Reinventing folklore for the screen is as old as the history
of the moving image. Yet, fables and
folktales are still a staple for cinema today with Hollywood remaking
everything from the iconic Clash of the Titans to Snow White. What’s novel
about Allysa Sing’s ‘The Crane Wife’ is how she has weaved (pardon) fashion as
a running motif into her short film.
Or did I get it wrong? That it was a fashion film with a
fable weaved into it?
Either way, they were perfect bed partners in a sense that
the film was about a wife making a cloth just like in the fable in which The
Crane Wife weaved a sail for boats. At the time, the act of weaving served as
an allegory to fashion. Local designer Max Tan was roped in for the clothes
featured in the film. Together with an exquisitely art-directed Chinoiserie on
the set, sensual lighting tones and an undeniable touch of ‘Wong Kar Wai’,
watching the film is like seeing fashion spread on a magazine come to life.
Allysa has rather cleverly chosen to eschew dialogue and use
stop-motion photography for her film to distance the audience from the subject
and preserve a sense of mystery about it. The stylized and repetitive moves of
the Crane Wife while dehumanizing the character, actually iconifies it. In
fact, true to its purpose, it makes the clothes stand out! Think America’s Next
Top Model and its regular themed shoots.
This interpretation of the fable is unmistakably detached
from the emotional core of the fable, which suggests the possibility of more
grief and longing. In the fable, there is a sense of sadness about the
short-lived cohabitation of the crane wife and the man (supposedly the camera’s
eye in Allysa’s film) and grief when she morphs into the crane and flies away. In
her film, emotions are stripped leaving only a sequence of visual tokens. The film, while spot on in its transposition of fashion from print to moving image, might have hit a deeper spot if it attempted not only to go through the motion of retelling a fable but to give it an emotional gradient that would complete the pretty picture.