The Line by Cheng Shian Wen
Starting this week, SINdie will be doing regular reviews of selected short films from Viddsee, an online platform for filmmakers and watchers of Southeast Asian Films. This will one of the several ways SINdie will be collaborating with Viddsee, championing independent films from Singapore and the region.
Here's the first to kick off. SINdie writer Joseline Yu reviews 'The Line' by Cheng Shian Wen
The Line
involves plucking the soldiers who have graduated from the premises of Ah Boys To Men and Army Daze into a (fictional) actual war zone. The short film’s tags
on Viddsee encapsulates its serious-minded ambitions: “desperation, human
nature, politics, war”.
The factoids of the Taunesia
Civil War displayed at the beginning and at the end of the short film creates a
sense of gravity, which is subsequently undermined by the execution of action
thriller tropes. The two soldiers fulfill the usual “good cop and bad cop”
combination, with the more “badass” member eventually becoming attached to the
cause he claims to be apathetic towards. The liberal usage of the ‘f’ word in
conversations between the two is probably meant to show that these two soldiers
have long outgrow their boyhood. Nonetheless, why the events in The Line warrant
such copious swearing deserves some contemplation. There’s no fucking, no one
gets fucked over and by the standards of the action genre, things didn’t get that fucked up.
The film continues to take
itself seriously in its clichéd and melodramatic scenes which couldn’t be more
off the mark from the gritty depiction of wartime violence it signals itself to
be. Any tension in the scene when the local militia brutalizes the Singaporean
soldiers and the female lead is weakened by
the presence of the dwarf-like Taunesian leader who provides
inappropriate comic relief. Most of the dialogue are less words likely to be
spoken by people placed in the same situation but instead words expected to be
spoken by genre archetypes placed in the same situation. The film’s competing
aims of verisimilitude and pleasing action thriller fans could be inferred from
the dramatization of the female lead espousing her patriotic cause in which “inspiring”
music and naturalistic sounds of a grassy plain could be heard at the same
time.
On the whole, The Line’s premise of featuring
Singaporean soldiers in a war-ridden country which is the complete opposite of
their relatively peaceful homeland is different and daring enough to be given
the treatment of an actual full-length action thriller. Yet as shown in this
short film, the premise inevitably loses much of its potency as the filmmakers’
fail to scale their ambitions down to size.
Review by Joseline Yu
Watch the full short film here on Viddsee
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About Viddsee
Viddsee is an online video platform for filmmakers and audience
of Southeast Asian short films. Built and designed by engineers and filmmakers,
Viddsee enables users to easily discover, watch and share stories from
Southeast Asia on their desktop and mobile devices. Our vision is to
continually grow the community of short film audiences to enable a wide and
accessible market reach for short films and become the leading micro-cinema
platform for Asia.
