Raffles Hotel

Like at least one other reviewer I was mislead by the DVD sleeve into expecting, 'graphic acts of sex and violence'. If only, at least the periods of confusion and pretentiousness would have been thereby mitigated, at least to some extent. This is a fine writer but on the evidence of this movie, by no means a fine director. This seemed so aimless and, dare I say, facile, that I was not even sure there was a direction or particular 'message' to be discovered. More likely this seemed an attempt at an art house movie without anything visual to impart. One would have expected an established writer to at least have a decent dialogue going between vivid characters even if the visual poetry was stunted. But no, unless I am very much mistaken, this was somebody expecting to achieve much without much input on their part. Positively, having visited Singapore, I was interested to see the local scenes, but that was about it, I'm afraid.

I've watched this film twice and yet still find this an all-too-short mystic epic of mood, music, atmosphere, and three talented actors all wandering about in search of some plot - which in the end they fail to find. I will also note that I was less than enthralled at reading the author's Almost Transparent Blue - in fact, I haven't finished it - a book which (to my clumsy eye) appears such a shallow knock-off of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch or Junkie or - even more lamentably - of Cortazar's incomparably greater work, Hopscotch (Rayuela), as to be pathetic. Yet I'm told the book sold well...

So back to the film. Moeko, who "used to be an actress", has returned, so weighed-down with nostalgia she can hardly walk, to Singapore. A tour guide meets her at the airport and serves her through the film as her guide in search of remnants of her past. We the viewers also search, trying to piece together, through her occasional visions - or hallucinations - or odd out-of-place comments (e.g.,"Have you ever seen a baby smile?") the cause of her apparent psychological stress or to guess at potential denouements. But the film keeps us at a distance. We know she wants to revisit the jungle, that no Japanese was buried at a ground she visits, that someone important to her past once worked at restoring a church, etc., but no one ever asks her - in earshot of the viewer - the simple question, "Why have you come here?".

To openly expose such information, apparently, would have been too easy, too unarty - but the viewer can't but wonder if the Director/Author himself had decided after even the first two-thirds of the film just how to piece together coherency. He was apparently concentrating on outdoing Fellini's 8-1/2, but somewhere failed to comprehend or fully appreciate the fact that Fellini's lead character coherently develops (in somewhat expressionist style) universal problems we all to some degree face. Then, I presume, some accountant's budgetary report arrived - or he was offered a better job - or he awoke to what he'd actually wrought - and decided to bring a quick end to it. Indeed, the end does - at least to my taste - arrive far too soon, with a quasi Twilight Zone conclusion, without ever allowing from Moeko's zombiesque torment a coherent evolution of details that might have formed a message of personal value to the viewer.

This film - in my view - exposes a danger of author-directorship, i.e., a lack of peer critique. An Antonioni or Fellini - or many a lesser director - would have forced the needed balance of coherency and universal message from the author.