Complete first draft for Vinegar Syndrome/Film Movement.
Rare is the film, like Yeo Siew Hua's Stranger Eyes, whose primary lines of artistic interest can be traced to two distinct points, individuals with specific backgrounds and means of expression whose paths had never intersected. I'm sure that you, the reader, have a much greater familiarity with one of them, who I'll get to in due course, but first I'd like to turn to the more conventional auteur at work here. The history of Singaporean cinema on the world stage is relatively short and too often lumped into a broader wave of Chinese cinema without regard for the sociopolitical (not to mention geographic and linguistic) separation of the island. One of the newest and most prominent Singaporean directors is Yeo Siew Hua, who started out as a member of the nation's 13 Little Pictures collective. After his experimental debut feature In the House of Straw (2009) and the music documentary The Obs: A Singapore Story (2014), Yeo unexpectedly broke out with A Land Imagined (2018). It won the Golden Leopard at the 2018 Locarno Film Festival, from a jury chaired by the legendary Chinese director Jia Zhangke and which happened to include Sean Baker among its ranks. This award registered as a significant achievement on multiple fronts. For one, it was the first top competition prize won by a Singaporean film at any of the four most significant European festivals. For another, it was the final winner of Carlo Chatrian's celebrated tenure as Locarno artistic director, which began in 2013 and saw a renaissance in both programming and awarding, with Yeo joining a formidable group of winning directors that included Albert Serra, Lav Diaz, Hong Sang-soo, and Wang Bing. That Yeo's win capped off Chatrian's tenure felt rather fitting: a new but already formidable auteur with a film that bent the rules of genre to his own ends, just as surely as his predecessors did with their own forms of slow cinema. A Land Imagined is a film commonly described as a neo-noir but which—entirely for the better—only fits that description in the barest of outlines. Though it begins (after a short, enigmatic pre-credit sequence) with Lok, a police officer, investigating the disappearance of Wang, a Chinese migrant construction worker on a massive land reclamation project, Yeo spends fewer than 20 minutes on this thread before moving back in time to Wang's point of view in the weeks before the present day. Though the film eventually circles back to Lok in its final third and a gun is actually fired, the mystery is beside the point, with the emphasis firmly upon central questions of identity, for both the two main characters and the soil they trod upon. The former is baked into the narrative—the ostensible explanation for the central, half-film-long flashback is that the two men are dreaming of each other—while the latter emerges at crucial junctures: during one of Wang's nocturnal outings, he goes to the beach in an area that used to be part of the sea, noting that even the sand he lays on is imported from Malaysia. The land reclamation project that Wang works on, as one of the overseers mentions to Lok, is continual with no particular end goal in mind. It eventually becomes clear that every character exists within a continual state of both stasis and change, one that rhymes with the slipperiness of the genre narrative they eventually inhabit. Yeo himself commented upon this in the second issue of Cambodian film magazine MARG1N, reflecting upon his own recent rewatch of his film. He laments that a key cybercafé has been consumed by gentrification, the migrant workers were largely replaced, and even the reclaimed land has been taken over: "What appear as desolate wastelands in A Land Imagined are in fact sites of grand potential, the sandy foundations of national imaginations. These sites of construction, of works in progress, of transformations, no longer exist. They never existed in the first place, remaining stillborn." What happens to the contested ground once it's disappeared, and to the psyches of the people living on it, forms a crucial part of Stranger Eyes. -- It's likely that no actor has ever been more inextricable from their director's body of work in the cinephile consciousness than Lee Kang-sheng and Tsai Ming-liang. While everyone from Setsuko Hara to Marcello Mastroianni to Gena Rowlands to Kyle MacLachlan to Kim Min-hee made significant films outside of their main directorial collaborations, it would appear to practically any viewer that Lee exists solely in relation to Tsai. Their director-muse collaboration has now lasted for about thirty-five years without stopping, such is the watchfulness of Tsai as he has filmed Lee aging with the most loving of gazes. But Tsai himself would be the first to refute the idea that Lee is exclusively "his" actor. In his lovely documentary Afternoon (2015), a filmed real-time conversation between the two in their shared home, Tsai actively encourages his friend to work with other directors, clarifying that he's not worried that such experiences would change Lee. Indeed, during the first decade of their collaboration, Lee appeared in five non-Tsai films—including two for Lin Cheng-sheng and one for Hong Kong treasure Ann Hui, where he was disconcertingly dubbed into Cantonese—which generally existed in the vicinity of Taiwan New Cinema's second wave. But from 2003 to 2014, during some of the most fruitful years of their collaboration, Lee only appeared in Tsai's films, aside from Help Me Eros (2007), the second of Lee's own two feature directorial works, both intriguing twists on Tsai's style. Since then, however, Lee's acting roles in non-Tsai films have ramped up considerably, especially since 2020. He has appeared in at least 16 such movies, most of which bear no resemblance whatsoever to the slow cinema that Tsai is so famous for: schlocky horror fare (The Rope Curse 2, Abyssal Spider), erotic Taiwanese-Japanese dramas (Sashimi, Hotel Iris), triad gangster thrillers (Everything Is Unknown, Lost in Forest). The prominence of these roles varies, from mere cameo appearances to full-fledged leading roles, but for anyone even remotely invested in Tsai's cinema, the sheer incomprehensibility of what is unfolding never fully goes away. Each of these roles, considering the genre variety at play, pulls at limits, less of Lee than of our expectations of what he is capable of as an actor. Judging from both Afternoon and my own Q&As with him, the closest cinematic analogues to his normal temperament are, in fact, his performances across Tsai's narrative films. He may be more voluble and behave more expressively, but the same world-weary affect is present the majority of the time. So, it is a shock to see him spouting generic dialogue, getting in fights, or acting terrified of a CGI ghoul, and doubly so to find that he's perfectly functional in those roles; if it wasn't for the cinematic baggage he brings, it'd even be possible to imagine him as "just" a moderately talented studio film mainstay. However, that baggage simultaneously holds him back and makes him pop every single moment he's onscreen. For all the pro forma busywork he communicates, there is no getting past two essential parts of his screen presence: his physicality—short-statured, weathered, ever-watchful (especially facially)—and his voice, slightly halting and labored in a manner that's instantly recognizable. It might be most helpful to regard those as baseline traits, impossible to disentangle from Lee no matter what role he plays onscreen. In Tsai's films, the strictures of conventional filmmaking that often seek to tamp down actors' idiosyncrasies are absent, and thus his muse's most distinctive qualities are magnified. He's certainly capable of acting normal, but the collision between mere competence and pensive transcendence projects a continual double image, making "ordinary" actions much more fascinating than if performed by any other actor. Though you could guess that Lee's cinephilic allure has been harnessed in even some of his most generic films, the three recent films he's appeared in that have actually made an impression outside of Taiwan—of which Stranger Eyes is the latest and greatest example—all near-explicitly cast him as the embodiment of a certain ideal of contemplative cinema. The two that preceded Yeo both happened to be feature directorial debuts. Chinese director Wu Lang's Absence (2023) offers the most direct recreation of Tsai's style and channeling of Lee's established persona—all moodiness and minimal dialogue—but places it in a mainland seaside context that's somewhat airier than cramped Taipei. American filmmaker Constance Tsang opted for an entirely different side of Lee in Blue Sun Palace (2024), casting him as a lowkey lothario who comes to tentatively romance two women consecutively in Queens, New York; though they are the focus, it is his face over which the end credits roll, a return to his "normal" state after he is seen singing karaoke and living out an ordinary American immigrant life. -- Any markers of normalcy are crucially absent from Stranger Eyes. In an odd coincidence, Lee Kang-sheng's debut feature The Missing (2003) prefigured both it—one plot strand follows a woman who loses her grandchild in a playground—and A Land Imagined—the other tracks a young man who plays Counter-Strike in a cybercafé—but while Lee's film followed the frenzied mania of someone flailing to correct a tragic situation, Yeo's explores the long aftermath. His characters have been locked into the rhythms of obsession over the missing daughter for so long that their affect, behavior, and even physical movements have taken on a narcotized sensation, as if A Land Imagined's insomniacs were reincarnated into our newfound protagonists. Like A Land Imagined, Stranger Eyes doesn't have one singular focal point, opting for hand-offs between multiple characters. But while that film had two fairly clean pivots from cop to worker to cop, Yeo roughly divides the film into four parts, with the second and longest from Wu's point of view and the third and fourth cleft by the return of Junyang and Peiying's daughter. While the other three segments deal overtly with mystery and tend towards the oneiric, Wu's part is a flashback that deliberately offers no resolution to the central disappearance, with the security camera dates delineating a forty-day period well before Xiaobo goes missing. What transpires instead is an extended, matter-of-fact observation of an observer, one at once familiar and alien. The average Lee fan would never mistake this as a performance that would comfortably fit into a Tsai film—and the novelty of seeing him tune into a Twitch DJ set or go ice skating is delightful—but his performance lacks the more extroverted tendencies of a standard thriller he would have starred in around this time. The main distinguishing factor between this and Tsai, oddly, might be a slight relaxation, a relatively secure economic position and a remove afforded by his technological apparatuses that is eroded by the lines on his face, the recognizable worry that takes over at crucial junctures. Stranger Eyes takes place in much more sophisticated, privileged, and ostensibly permanent settings than its predecessor's migrant dormitories, but the same feeling of unbelonging is there. It's worth noting that three of the four main actors—including Wu Chien-ho and Lee's The Rope Curse 2 co-star Vera Chen as the grandmother—are Taiwanese, while Anicca Panna is from mainland China, though the precise national origins of the characters are kept unclear: Lee's mother speaks Hokkien, a variant of Chinese commonly spoken in both Taiwan and Singapore, while he and every other character sticks to Mandarin. Though there are interactions with English-speakers, mainly confined to Junyang's flirtations, the dislocation feels most acute when Yeo focuses on the technology that enables the complexity of his characters' interactions. Obsolescent media lingers like a ghost from the land's past: DVDs and handheld camcorders coexisting uneasily with iPhones and panoptic hi-def police surveillance. It's certainly no accident that the closest moment of connection in all of Stranger Eyes—the conclusion of Wu's segment as Peiying dances in his store—is done remotely, Wu watching through security cameras as he plays Tsai Chin's "Unforgettable Love" off his iPhone. The original Chinese title, roughly translated to "silent video recording," is instructive here: the cameras and their operators watch, but they can't come close to divining the true meaning behind a particular action or sequence of events. Stranger Eyes thus acts as a series of inversions, with each member of the central trio following another—on foot or via video—in an effort to not only discover a pattern of behavior, but to attempt to come to an understanding of their psyche. Even Lee Kang-sheng himself, in his final audio-only scene, speaking as if he was a still-breathing ghost, can only bridge the gap by explaining that he has no explanations for the meaning behind the images he is capturing. All that can be done is to keep watching, not for signs of criminality as the police are content to do, but as a form of foolhardy yet truthful dedication.
