This was the one film I chose because of the auteur name attached. Eric Khoo is a respected director from Singapore who through his company Zhao Wei Films has also helped commercial co-productions with Malaysia to develop, especially horror productions. I managed to interview him in Oslo a few years ago. I booked this film ‘blind’ and was a little surprised by what it turned out to be – and even more surprised when I read some background after the screening.
Co-produced with Hong Kong producer Nansun Shi (ex-partner of Tsui Hark), In the Room seems to have been inspired by memories of erotic films of the 1970s and 1980s such as Emmanuelle and 9½ Weeks which were presumably hits in Hong Kong and Singapore, although with some cuts for cinema viewing I expect. In the Room is a set of encounters/liaisons in the same hotel room at different times over many years. The fictional Singupura Hotel is first seen in 1942 as a British planter is about to leave the island before the Japanese take over. He tries to persuade his lover, a married Chinese man who runs a rubber wholesaling company to leave with him. In the same Room 27 we then see a succession of guests from across South and East Asia involved in various liaisons. Eric Khoo has suggested that this format had the great advantage of fostering his co-production plans with actors from Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. It was also a production that allowed him to shoot on a sound stage for the first time (all his previous work being location-based).
It seems odd to recall the erotic films from the past in the era of internet porn and the rather desperate attempts of Lars von Trier to present ‘explicit’ sexual content in his Nymphomaniac films. In the Room‘s sexual activity isn’t particularly arousing and I actually found much of it to be quite tender and moving. The professional critics at various festivals have been rather dismissive, claiming the script (most of the stories are written by Jonathon Lim) as the weakest element. I find this a bit strange since the scenes are mostly dialogue-driven and each scene, bar the first, is subtitled because the language is different. Perhaps the subtitles are not very good? They seemed fine to me. On the other hand, there is quite a lot of praise for the set design which I thought was OK but that the first set, filmed in Black and White, didn’t work for me.
There were indications in the film that it is in some ways ‘personal’ for Khoo. The Japanese woman is I think reading a manga by Tatsumi Yoshihiro (Eric Khoo made his animated feature Tatsumi (2011) about the manga artist/writer). The film is dedicated to Damien Sin who wrote Khoo’s first feature and in the film ‘Damien’ is a character in a 1970s (soft) rock band who dies of an overdose and then haunts Room 27 over the rest of the film. This supernatural narrative strand also includes a young woman who works as a maid in the hotel and who meets Damien on the fateful night.
The question of censorship is interesting because reading through the reviews of North American screenings, it’s apparent that the print for the LFF has been shorn of what sounds like a more explicit/outrageous segment in which a bar-room ‘madam’ performs the old trick of ‘firing’ table tennis balls from her vagina – a nod to the brothels inhabited by British soldiers in Singapore and Malaysia in the 1960s perhaps? The LFF print is presumably the one that is intended to be released in South East and East Asia. I can’t say this film is up to Eric Khoo’s earlier standards but it’s better I think than the reviews so far suggest. I even quite liked the music and the song that Damien composes.
The trailer for Toronto:
The Case for Global Film 