Friday, Dec 6, 2024:
The two films I saw today deal with unrequited love in very different forms.
Based on Simon Tay's book of the same name, City of Small Blessings follows Prakash (Victor Banerjee) as he fights for the right to keep his home. You see, authorities have marked the area for demolition to give way to the construction of a new MRT line. Prakash thinks this is a minor clerical mistake and sets off to correct the problem, much to the exasperation of his wife Anna (Noorlinah Mohamed) and son Neel (Brendon Fernandez).
A retired educator who is responsible for the upbringing of many now influential figures in the Singaporean government, Prakash's pleas fall on deaf ears as he makes appeal after appeal to his former students. City of Small Blessings puts forth an idea of "home," one that exists in the space of one's mind and one that collectively means "home" to society at large. To others, Prakash's home is just an obstacle, a lot of land. But to Prakash, it means so much more than that: what is the loss of one's house or a beach where you courted your love? He has given so much to the land he loves: his memories, his life, his home, and it has given him nothing back. It is an unrequited love that has consumed a man's entire life.
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In 2017, Caroly Cronenberg (nee Zeifman) died of cancer. For his latest film The Shrouds, her husband David Cronenberg draws upon that lingering grief to create one of the strangest odes to a love lost, a story of a love that is, in a sense, unrequited. Because how can one seek love from one who has passed on? Such love will always be in the past tense, as, obviously, corpses cannot give it, the can only function as the receptacle of love with no other place to go.
Stilted, prone to conspiratorial tangents, and dry as a dessicated corpse, The Shrouds is Cronenberg's Megalopolis, ambitious and weird even in Cronenbergian standards. It is a story of death in many forms: the death of an idea, the death of personal and truth via the virtual image. But beyond the film's dry, almost mumblecore (corpsecore?) aesthetic is a tale of a deeply hurt man who sees his wife, ravaged and mutilated by disease, in everyone he meets, unable to detach himself from her even if he wants to, fixated on what is left of her body, creating stories to keep her in his mind long after her passing.
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