Rain Dogs opened last Thursday in Malaysia. During the screening I attended, the audience applauded after the movie ended, and sat through the entire closing credits, a rare thing in these parts, I tell you!
When Kuala Lumpur is depicted in local commercial films, more often than not, you’ll get shots of the Petronas Twin Towers, a symbol of advancement, affluence and national pride. In TV dramas, no matter the language, there is always a sense of near-opulence, if not outright grandeur, when people drive shiny cars and eat in posh hotel restaurants. Thugs are dressed in leather jackets, looking like they’ve just stepped out of a Hollywood urban thriller.
The Kuala Lumpur depicted in Ho Yuhang’s Rain Dogs is bustling, seedy, unfinished, on a slow brew threatening to boil over. There are no shots of glitzy, futuristic monuments shining in the sun; only cheap, sleazy motels; low-cost flats; backstreet foodstalls; smoky, illegal snooker halls; dubious auto workshops. And these are populated, not by suit-wearing businessmen and high-maintenance women, but by thugs, bookies, prostitutes and murderers. This is the underbelly of KL rarely seen in local productions.
And this is where the story of 19-year-old Tung (Kuan Choon Wai)’s journey of self-discovery begins. He goes for a short visit while on his pre-college break, and hooks up with his older brother (Chung Wing Hong) there. Tung gets into a series of mishaps, but his bad fortune only culminates in the sudden and shocking death of his brother. The loss of his only role model (we are told he has never met his father) forces him a few steps ahead of himself, and he gets into a tiff with his mother’s secret lover. Angered by his mother’s lack of confidence in him, he storms off to the borderland to live with his uncle (Liu Wai Hung).
There, he learns about love, violence, tenderness, and all the conflicting elements of life. The outskirts may be scenic, with beautiful misty mountains and wide, open spaces, but life is as constricted as in the city. His uncle claims to be a fisherman, but keeps a gun hidden at the jetty. Life is still no different from the seedy streets of KL, and the same brewing danger is ever-present. Tung soon finds himself inevitably trying to fill his brother’s and uncle’s shoes, and the violence he had seen in the city soon shatters the serenity to which he has escaped.
Tung’s coming-of-age story could have been told in any number of ways, but encapsulating the story within these environments gives it a great degree of social importance and power. Rain Dogs’ poetic and meditative approach to the exploration of what it means to grow up in such environments, lends it a quietly heart-breaking quality. Tung, the often passive observer in the story, is our eyes and ears into this community on the fringes. And when he does take action, it is with the only means available to him, and often these are far from appropriate and not likely to be effective, and could even backfire. Allowing Tung as our only perspective eventually leads us to empathise with him as he tries clumsily to exert some semblance of control over the largely uncontrollable surroundings and circumstances.
The film also says as much about the third party as an external, disruptive force. Tung, himself, is as much an upsetting element in the lives of the people with whom he comes into contact at the borderland village, as his mother’s lover is in his. Life, as they say, is a perpetual cycle. And the people in this story are a confused, unsure and volatile bunch. The only character that conveys any confidence and stability is Tung’s aunt (Yasmin Ahmad) whose sole motivation in life seems to be love and compassion, to the point of doting on and spoiling her son. A powerful symbol of nurture – whether it be mother or maternal figure – when removed, spells trouble. In fact, Ho underlines the film with Odetta’s haunting Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child. And as Kate Bush once told us, mother stands for comfort.
With his minimalist visual approach, often letting his visuals speak for themselves, Ho sets up the final moments of the film with a series of shots that seems to emphasise the importance of family and community, of watching out for each other, and sticking together to survive this thing called life. As clichéd as it sounds, no man is an island.
The series of shots is deliberately left open to interpretation; clearly, Ho refuses to force a conclusion on us. As it is, life is about choices, and we can choose to see it as a hopeful end, or that beauty and happiness are transient and the only sure thing in life is the journey.