15 Ramadhan 1435
18.30
Highlight of the day so far, watching Anthony Chen's fine film Ilo Ilo on DVD. Even the fact that the English subtitles stopped working with around about a fifth of the movie left didn't spoil my enjoyment. Chen focuses on what reasonably be termed the lives of ordinary Singaporeans in a very ordinary story to remind us that there's nothing ordinary about ordinary life.
The excellent low-key naturalistic performances from the four leads underpinned a delightfully subtle, gently subversive look at a Singaporean Chinese family in increasingly pressurised circumstances alongside the evolving complexity of their relationships with a new maid from The Philippines. Chen really makes you feel the financial pressures driving the characters such that there's a sense of mounting unease even in the happier moments on show.
Just one well-chosen detail that typifies the subtlety I mentioned earlier: there's no music in the film of any note until the end when the father and son share the headphones to the cheap cassette we've seen Teresa, the maid, listening to several times earlier. We then hear the Filipino song of gentle yearning that she's been listening to, which then plays over the final credits. There's no overt sentimentality here, no attempt to point to the meaning of the moment, and it works powerfully because of that restraint. Lovely stuff!
19.45
Second highlight of the day, just after breaking fast, the official switching on of our twinkling lights to accompany the maghrib prayer. Amazingly all the lights are still working for what we estimate is their fourth year of operation here in our Hall. Normally I'd take a picture but we're not on visuals at the moment as Fifi has borrowed Uncle B's camera for a project she's doing.
22.40
Third and final highlight, a night out at the Mall munching KFC and doing some shopping which, as the Missus astutely pointed out as we left constituted, Our first night out this year. She meant during the fasting month, by the way, so there's no need to feel overly sorry for us. Funnily enough Ramadhan always works out this way: it starts with a week or two of turning inward, as it were, and then the curtains come down, the lights go up, the cushion covers come off, the biscuiting begins and we engage with the world again.
2 comments:
Your thumbs up for Ilo Ilo simply reinforces my confidence in that taste of yours. I must find those zakat-reminding mugshots of yours, incidentally.
I believe the Missus took pictures of the mugshots, but, so far at least, I've managed to prevent their wider dissemination in cyber-space. I feel a need to protect the innocent on this one.
And I rather think it was the enthusiasm of your good self for Anthony Chen's little masterpiece that pushed me in that direction. Thanks! (Though little masterpiece may sound patronising I can assure you it isn't meant to be.)
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