Lullabies & Elegies
Director Chong Keat aun takes his usual scalpel to Malay society through a feminine lens.
Pavane for an Infant
Director: Chong Keat Aun • Writer: Chong Keat Aun
Starring: Fish Liew, Natalie Hsu, Pearlly Chua, Tan Mei-ling, Ben Yuen
Malaysia / Hong Kong • 1hr 57mins
Opens Hong Kong June 19 • IIA
Grade: B+
Pavane for an Infant | 搖籃凡世 begins with the quiet and quite harrowing moment a young woman walks up the waist-height door of a baby hatch, one of those centres set up to accept unwanted infants anonymously and safely, and puts her crying baby inside. As soon as the door closes, a garish red clock starts a countdown from 30 right above it. The woman stands there for a bit, and just as the clock ticks to zero she lunges for the door. Too late; it’s locked. Through the CCTV feed social worker Lai-sum (Fish Liew Chi-yu, Cesium Fallout) watches as the woman frantically pounds on the building’s doors and windows. She blew her 30-second grace period and the baby is gone. Inside Lai-sum feels for the woman and pleads her case to the centre’s den mother Kam (Pearlly Chua) to make an exception. After all, the woman clearly tried to beat the clock. Unfortunately there’s nothing to be done. This baby is now in the system.
Filmmaker Chong Keat Aun is at it again, turning his typically lyrical, if more urban this time, critical eye on modern Malaysia and the conflicting ideas and beliefs that, while co-existing in relative peace, can be repressive and dangerous for so many – especially women. Pavane (for the record, a processional dance) feels tonally in line with Chong’s last film, Snow in Midsummer, which pivots on the 13 May Incident and its race riots of 1969, and the still unreleased (in Malaysia) The Story of Southern Islet, an allegorical story about a woman seeking shamanist healing for her sick husband, set during the 1987 anti-Chinese policy movement and security crackdown. Once again, he has plenty to say, even if he gets a little lost in the weeds near the end. But not lost enough to make Pavane for an Infant any less affecting.
Pavane’s greatest strength is in how it paints an authentic cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious portrait of modern Kuala Lumpur, warts and all, using all those elements as a filter through which Chong tells the story (based on an amalgam of true ones) of a pregnant teen, Siew-man (Natalie Hsu Yan-yi, Last Song for You) and generally dissects the lack of body autonomy for too many women in Malaysia. The woman at the door was Indian. Lai-sum and Kam are Buddhist Chinese. Their fellow social workers at the centre are Muslim Malays, Nurul (Jasmine Suraya Chin) and Fatimah (Tan Mei-ling). By setting the story in this pluralistic space it interrogates the boatload of influences bearing down on the women who use the baby hatch – grossly demonstrated by the men (it’s almost exclusively men) making comments in an online forum about how baby hatches are for “sluts” etc and so on. Lai-sum meets Siew-man one night when she finds Siew-man lurking around the centre, alone and struggling with what to do about her unwanted baby. She slowly wins her trust, they become friends, Lai-sum learns about the rape that ended with Siew-man’s pregnancy, and she decides she’s going to do something about it.
This is a film that lives or dies by its performances, and though Hsu a little overrought at times, she’s mostly strong, and more importantly provides a mirror and/or sounding board for Lai-sum and a career-best turn from Liew. Liew is still, dignified and internal as a social worker driven to her job by her own experiences and regrets – which she recognises in the desperate women at the hatch. Chong and Liew never jump up and down and wave over Lai-sum’s past, instead let the little details and unspoken connections do the jumping and waving for them. It’s graceful, demanding filmmaking by both and rewards not looking at your phone for a couple of hours.
Pavane for an Infant goes a little wonky in the third act, when Chong injects a sting sub-plot late in the game, drawing the focus away from Lai-sum and Siew-man’s supportive, non-judgemental relationship and the personal resolutions each does or doesn’t come to. Like the film, Lai-sum and Siew-man find most answers hard to come by. That’s not a criticism, it’s just reality. As a result Chong struggles a bit to seamlessly weave the various threads and themes together (how some of the narrative points click are head-scratchers) and land the plane smoothly. And it’s debatable as to whether or not the vaguely genre elements (though I’d totally pay to see Liew in an Asian spin on Ms .45) even needed to be there to begin with if, as Chong claims, Siew-man’s story was rooted in reality; the storytelling options were there. But those are minor quibbles in what’s otherwise an infuriating, empowering and, yes, feminist statement, soothingly visualised by DOP Leung Ming-kai (All Shall be Well, The Sunny Side of the Street), toggling between warm nature and concrete murk, right up to the final frames that see Lai-sum at a literal crossroads, where it seems all women wind up standing at some point or other.