Now reappearing: curious tale of missing film
Sandi Tan’s “Shirkers” is an appealing and idiosyncratic documentary about how a young woman in draconian 1990s Singapore finds an artistic channel for her rebellious impulses, only to see the fruits of her labor vanish into thin air.
Pure rage would be a justified response, and there is anger here, to be sure. But Tan has gained some distance from the events she depicts, and the movie has a full share of offbeat humor.
The movie is many things at once. It’s a mystery, probing the disappearance and return of a film — also called “Shirkers” — made by Tan and her friends.
It’s also an account of that friendship, which is not all rosy. There’s an intriguing portrait of the youth culture in Singapore at the time. And there is plenty of entertaining footage from the original “Shirkers.”
Tan and her friend Jasmine Ng were devotees of punk and Brecht and David Lynch, although their exposure to radical cultural trends was somewhat limited because of Singapore’s censorship (including a ban on chewing gum). Their insurgency was probably mild by Western standards.
Yet the movie they made, based on Tan’s noirish script, might well have raised hackles in the government — Tan played the hero, a female assassin whose “gun” consisted of her hand with its forefinger extended. The film was shot, guerrilla style, on the streets. Another friend, Sophia Siddique Harvey, joined in the escapade.
The director was a middleaged married American man, one Georges Cardona, who taught film classes in Singapore and made a deep impression on Tan. The two even took a road trip together in the United States. He falsely claimed to be the inspiration for the James Spader character in “sex, lies, and videotape.”
They somehow finagled a camera and a supply of film. Without revealing too many details, let’s just say that Cardona got the three girls to withdraw from their bank accounts to keep the movie funded, and eventually disappeared with the 70 canisters of film they had shot.
Cardona was a charismatic sort, and Tan provides footage of him to prove it. As to his motivation, who knows? Ng, now an activist and filmmaker still in Singapore, thinks Tan failed to see him for what he was. Siddique, now chair of the film department at Vassar (as Sophia Harvey), also weighs in, on Cardona and the project generally.
Tan is now a novelist, living in Los Angeles. She unexpectedly acquired the missing footage, decades after it was shot, and found that although the images were intact, the soundtrack was gone. So what we see of the original “Shirkers” is a silent film — it’s tempting to call it a silent comedy. It’s dreamy and funny, just what you’d expect from a bright youngster (actually, three bright youngsters) with high aspirations.
The old “Shirkers” is gone, but long live Tan’s new version.