. Romance, unlike love, or more accurately, commitment, doesn't have to be sound. Romance is all that is throw-caution-to-the-wind and bask-in-the-heady-abandonment-of-reason. Romance, above all, is best enjoyed when you can afford to commit quixotic follies (i.e., when youth is on your side or if you're a masochist lor). Or, in the comfort of the big screen as you tuck into your upsized popcorn and soda, Kleenex fully within reach.
Soooo....
I don't care if it's as realistic as Donald Trump's tacky toupe. I don't care if it's clichéd as Afro on a negro. I don't care if it descends into melodramatic madness à la Taiwanese television. I don't care if I sound petulant. I don't c-a-r-e. If realism is what you crave for, you should just stick to reality and give entertainment like movies a miss. Reality alone is enough of a burden for us to contend with without it seeping into our outlets of escapism.
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