my Singapore Gaga review
I finally went to watch Singapore Gaga last Wednesday night, and it sucked, big time.
It was a bit of an adventure even getting there. First, I couldn’t book tickets cos I don’t have a credit card, so had to keep reminding sis to do it. By the time she got around to it, it turned out the movie was so popular that we had to wait another 2 weeks to watch it. On the evening we had tickets, I called sis to meet up, turns out she was having a crazy day at work, and so was very late meeting me. With 5 minutes left before the movie started, we walked all the way to the Esplanade before we realized we were walking in the wrong direction, practical ran our way past the Padang and finally stumbled into the Arts House (which, by the way, is a pretty swank-lookin’ nicely-renovated colonial heritage building). We’d already missed 20 minutes of the 55-minute film, but insisted on going in since we couldn’t get our money back anyway. Now, trying to find 2 empty seats at a sold-out show in the dark is not as easy as you’d imagine, so we just sat on the floor and hurt our backs, necks, legs and bums for what was left of the show.
So granted, I already wasn’t in the best of moods. Still, I don’t believe I would’ve enjoyed the show much more than I did had I not already been through all that.
The film synopsis boasts that Singapore Gaga is about “the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural landscape”. I’d say that’s a bit of a stretch. The film is really a rojak mish-mash of mini-narratives about street performers and other little-known musicians who play instruments like the harmonica and the toy piano, with a few radio announcers and the voice of the MRT thrown in. A lot of the sequences were long, drawn-out and so boring I felt like screaming at some points. Film-makers are supposed to throw our lives back at us in a new light, or give us a fresh perspective on it, or give us something interesting to think about. Besides the little funny bit about the recorder, this film did none of that. If I see the woman selling tissue paper in Simei or the singing and dancing man in the red clogs at Tanjong Pagar MRT everyday, simply sticking a camera in their faces and putting that on a screen is not gonna do anything for me.
And you know, it really pisses me off when things that are passed off as markers of ‘Singaporean’ culture are really markers of ‘Chinese Singaporean’ culture, as in the case of this film. Throwing in one tokenistic interview with an Indian, one 2-minute segment of Malay kids singing in Arabic, and fixing your camera’s gaze on a few ethnic minority faces here and there doesn’t count much for representation.
The bits about radio announcers who speak in Chinese dialects and the way the filmmaker dealt with the subject of the loss of Chinese dialects in Singapore were good, but too fleeting and perfunctory to make any kind of lasting impact.
Meanwhile, there’s a portion of the film that’s either a dawn or dusk shot along Serangoon Road, at a field where hundreds of male Bangladeshi migrant workers are hanging out, some being herded onto buses. It’s interesting whose voices are privileged in those shots. Part of the segment is filmed following a woman with a megaphone, belting out to the workers through the din of chatter to wait while she tells them which one her bus is. The rest of the segment is filmed through the window of a cab, the sounds from outside buffered by the whirrings of the inside of a vehicle and the sound of a radio announcer speaking in a Chinese dialect. The migrant workers remain voiceless, seen but never really heard, simply another “quirky” addition to the sights and sounds of the Singaporean landscape. In keeping with the nationalist theme of the film, this depiction only serves to reinforce the exclusion of migrant workers from the national narrative, invisibilize their exploitation for the benefit of citizens, and downplay their role in keeping the Singapore economy going.
I’d say the best thing about Singapore Gaga was its marketing campaign. Quite frankly, for a film without any big studio backing, the filmmaker did a pretty good job of getting the word out there through its website, eye-catching poster and other grassroots marketing techniques. Tickets were selling out so fast that more show times were added on for the last few weeks of the film’s run time. And I didn’t read a single bad review of this film anywhere. Which is not necessarily a good thing. I agree that it’s important to support local, independent artists and all, but support and blind cheer-leading are not the same thing. Needless to say, I’ll be a lot more wary of what Singaporean reviewers say about Singaporean films from now on.
It was a bit of an adventure even getting there. First, I couldn’t book tickets cos I don’t have a credit card, so had to keep reminding sis to do it. By the time she got around to it, it turned out the movie was so popular that we had to wait another 2 weeks to watch it. On the evening we had tickets, I called sis to meet up, turns out she was having a crazy day at work, and so was very late meeting me. With 5 minutes left before the movie started, we walked all the way to the Esplanade before we realized we were walking in the wrong direction, practical ran our way past the Padang and finally stumbled into the Arts House (which, by the way, is a pretty swank-lookin’ nicely-renovated colonial heritage building). We’d already missed 20 minutes of the 55-minute film, but insisted on going in since we couldn’t get our money back anyway. Now, trying to find 2 empty seats at a sold-out show in the dark is not as easy as you’d imagine, so we just sat on the floor and hurt our backs, necks, legs and bums for what was left of the show.
So granted, I already wasn’t in the best of moods. Still, I don’t believe I would’ve enjoyed the show much more than I did had I not already been through all that.
The film synopsis boasts that Singapore Gaga is about “the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural landscape”. I’d say that’s a bit of a stretch. The film is really a rojak mish-mash of mini-narratives about street performers and other little-known musicians who play instruments like the harmonica and the toy piano, with a few radio announcers and the voice of the MRT thrown in. A lot of the sequences were long, drawn-out and so boring I felt like screaming at some points. Film-makers are supposed to throw our lives back at us in a new light, or give us a fresh perspective on it, or give us something interesting to think about. Besides the little funny bit about the recorder, this film did none of that. If I see the woman selling tissue paper in Simei or the singing and dancing man in the red clogs at Tanjong Pagar MRT everyday, simply sticking a camera in their faces and putting that on a screen is not gonna do anything for me.
And you know, it really pisses me off when things that are passed off as markers of ‘Singaporean’ culture are really markers of ‘Chinese Singaporean’ culture, as in the case of this film. Throwing in one tokenistic interview with an Indian, one 2-minute segment of Malay kids singing in Arabic, and fixing your camera’s gaze on a few ethnic minority faces here and there doesn’t count much for representation.
The bits about radio announcers who speak in Chinese dialects and the way the filmmaker dealt with the subject of the loss of Chinese dialects in Singapore were good, but too fleeting and perfunctory to make any kind of lasting impact.
Meanwhile, there’s a portion of the film that’s either a dawn or dusk shot along Serangoon Road, at a field where hundreds of male Bangladeshi migrant workers are hanging out, some being herded onto buses. It’s interesting whose voices are privileged in those shots. Part of the segment is filmed following a woman with a megaphone, belting out to the workers through the din of chatter to wait while she tells them which one her bus is. The rest of the segment is filmed through the window of a cab, the sounds from outside buffered by the whirrings of the inside of a vehicle and the sound of a radio announcer speaking in a Chinese dialect. The migrant workers remain voiceless, seen but never really heard, simply another “quirky” addition to the sights and sounds of the Singaporean landscape. In keeping with the nationalist theme of the film, this depiction only serves to reinforce the exclusion of migrant workers from the national narrative, invisibilize their exploitation for the benefit of citizens, and downplay their role in keeping the Singapore economy going.
I’d say the best thing about Singapore Gaga was its marketing campaign. Quite frankly, for a film without any big studio backing, the filmmaker did a pretty good job of getting the word out there through its website, eye-catching poster and other grassroots marketing techniques. Tickets were selling out so fast that more show times were added on for the last few weeks of the film’s run time. And I didn’t read a single bad review of this film anywhere. Which is not necessarily a good thing. I agree that it’s important to support local, independent artists and all, but support and blind cheer-leading are not the same thing. Needless to say, I’ll be a lot more wary of what Singaporean reviewers say about Singaporean films from now on.
posted by burgers and durians at
9:35 PM
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