Singapore auteur Eric Khoo is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wong Kar Wai, and for good reason. He shoots similarly minimalist films that rely more on stunningly beautiful cinematography and careful structure than on dialogue to tell his stories. His latest, Be With Me, is a careful study of isolation and the longing for love in Singapore, intercutting three different stories. You have the old man cooking for his wife and feeding her as she lies ailing in the hospital, two teenage girls building a relationship via text message, and the compulsively eating security guard hopelessly in love with an entirely out of reach business woman who works in his building. For the first hour Khoo seems to have a masterpiece on his hands, but then he makes one horrible mis-step thatbrings the whole thing crashing down ...
Be With Me plays almost entirely without dialogue, relying on rhythm, imagery, body language, and embedded text to make its points. You step into its world without any introductions and have to begin by simply letting the images wash over you as you slowly build an index of who is who and what their connections are to one another. By the time things wrap up you see that there are three stories overlapping to various degrees, all of which deal with the quest for love in modern life.
Khoo's camera work is simply stunning. Every frame, every single one, is flawlessly composed and beautifully lit. His actors are all wonderfully expressive - an absolute necessity with a film with such sparse dialogue - and Khoo edits things together with a wonderfully fluid rhythm. Even in the early going when you don't particularly understand these characters you care about them. Khoo has managed to capture something universal, some instantly recognizable kernel of truth in each.
So where's the problem? Well, after spending roughly an hour establishing his full range of characters and the rhthm of the piece, Khoo suddenly and inexplicably abandons them. He focuses in on one woman to the virtual exclusion of all others while streaming a huge amount of exposition - this deaf and blind woman's entire life story - in subtitles across the bottom of the screen. It's simply an inexplicable decision. Not only does this mean the abandonment of his other story lines but the back story isn't even particularly necessary, it does virtually nothing to advance his point that wasn't already being done simply by this woman's presence in the film. He breaks his own rhythm to give us, essentially, nothing. He returns to his full complement of characters by the end and redeems the film somewhat through some remarkable imagery in the closing minutes but by then the damage has been done. What could very well have been a masterpiece has been broken into a frustrating and hugely flawed work.