Shirkers
The good news: Shirkers has been picked up by Netflix, so you will be able to see this fascinating documentary within the next year.
All I knew about Shirkers was that it was the story of a student film that for some reason disappeared, only to resurface many years later. The details, revealed with languid pacing and a slow burn of suspense, are crazier than I could imagine.
Sandi Tan is now forty-six. She has been a film critic and novelist. Shirkers, this documentary, is her first feature film to be seen by the world. But as a teenager in Singapore in the early ‘90s, she and two friends made a wild, experimental, low-budget feature film, also called Shirkers. It might have been juvenile and flawed, but it would have been milestone in Singaporean indie film, if anyone had seen it.
Shirkers is much more than the strange tale of how the original film was created and lost. It is a story about growing up in a Singapore which still retained some of its rambling old charm, even as it very rapidly developed. There are ramshackle houses and empty streets and colonial train lines and lush vegetation, which are now gone. Tan captures the feeling of stifled creativity, but also the series of events that allowed her to watch banned foreign films, travel abroad, write a screenplay and pull together a film production.
Her partners in art were Jasmine and Sophie, and with their perspectives firmly represented in this documentary, we see a triangulation of story. There is a fourth perspective though: the film teacher whose class brought them together and who encouraged their identity as a band of talented and ambitious outsiders. George was a visiting American. He had lots of outlandish stories about his youth and about his involvement in American film. He claimed to be the inspiration for James Spader’s character in Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Although he did little to help get the film production off the ground, he acted as the director, even as Jasmine and Sophie complained to Sandi about ways he was sabotaging the film. When the film wrapped, the three girls returned to their educations around the world. George would develop the film and send it to Jasmine for editing. It never arrived. They never saw George again.
Interviews and present day sleuthing are part of the film, but the main elements is the footage from Shirkers itself. It is no spoiler that the film footage exists because we see young Tan (who was cast as the lead in the original film) in her role as the mysterious S., loping around the city, collecting a group of misfits who she will ‘kill’ in order to save them and move them into anther reality. The style was quirky, stylized and personal and would predict some of the indie film styles of the later '90s in American film.
The film is truly haunting, and the mood is greatly enhanced by wonderful music and sound design. The story is creepy and weird and outrageous. It made me sad and angry and sometimes made my mouth hang open in disbelief. I won't give away any more so that viewers can enjoy the full experience.