Apparently, the spirit of the Mandarin voiceover on emo music is hard to exorcise. Royston Tan has a lot of cleaning up to do. To give this film credit, the narration is on English. But the narrator (no better way to put this linguistically) really cannot make it one lor. To be fair, like my own first films too.
In 'Did you see what I see?', we amble through a black and white montage of bleak scenes of life. In the director's own words, the montage reflects reality, one that is not meant to be beautified by shooting in colour. One that has to remain as sombre as the real life. My heart sank as I followed the train of thought, which echoed some real personal pain. But soon, my brain sank too and got left behind somewhere in the black and white streets.
p.s. I am not sure if the filmmaker saw some light at the end of the tunnel because the last scene came into full colour.