Summary
An understated piece where the you always feel like you are a tantalising few inches away from whatever it’s building to.
Anthony Chen’s second feature may be called WET SEASON (热带雨), but in weather terms its more like the seasonal build-up. Filled with slow-burning tension, one where you always feel like you’re on the cusp of something, it almost never catches fire. After all, embers get notoriously damp in the rain.
The Singaporean drama is, at its core, a coming of age drama about the relationship between school teacher Ling (Yeo Yann Yann) and secondary student Kok Wei Lun (Koh Jia Ler). While there is an inevitability to their interactions, Chen’s understated film is all about character, mood and setting.
That setting, as the title would imply, is a frequently rain-soaked one. This leads to an incredibly claustrophobic feeling in the first half of the film. Ling’s drives back and forth between work and home are often filled with her anixety as glimpsed through a raindrop streaked windshield. Her tense relationship with her husband Andrew (Christopher Lee) is built around their struggles to conceive a child. She’s also taken on the burden of caring for her bed-ridden father-in-law.
While there’s a pervading feeling that we know exactly how this is all going to turn out, it’s to Chen’s credit that the film doesn’t go there as rapidly as one would expect. Chen’s pacing is so measured that the film appears to be an aimless series of transitions at times. When the dam bursts, in a scene that’s appropriately uncomfortable to watch, it feels more like a sad inevitability than anything titillating or climactic.
What makes WET SEASON worth sticking around for is the Golden Horse Award-winning performance of Yeo Yann Yann. She’s difficult to read at first, and we ponder whether her closeness to the boy is one of misplaced maternalism or something else. Yet as Wei Lun becomes more irrational, possessive and inappropriate, we see a strength emerging in Ling that becomes the backbone of the film.
The bittersweet ending is almost a step too far, even if it does finally leave Ling in a place of empowerment. Here we come to the realisation that the film has not strictly been about a teacher-student relationship at all, and that the coming-of-age aspects are more about one’s late 30s than late teens. One suspects that this perspective would add a great deal to a second viewing, although Chen asks a fair bit of us for this minor payoff.
2019 | Singapore | DIRECTOR: Anthony Chen | WRITER: Anthony Chen | CAST: Yeo Yann Yann, Koh Jia Ler, Christopher Lee | DISTRIBUTOR: MIFF 2020 (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 6-23 August 2020 (MIFF)
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