Review Of LOVE CONQUERS ALL

Tan Chui Mui's Pusan winner, Love Conquers All, opened in Malaysia on Dec 21. It screens exclusively at Golden Screen Cinemas' International Screens, a section dedicated to foreign films and local independent efforts.

Here's a review of the film.

Like that famous saying, Tan Chui Mui speaks softly, but she carries a big stick. Her films are quiet little affairs, but boy, do they pack an emotional wallop. She has a knack for easing you into a situation, and getting you deeply involved with her characters. I liken it to Nabokov, who can say a thousand things in one sentence. Tan can create such emotional push-and-pull between her characters without them saying much. It's all in the doing, not the uttering. Show, not tell. And she does it beautifully.

That skill is very evident in her debut feature, Love Conquers All, in which the lead character, Ah Ping (Coral Ong) travels from a small town to the big city and meets a rather shady fella named John (Stephen Chua), who may or may not be a pimp.

Ah Ping comes to live with, and work for, her aunt, a food stall owner in a restaurant. She bonds with her little cousin (Leong Jiun Jiun) and unwittingly strikes up a friendship with John, who goes all out to court her. At first, Ah Ping is hesitant about going any further with John, because she already has a boyfriend back home, whom she often phones. But the two eventually become intimate, even when Ah Ping still professes her love to her boyfriend (in John's presence).

One day, John simply disappears, and it seems like something he had told her earlier on in their relationship might be coming true. Or might it?

From thereon, the story seems to be moving into an area at which it had only hinted in its first half. Tan's strengths as a director come into full force in the first half of the film, where a tender love story unfolds, where quiet emotions and unspoken feelings emerge, and where the suspense of a love encounter is underpinned by invisible tension. Tan imbues the dialogue with such carefully chosen words that at times dual meanings arise, and the intentions of the speaker become ambiguous. It's a beautiful dance of courtship, with brilliant performances from the two leads, but it's also an open-ended one that could go in any direction at any time.

But when the second half of the film comes around, together with a so-called "twist," Tan seems to abandon the earlier method and begins to tell the rest of the story through an assembly of cuts and images that are at times too vague. The subplot of the little cousin's infatuation with a pen-pal, although well-intended, becomes too much of a troublesome third arm and ends on a vague note as well. But some rhyming instances help to perpetuate a sense of unwanted change, that situations may not be the same anymore, but some things such as love, remain the same.

The story too, starts to reveal itself as a rather closed-in affair, with Tan affording her audience nary a perspective of their own, with the conclusion being more of an imposing statement than food for thought. Her treatment of her lead character could be construed as a little mean-spirited. Rather than ask us "Would you do anything for love?", she gives us an answer, and a pointer towards this direction earlier in the film. But although the whole seems less than the sum of its parts, Tan's honesty holds the film together more than it should.

Despite not rising above the trappings of a cautionary tale, Love Conquers All is still an impressive debut feature.