Be With Me (2005)0

Be With Me is a tapes­try of four dif­fer­ent sto­ries set in modern-day Singapore that focuses on themes of love, long­ing, lone­li­ness and hope. One of the sto­ries in the film is about a blind woman named Theresa Chan. Her seg­ment of the film is actu­ally more of a doc­u­ment of her every­day expe­ri­ences rather than a work of fic­tion though, of course, some cre­ative lib­er­ties were taken to inter­weave her story into the rest of the sto­ries in the film. It was her incred­i­ble life story and her per­se­ver­ance despite her dif­fi­cul­ties in life that inspired direc­tor Eric Khoo to make this film. In her seg­ments, we see her lead a nor­mal, healthy life, with a job teach­ing blind chil­dren craft­work, liv­ing by her­self in her own home, and in the process of com­plet­ing a book. But though she is a capa­ble human being, she, like the other char­ac­ters in the film, feels a sense of lone­li­ness. She even­tu­ally devel­ops a rela­tion­ship with an old shop­keeper (Ching Chiew Sung) who, after the loss of his wife, has retreated into a state of depres­sion. The other sto­ries in the film include Jackie (Ezann Lee), a teenage girl, and her strug­gle in deal­ing with her short-lived rela­tion­ship with Sam (Samantha Tan), a girl that she met online, and also Fatty Koh (Yew Seet Keng),a rotund secu­rity guard, and his infat­u­a­tion with a busi­ness­woman who works in the same build­ing as he does. Besides the documentary-style seg­ments involv­ing Theresa Chan, the sto­ries that Khoo and co-writer Wong Kim Hoh have con­cocted are actu­ally very sim­ple and cliched in terms of both struc­ture and exe­cu­tion. However, the film still suc­ceeds in its abil­ity to move us. It seems to be not so much con­cerned with dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions of love lost and regained and the yearn­ing for love, but rather to present a sin­gu­lar look at the emo­tional com­plex­i­ties of love, how­ever enclosed in its point of view.

The film also seems to have a belief that love can only be acquired through whim­si­cal twists of fate. The cat­a­lyst for the rela­tion­ship between the old shop­keeper and Theresa is a social worker who checks up on her and also hap­pens to be the shopkeeper’s son. The rela­tion­ship between the two teenage girls was sparked off by their chance encounter on the vast world-wide web, but their rela­tion­ship does not work out. The woman of Fatty’s dreams hap­pens to work in his build­ing, and though he pines for her love, we know that no mat­ter how hard he tries, he would never be able to win her love for they are two incred­i­bly dif­fer­ent per­sons. The work­ings of des­tiny can be seen in the coin­ci­den­tal pair­ing of care­taker and patient between the social worker and Theresa, which then leads to her rela­tion­ship with his father, who in turn hap­pens to be in need of com­fort in his time of despair. It can also be seen in the absurd event of Jackie’s sui­ci­dal attempt to kill her­self by jump­ing off a build­ing but instead lands on Fatty while he is on his way to finally post a let­ter of con­fes­sion to his love, caus­ing her­self to become hos­pi­tal­ized. When she receives a visit from her father in her ward, we real­ize that he is actu­ally the social worker assigned to take care of Theresa. The social worker has always been too busy for his fam­ily, caus­ing his estrange­ment from his father and, as we now real­ize, his daugh­ter as well. Jackie’s sui­cide attempt has caused her father to finally start pay­ing more atten­tion to his own fam­ily, instead of the many other fam­i­lies he tends to. His visit to the hos­pi­tal in turn causes him to request his father to make his weekly visit to Theresa in his place, whereby they share a moment of embrace that sat­is­fies their need for com­fort. Jackie sur­vives her sui­cide attempt (which was actu­ally trig­gered by her rejec­tion from Sam, who has found a boyfriend and no longer has a desire to be with Jackie) and gains the atten­tion of her father and also some­one to lis­ten to her griev­ances. Fatty on the other hand expe­ri­ences cruel fate as his impos­si­ble love for the busi­ness­woman and also his abu­sive life at home (cour­tesy of his father and brother) are quickly resolved with his own death. As in his other films, Khoo infuses his films with a sen­ti­men­tal­ity for the past and for­eign influ­ence by pop­u­lar cul­ture in youths. These, and his inter­pre­ta­tions of every­day life in Singaporean homes (eg. par­ents com­par­ing their chil­dren in terms of aca­d­e­mic abil­i­ties; the sep­a­ra­tion between the present gen­er­a­tion and the gen­er­a­tions before it; the iso­la­tion of the aged), add to a cer­tain real­ism that allows us to iden­tify with his vision of Singapore in his film. He stays true to the essence of his sto­ries by keep­ing them as nat­u­ral­is­tic as pos­si­ble. Also akin to his pre­vi­ous films is his use of food as metaphors and story devices. In Be With Me, food is used to exem­plify the var­i­ous needs of the char­ac­ters in the film. For Theresa and the old shop­keeper, home-cooked food is used a sym­bol of care and kind­ness, sub­stan­tial forms of affec­tion. For the old shop­keeper, the process of cook­ing also helps him release his neg­a­tive energy into cre­at­ing some­thing that pro­vides com­fort­ing plea­sure. However, curi­ously the only food we see the teenage lovers (includ­ing Sam’s new boyfriend) con­sume is ice cream, an incon­se­quen­tial form of food. This per­haps sym­bol­izes the super­fi­cial qual­ity of their love, that though sweet, it is not bound by warmth and not built to last. For Fatty, he has a close rela­tion­ship with food. We see him gorg­ing down large vari­eties of local delights and get a sense that per­haps the only thing that he has a choice in the mat­ter of is food. And then of course there is the prob­a­bil­ity that because of his lone­li­ness, he uses the large quan­ti­ties of food he con­sumes to fill his void, and also that he eats all this food because he can and is con­stantly reminded by the peo­ple around him that he is inca­pable of any­thing but eat­ing. The film also depicts the chal­lenges of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in mod­ern times. In the seg­ments fea­tur­ing Theresa, sub­ti­tles are used exten­sively (even when there is no voiceover) to cre­ate a styl­is­tic way of empha­siz­ing her expe­ri­ence of being blind. Also, in the seg­ments fea­tur­ing the two girls, there is an empha­sis on the use of text mes­sag­ing as a sort of dis­tanced form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, that it does not in any real sense allow us to com­mu­ni­cate at all. Throughout their seg­ments, we see the both of them con­vers­ing, but Khoo never allows us to hear their con­ver­sa­tions. The only way they com­mu­ni­cate is through touch and text mes­sag­ing. It’s quite likely that Khoo is try­ing to say that their con­ver­sa­tions are not of much impor­tance, because their love for each other is not a real one, but rather an ide­al­ized one. This prob­a­bly also applies to the Fatty’s infat­u­a­tion with the busi­ness­woman (he rit­u­ally spies on her through a series of secu­rity cam­eras). Perhaps what Khoo is try­ing to say is that as the world becomes more technology-oriented, the more we seem to encounter trou­ble in com­mu­ni­cat­ing with oth­ers. All these ideas that Khoo has put into his film exist only to serve his pur­pose of cre­at­ing a sim­ple, but emo­tion­ally mov­ing poem to the lonely, wan­der­ing, indi­vid­u­als of the mod­ern world. However, its lack of effi­ciency may have hurt the film’s suc­cess in actu­ally achiev­ing its goal. The intent of Be With Me’s relaxed pace might have actu­ally induced some peo­ple to sleep­ing. But at the same time the core of the story and what it is about has moved oth­ers because it speaks a lot about the ever-changing soci­ety that we inhabit now and how these changes are so severe that we actu­ally for­get the sim­ple plea­sures of life. Written by: Genevieve Lee