4:30 (2005)

Regrettably, my experience of Singaporean cinema is very, very limited. That will change, I hope. 4:30 proves to be a treat; a mysterious, visually stunning film about a boy lost in alienation. Zhiang Xiao Wu is eleven. He lives in an apartment with a Korean tenant, who is perhaps related to him. The man (intent on suicide) is the object of the boy's secretive attraction. As the man lies intoxicated on his bed at night, the boy watches him, or steals something from him. They have no common language, but between them, there is a form of friendship (or a shared sense of loneliness). I can hear you sigh, a young boy who feels like a stranger in the world - haven't we seen that theme too many times in movies? But this film is certainly something different. That has to do with how the theme is developed.

Royston Tan does not attempt to dig out the boy's "inner, psychological life". What he draws attention to, instead, is a series of repetititive actions. The boy sits at the man's bed. He makes notes and collects things for his diary. He goes to school, where he always ends up in trouble, he disturbs the morning excercise of a group of elderly people. But not only do we learn to know the boy through those ordinary events - Royston Tan explores the surroundings in which the boy lives. A shabby wall / a staircase / a back yard / an ice-cream van. As we see a particular place several times, we get a sense of the world in which the boy spends his days.

One film that kept returning to my mind while watching this one is Flickan, the recent, Swedish girl who spends one summer alone in a house. As that film, 4:30 is to a large extent a visual masterpiece. The takes are always long, but they do not try your patience. The color scale veers towards green and blue hues. The director/cinematographer has an amazing, meticulous sense for composition; what is the background and foreground of a particular frame is something I ended up thinking about several times. As in Flickan, there is very little dialogue here: if one were to write it down, no more than perhaps two pages would be filled.

Now I suddenly recall that I might have seen parts of Royston Tan's other film, 15. I remember it as a much more bustling movie.