Huan tu

What did I just watch?! Was this Singapores attempt to be gritty and surreal. The irony of this movie is that you have a missing insomniac being sought be an insomniac detective and the viewer ends up having to fight to stay awake. I would rather get caught vandalizing cars I. Singapore than be subjected to this again.

A Land Imagined is described as, and perhaps hoped to be, a neo-noir mystery about an insomniac policeman, who somehow dreams (spot the contradiction) his way into solving crimes. ( Hello Special Agent Dale Cooper!) For those hoping for some sort of crime procedural thriller, don't hold your breath, because it never arrives. We don't even find out who reported the missing guy Wang, that Officer Lok seeks and we never actually see Lok in any sort of police environment.

A Land Imagined is one of those badly constructed films that just doesn't know what it wants to be. It's certainly no mystery thriller, though it kind of attempts to start that way. Then Lok disappears from the narrative for a good half of the film as it goes into social critique mode, exploring the lifestyle (if you could call it that) of (cheaper) immigrant workers from (mentioned in the film) Bangladesh and China. This is not to say the concept itself is unworthy of exploration. But it just doesn't fit, done in the neo-surrealistic style we see here, employed by writer/director Yeo Siew Hua, who to be quite frank, just doesn't have the storytelling goods to let all these different influences coalesce coherently into a worthwhile story.

Unless you're looking for relief from insomnia, I recommend staying well away from A Land Imagined.

If you like watching movies that seem to just naturally engender a sweaty, angst-y compulsion amongst reviewers to use words like insouciant, milieu, limns, palimpsest, liminal, peregrinations, and oneiric in a feverish attempt just to DESCRIBE them, then A LAND IMAGINED is just the movie for you; I would show examples of this, but URLs are a giant no-no here on IMDb which I found out the hard way. Ow.

The plot seems simple enough and holds some promise. A Singaporean police detective, Lok, and his partner are investigating the disappearance of a Chinese migrant construction worker who works as part of the massive and never-ending "land reclamation" project in Singapore that's been ongoing since the 60s. This is no small task as countless thousands of migrant construction workers from many different nationalities, living and working in poorly documented and unequivocally exploitive circumstances, make locating any individual one a virtual impossibility. The land reclamation project has been ongoing for around half a century and has literally increased the total landmass of Singapore by slightly more than 20%, just to give you a scale of the project and the number of workers that must be involved.

Structurally, the movie has two primary elements. First is a depiction of Lok and his investigation which opens the movie, and then we switch to a flashback account of the timeline and experiences of the disappeared Chinese migrant construction worker, Wang. When that account comes to a dramatic head, we return to Lok and his investigation and follow that through to the end of the movie.

To be sure, A LAND IMAGINED does have much to recommend it. It does a stellar job of representing the miserable living and working circumstances and exploitation of the migrant construction workers. From a socio-political perspective, this is potential dynamite given the fact that it can't help but be ultra-critical of the political and commercial power structure in Singapore. Singapore is overwhelmingly dominated by the People's Action Party and makes regular use of defamation lawsuits to crush anyone embarrassingly critical of the PAP, its policies and programs. Nobody even pretends that the press is at all "free" in Singapore. You have to give the makers of A LAND IMAGINED serious points just for making the movie at all.

One point that the movie hammers upon repeatedly is the fact that NOBODY really wants to know what happened to Wang. Troublemakers are not appreciated, let sleeping dogs lie and all that. We don't want to irritate the power structure. All of which, of course, left me wondering how did the police actually find out about the disappearance of Wang at all? Who would have reported it? The idea that a couple of police detectives would even be investigating the disappearance of Wang in the first place doesn't jive in any way with anything else we're led to believe about the environment in which the investigation is taking place. Who would have sent out a couple of police detectives to investigate something nobody wants to find out about?

A LAND IMAGINED's execution of its desire to be "neo-noirish" AND surreal in a context of socio-political commentary render it mostly a large, confounding and tedious pill. The acting is good and the cinematography definitely captures a noir sensibility and an excellent representation of the unpleasant life realities of the primary characters, but it does so with so much top loading of stylistic balderdash one spends a lot of time looking for deep meaning that either isn't there or is impossible to sort out. It's just a bunch of stylistic posing. Do we really have to spend THAT much time staring point-blank at some actor's face which is itself staring at something else we can't see while we can't read their mind or the meaning of their blank expression?

And exactly what was the contribution to the movie that we were supposed to glean from watching Lok's wiener boinging around as he runs stark naked on a treadmill? That we have no more control over our lives than a wiener boinging on a treadmill? Or something like that?

If the writer and/or director had merely used their obviously significant skills to create a more comprehensible movie instead of portraying everyone drifting haphazardly and ephemerally from situation to situation it probably would've ended up being a pretty good movie. There's clearly lots of talent here, it's just sad that most of it is being misused to portray abstractions that contribute nothing to the movie but confusion. Certainly Lok's "investigation" was the most vague and noncommittal police investigation I've ever seen in a movie. He spends so much time staring blankly at everything (noirish emoting, I suppose) he didn't have time to do any actual investigating.

I don't know... Perhaps the movie had to be so vague and ephemeral just to get it made in the context of Singaporean political realities. I rather hope so, because at least that would make sense.

"A Land Imagined" may shatter the expectations of traditional film noir fans, much to their detriment. First, it's a courageous profile of Singapore's dismal human rights record in its treatment of fiscally-captive migrant workers by unscrupulous land reclamation firms. Secondly, it takes viewers deep into the surrealist existence of these unfortunates, one of whom has gone missing, the target of Lok (Peter Yu), a troubled but highly-competent insomniac cop. Don't expect a standard police procedural. This one's brilliantly unique.

The story belongs to the also-sleepless worker Wang Bi Cheng (Liu Xiaoyi) trapped in a nightmare world of heavy machinery, starvation pay and miserable worker dorms. Seeking relief, Wang discovers an all-night gaming parlor only to be pounced on by a fierce Internet troll.

Kudos to director Yeo Siew Hua for setting a compelling crime drama among the anonymous men wasting their lives in the service of brutal capitalism. It's a story rich in humanity, a passport to a real-world existence captured perhaps for the first time in cinema.

Great cinematography, good acting, whimsical storyline. I have no idea what the conclusion of the mystery is. It just ends. So if you like atmosphere and brooding and mysticism, check it out. If you like murder mysteries, or mysteries at all, skip this.

Maybe if I understood the culture better, I'd understand what happened? Not sure. It shows some of the mix of cultures in Singapore between the (poor) Chinese and Indians, so that might interest someone as well. As an American interested in Asian cultures, I'm at a loss. If someone understands it, maybe post here what happens in the end? It'd be nice to know.