Belly-Dancing Dogs

I was rather miffed that for the last two films in the Focus First Cuts series, Golden Village chose to screen them as a mini-festival as opposed to full commercial releases, since this entailed higher costs on my part. Then again, with the huge load of movies being released right now, I guess it's kinda silly to show anything that hasn't a snowflake's chance in hell of making any money. Not all of them are Crazy Stone after all.

Not that they should be. 太陽雨 (Rain Dogs) from Malaysia is a gentle mood piece that traces the coming of age of a teenage boy, and it works just fine as what it is. The protagonist Tung starts off as an innocent from a small town, visiting his brother in the big city, and barely 5 minutes into the movie, he's robbed of all the money he brought. He looks at everything with wonder, tinged with wariness, and clearly he's unable to fend for himself in that unfamiliar environment.

Then his brother is killed, and the loss of innocence begins. Unable to talk sense into his mother, and unhappy with her deadbeat boyfriend, Tung takes off to a village to stay with an uncle. There, he undergoes a slow journey of self-discovery, taking baby steps towards becoming a man.

What's notable is that this journey is not signposted with big events and transformations. It's the little things that count, and it's a pleasure to see him gradually evolve. The meditative, lulling quality of the Malaysian countryside is essential to the soothing rhythms of the film and the small, tentative changes in him. Tung is reticent, if anything, but this doesn't stop us from feeling what he's feeling. At the end of the film, he has not changed greatly, but we can see that he's taken the first steps towards the rest of his life.

Contrasting with that, 師奶唔易做 (My Mother Is a Belly Dancer) is loud and noisy. It charts the lives of a group of women having their mid-life crises, who take up belly dancing as a hobby but find that it has the power to change their lives. Or does it?

The thing I like about it is that there's a real palpable sense of space. The flats they live in are tiny and claustrophobic, and so are their surroundings, and there's real dirt and grit in their homes and lives. This goes a long way towards making us feel for the characters and their trapped lives.

What's unclear is what belly-dancing has to do with all of this at all. The film badly wants it to be something that lifts them up and out of their troubles and worries - this is seen in many scenes where they dance with abandon and real joy lights up their faces. Yet it also wants to be realistic - belly-dancing is not a cure for their troubles. After the music ends, they all have to go back to their lives, and these are areas in which dancing serves no purpose. It can't put food on the table, it can't make their husbands love them again, it can't find a father for their baby, it can't bring them respect from their husbands and families.

It's an uncomfortable blend of downbeat drama (which feels realistic and good) and feel-good fantasy (which wants to be transcendental but is ultimately artificial), and the two parts are hurting the whole. This, in my opinion, is the biggest failure of the film - not knowing exactly what it wants from the belly-dancing. A temporary escape? A metaphor for a real life? A symbol for who they really want to be? There's a lot of gyrating around with no real point, and ultimately, a pointless movie is an unnecessary one.