Often associated with being the entry point to Asia, given its geographical locale and robust business sector, Singapore's image is excoriated and inverted in Eric Khoo's Mee Pok Man, a film which provides an empathetic lens to the day-to-day struggles of common working class people seeking a better life. Subversive and uncomfortable, Khoo's film details the underbelly of Singapore for many natives, an affront to the notion of meritocracy-based class movement defined in the age of global capital. The narrative hints at an uncommon love story between a painstakingly shy Mee Pok cook and a despondent sex worker yet it subverts the common archetype of love being liberation, enunciating through its somewhat cynical social-political worldview an environment which in itself suppresses this notion of peace and happiness which connection can obtain. This subversive and unlikely connection that unfolds is driven in large party by cruel, hard environment they inhabit, these disparate souls forming a sense of connection through transference of communal pain rather than personal affection. Stunning debut feature that is raw in its formalism yet focused in its underlying thematic conception, Eric Khoo eschews the often utopian type notions placed on economic growth and development, delivering a powerful, unorthodox portrait of the lower class struggle for a better life amongst the dynamic seas of transnationalism
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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