Karaoke

From last Friday's preview, you'd have guessed that we like Karaoke. Well, we do. It's a brilliant film.

Comparisons to Bernard Chauly's Pisau Cukur or Yasmin Ahmad's Talentime would be unfair - Chris Chong's first feature is clearly not for the popular palate. Its lingering shots and relative silence will be difficult for blockbuster-fed audiences. But for those with the gumption to stick around, Karaoke is a rewarding experience.

Take an extended sequence in the mid-to-later portion of the movie. Betik (Zahiril Adzim), fresh from (and probably unable to make it in) KL's indie scene, returns to his kampung and his mother (Mislina Mustaffa)'s karaoke bar; he hopes to inherit this business. But his birthplace his changed; curious about the oil palms that now encroach upon his backyard, Betik idly walks off into the plantation.

He gets lost, and - as the camera pans upward - the character itself is soon missing, subsumed by a kelapa sawit landscape. The film then embarks on a leisurely tour of the agricultural industry: watching tractors push fruit, and processing lines belch steam; spying on an ageing woman sweep up errant kernels.

And it's captivating. With Jarin Pengpanich's cinematography, Karaoke must be one of the few films in which an oil-palm factory is actually pretty. While Chris and production designer Yee I-Lann come from palm-oil-ravaged Sabah and hate the devastation that industry has wrought, the movie itself does not preach. It merely documents the transformation, and leaves it up to us to judge this change.

Change is the overarching theme of Karaoke, which Chris co-wrote with singer-songwriter/playwright/journalist Shanon Shah: change, and our failure to adapt to it. Betik is a failure: he fails to reconcile with his mother, who has decided to sell off her bar for a fresh start elsewhere; he fails in his pursuit of Anisah (Nadiya Nisaa), who is unimpressed with Betik's urban credentials and his dubious ability to make her indie-style T-shirts.

His sole "success" is an accidental career in karaoke videos; by the end of the film, Betik is a nameless male, forcing a smile in a kitsch fantasy. Karaoke begins with extreme close-ups and gradually pulls away to landscape shots. The world's avenues are opening wide, but the protagonist remains stuck in a little television set.

(Not that it's all serious: Karaoke's karaoke videos are funny in context, and so are Zahiril's pained grins in them.)

The music in the film, specially written by Shanon, is triumphant pop: from bittersweet love songs to nasyid. We hear that there'll be an album out, soon.

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Director Chris Chong Cast Zahiril Adzim, Mislina Mustaffa, Mohammad Hariry, Nadiyatul Nisaa Runtime 74 mins Opens 26 November

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Text Zedeck Siew