A Fantastic Ghost Wedding

Death and the afterlife are pretty grim topics for a comedy, but writer-director Meng Ong just about pulls it off in A Fantastic Ghost Wedding. This darkly amiable film isn't quite as polished as you might hope, and stumbles badly in an oddly-executed final act. But it wears its big, silly, open heart on its sleeve, and is buoyed by a very good, totally game cast led by two of the region's most adept comedians - Hong Kong's Sandra Ng and Singapore's Mark Lee.

Washed-up former singer Mrs Wu (Ng) is beside herself with grief. Peng (Wang Po Chieh), her beloved son, has been found dead in a local river, taking with him her heart and her hopes for his future. She comforts herself by spoiling him with luxury items in the afterlife, and soon, she finds herself contemplating another old Chinese ritual for the dead: finding him a wife. She enlists the services of Master Wong (Mark Lee) and his adorable apprentice/son Boy (Keane Chan). But the hunt for a perfect match for Peng takes an unexpected turn: one that forces Mrs Wu to really examine her relationship with her son, just as Master Wong must evaluate the pressure he places on his Boy to take over the spooky family business.

Ong's script does a fairly effective job of balancing the tragedy and comedy of Mrs Wu's situation: she harangues everyone around her, including her gloomy husband (Jim Chim), into getting the very best in afterlife amenities for her son. But there's a real sadness here to her loss, one that plays very well into the twist embedded into her search for a daughter-in-law. It's a point many of us can take to heart: you can love someone without ever really listening to them, or accepting them for who they really are. For every moment of madcap silliness (Master Wong trying to pinpoint a wife for Peng outside a factory full of female workers), A Fantastic Ghost Wedding finds something almost painfully truthful to say about losing sight of the people you love while they're still alive.

It's a shame, then, that the film loses track of itself in its final third. Even as Mrs Wu is eaten up by guilt and the sad secret she's keeping close to her chest, Master Wong's own determination to prove to Boy that ghosts really do exist forces the script to head into an almost delirious stretch in which paper dolls strut across grass fields and characters confess all in teary, blue-lit moments. Perhaps we're never meant to know just exactly what happens at that point - is Master Wong running a complicated scam? - but it's a confusing and arguably deflating way to tie up the narrative's loose ends.

At least Ong's three leads are well worth the watch. With her sensitive performance, Ng proves that tragedy and comedy are more closely related than you'd expect: in the same scene, she can punch you in the gut with the weight of Mrs Wu's grief, even as she makes you laugh over her character's desperate antics. Lee, too, is an adept comedian who manages to find the darker emotional undercurrents in the relationship with his son. The film also marks an astonishingly assured silver-screen debut for Chan, who is adorably affecting whether he's running around with a sword or trying to puzzle out why his mother refuses to make contact with him from the afterlife.

Strictly speaking, A Fantastic Ghost Wedding isn't a great movie - it's filled with some lovely moments and its cast is great (though Wang and Kenji Fitzgerald, as Peng's friend Ryan, are pretty stilted), but Ong doesn't quite manage to make it gel into a coherent whole. Nevertheless, its core message of love and acceptance is so tender, sweet and unexpectedly brave for local mainstream cinema that it's easy to forgive the film its many flaws.

As much as 'A Fantastic Ghost Wedding' has been sold as a crowd- pleasing comedy, it really isn't very funny at all. Yes, those looking for the kind of broad laughs in the vein of Hong Kong comedian Sandra Ng's 'All's Well Ends Well' or our very own Mark Lee's 'Money No Enough' series will probably come off disappointed, because there are few singularly hilarious laugh-out-loud moments to be found here. But that doesn't mean you should simply dismiss this first pairing between Ng and Lee, for what it lacks in terms of humour, it sure makes up for in thoughtfulness and poignancy.

Credit that to Meng Ong's script, based upon his own story, which deals with the themes of love, loss and letting go with (pleasantly) surprising nuance. This is one of those movies where the synopsis doesn't do it any justice, because though it is ostensibly about a father-son medium pair (played by Lee and newcomer Keane Chan) helping a grieving mother (Ng) to find a wife for her deceased son in the afterlife, there is so much more about Ng's relationship with her son or Lee's own with his Boy and their parallels that a simple one-paragraph description cannot quite fully articulate.

That said, aside from the initial meet-greet (arising from a recommendation from Marcus Chin's shopowner of paper offerings for the dead) and a montage of sequences thereafter of the ritual proper, Ng and Lee don't share the screen as much as one may have expected. Instead, Ong, who also directs the movie, divides Ng's time threeways – one, between her and her husband (Jim Chim) whom she has grown increasingly distant from since their son's death; two, visions of her and her son in the afterlife against nicely CG- ed backdrops of paper bungalows, cars, and even an aeroplane; and finally between her and Lee's Master Wong, whom she largely regards as no more than a conman.

On the other hand, Lee balances his time with Ng against that with his own son alone, as Ong portrays how their unconventional trade has come at the expense of Boy's friendships with his classmates (who shun him for being someone who consorts with ghosts) as well as that of his time needed for homework and preparing for examinations. Boy also gets to come to terms with a mother he never knew, in particular through a heart-breaking sequence which sees him try to summon his mother's spirit in order to communicate with her, only to have his own belief in the existence of ghosts challenged when she doesn't show up (for good reason, we may add).

That is a lot to go on for a 97-minute movie, and the fact that Ong manages to develop each of these overlapping but largely separate plot lines is praise-worthy in itself. Each of them coalesce beautifully around the central themes mentioned earlier, and it is towards the end when we see Ong tying them all together for a climax built on a wedding ceremony between the living and the dead that we fully comprehend Ong's intention for the movie as a whole. In Ng and Lee's relationships with their children, and in that of how Ng and Chan deal with the absence of a loved one, Ong meditates on how our tendencies to dictate the way that we love, whether is it by clinging on to the ones we love or freeing them from the confines of our biases and mindsets, ultimately makes not just us miserable but also the very people we love.

What few commentators have touched upon, but what we feel deserves special mention here, is its delicate handling of a possibly homosexual relationship between Ng's son Peng (Wang Po-Chieh) and Ryan (Kenji Fitzgerald). At the expense of spoiling one of the many surprises of the movie, let's just say that it isn't any coincidence that the person who picks up the diamond ring which Peng's mother offers to find his bride is this white-skinned fellow at the exact spot of his death, and what comes after is testament to Ong's maturity as a director and perhaps one of the most subtle treatment we have seen of a potentially controversial – but no less relevant – subject in a local movie.

It is befitting then that, although Ng and Lee are known for their 'mo lei tau' personalities in other movies, both actors have toned down their more outright comedic sensibilities here. Ng doesn't overplay her character's neuroticism; instead, she easily wins empathy for her gentle portrayal of a mother who is forced, after his death, to come to terms with just how domineering she has been with her son all along. Lee also has good chemistry with Chan, who is also forced to recognise that his blind insistence that his son follow in the footsteps of the family's 'medium' business has made him unable to communicate with his son and at risk of losing the Boy altogether. Ng has good banter with both Lee and Chim, and the choice of casting a Hong Kong actor next to Ng as her husband is an inspired one that makes for a more natural delivery in the former's native Cantonese tongue.

To say that we were surprised by how much we enjoyed 'A Fantastic Ghost Wedding' is an understatement. Indeed, this is one of the very best local films of the year that boasts a multi-layered yet well- developed script, solid direction (without any of the glaring continuity errors we so often see), and engaging performances from a regional cast – most significantly to us, it tackles several complex subjects with confidence, thoughtfulness and nuance. No matter really that it isn't as funny as it has tried to sell itself to be, because it is in refusing to be built on such easier and forgettable pleasures that it manages to be something truly moving and compelling in its own right.