The 25th anniversary New York Asian Film Festival took place from July 10th to July 26th. For details on what you missed, click here.
Wheel up, wheel up, ladies and gentlemen, as we once again play VN’s favorite festival game: try to describe a movie without actually saying anything about it!
Every year there is always at least one movie, the unfolding of which proves to be a gift of unantcipated and, indeed, unforseeable narrative developments. And, with that, the recognition that to rob people of the chance to experience the pleasures of watching those developments unfold in real time with no prior knowledge would be a crime unto itself. And so the question becomes: how do you recommend a movie while saying as little as possible or even intimating what it might actually be about?
Previous entires include: Confession and Geylang, and Petong Sakulchai and Ariel Fang have done themselves proud with this latest entry into the canon, the almost perversely generically titled Someone Special.
One thing that should be said going in: it is a film not just for the adventurous, but for those who don’t mind taking a walk on the dark side. This is a film that deals with some very dark themes, which means it’s not for everyone by design.
But boy oh boy, was it for me.
To even note the genre feels like a bit of a spoiler, but really it’s more of a red herring than anything; the film dances between tones with balletic grace, wacky in one moment, haunting the next, heartbreaking the one after that. It’s a bit of a rollercoaster in that sense. But seamless in its transitions, and with a sense of control that would be impressive in even a veteran filmmaker, let alone a debut collaboration.
So with all that in mind, here is what I am willing to say about the film: it stars Sirat Intarachote as Rainn, a mentally disturbed painter with potential violent tendencies. It also stars Anyarin Terathanaput as Sa, a mentally unwell therapist who is crumbling in the aftermath of her recent divorce. And finally, Sa as a patient named Gin (Fern Supanare), who is mentally unhinged yet passionate.
Of course, I will not reveal the ways in which this trio come together to create a deranged pas de trois like few others in the history of cinema. Suffice it to say, expect the unexpected.
Of course, even saying that sort of thing feels, in itself, like a deceptive framing. To say that a viewer should go in knowing as little as possible triggers the natural human instinct to speculate, and almost invountary urge to try and figure out what’s happening and where things are going. So many of us have an inexplicable, uncontrollable urge to somehow ‘beat’ the movie at its own game. To outsmart it, at the cost of our own sense of entertainment.
That Someone Special avoids this is not due to any particular sort of cleverness or five dimensional narrative chess on the part of Sakulchai’s script, but because it is that rarest of birds: a genuinely character driven genre film.
Rainn, Sa, and Gin are not well people, which makes it difficult to predict their actions.. and, in turn, the consequences of those actions. We don’t know what’s coming next because the characters are not acting like archetypes in a movie, but like people who don’t understand themselves or their pain but are willing to go to extremes in order to try and form conections, in the hopes those conections might resolve their issues. As if it were ever that simple.
(My favorite example of this sort of thing– and of course I’m going to be vague here– is a moment hlafway through the film where Sa seems to finally turn a corner, emotionally speaking, stepping into her own sense of power. It’s a cathartic moment for the audience… and it lasts all of five seconds, as an impeccably poorly timed e-mail from her ex instantly reverses the entirety of her progress. Simultaneously amusing and crushing, and hits a little too close to home)
In the Q&A after the screening, Sakulchai opened up about his autism diagnosis at an early age and the comprehensive research he did during the development of this story, and I think the highest compliment I can put paid to the screnplay is that the characters various expressions of their mental illness rarely feel like anything other than the behaviors of actual, complicated humans, as opposed to movie style psychopaths. Both the writing and the filmmaking itself do an excellent job of putting the audience inside the heads of Sa and Rainn, so that even when it’s not the easiest place to spend time and the sense of reality can ocassionally prove slippery, we still understand and sympathise with their struggles and root for them, in our own way.
But with all that having been said, I suppose a special shout-out is due to Supanare as Gin, the true wild card of the bunch.
To be clear, all three actors give nuanced, intense performances worthy of accolades. But Gin in particular is a character that, if not properly calibrated in both the writing and the performance, could have very easily gone off the rails. And so it’s to her credit that the livewire energy she brings to the film (which, Sakulchai freely admits is a completely diferent energy thatthe character was initially concieved with) manages to avoid turning Gin into a cartoon. Granted, there’s a version of that that sounds like it might have been fun… but it aslo would have disrupted the delicate tonal balance this film miraculaously manages to maintain for nearly two hours. Which would have been a genuine shame.
I don’t know if I’ve convinced you that Someone Special is a film worth seeing when it (hopefully) makes its not festival debut sometime in the future. But I hope I have. It’s something special.
…Can you believe i didn’t actualy do that on purpose? Totaly uninentional. I almost changes it because of how embarrassing it is, but no. We stick to our convictions here, even if they lead down a dark, sad path. If the movie taught me anything, it taught me that.
