When love
goes sour it can bring out the worst in people. Sounds and gestures which were once held dear
transform into irritations for the heart gone cold. Edmund
Yeo’s Love Suicides (2009) tells
the tale of a woman (Kimmy Kiew) who
has been abandoned by her husband. She
and her daughter (Arika Lee) live a
quiet, simple existence near a rice paddy field in rural Malaysia.
The
daughter takes pleasure in the few things she has to play with: she diligently practices on her woodwind recorder or plays with a red balloon
that hangs limply on the string. Brief letters
marked airmail begin arriving from the husband which mysteriously suggest that
he can hear every sound the girl and her mother make:
“Dear wife,
don’t let the child play the flute. It’s
too noisy. My heart aches.”
“Dear wife,
don’t send the child to school wearing shoes. It’s too noisy. My heart aches.”
“Dear wife,
don’t let the child eat from the porcelain bowl. It’s too noisy. My heart aches.”
Although
the woman and daughter appear to be completely alone, the woman follows her
husband’s instructions to the letter. The
daughter says nothing, but her words and actions suggest a growing sense of
anger and resentment. In the excerpt below, the mother is force feeding the daughter because the little girl is not allowed to eat on her own from the porcelain bowl:
There are
many ways to read this short tale – the film itself being an interpretation of the
even darker short story of the same name by Yasunari Kawabata. From my
perspective, it is a tale of abuse. The
quietness of the film – the excerpt above features the word of dialogue, there is no music and only a few incidental sounds (the recorder, shoes on gravel, the waves on the shore) –
intensifies the tension that builds in the film. It is a tension that leaves unspoken the at
worst physically violent and at best verbally abusive relationship that must have existed
for this mother to unquestioningly follow out her husband’s cold written
instructions.
Cinematographer
Lesly Leon Lee (vimeo) has done an inspired job shooting the
film in cool colours and dark shadows. Each sequence is beautifully framed. The profoundest shot for me was the one of
the mother lying on a tangled web of a fishing net. It is an eloquent metaphor for the situation
she finds herself in.
The
original short story is one of the many gems contained in the Kawabata The Palm-of-the-Hand Stories collection translated by Lane Dunlop
and J. Martin Holman. Love
Suicides premiered at the Festival Paris Cinéma 2009 and Yeo won Best Director for the film at the China Mobile Film Festival 2009 and the Doi Saket International Film Festival 2010. The film was produced by Greenlight Pictures.
Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012
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This is the second in a series of
reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984). A graduate of Murdoch University in
Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue
a Master’s degree at Waseda. His films
have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan,
and Rotterdam.
Edmund Yeo Filmography
Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)
Fleeting Images (2008)
Love Suicides (2009)
kingyo (2009)
The White Flower (2010)
Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)
NOW (2010)
Inhalation (2010)
Exhalation (2010)
