STRAITS TIMES
March 15, 2006, Going GaGa

Warm, whimsical and witty, Tan Pin Pin's documentary shows her curiosity and empathy for her subjects

By Ong Sor Fern

Straits Times

IF YOU watch just one made-in-Singapore film this year, make it Singapore GaGa.

Tan Pin Pin's documentary, which debuted at the Singapore International Film Festival last year, is finally getting a well-deserved, if tiny, commercial window at the Arts House's Screening Room.

And it is well worth making the trek there to watch this warm, whimsical and witty film.

Out of one simple guiding principle - capturing Singapore through its soundscapes - Tan has spun an engaging and affectionate tapestry of the Republic. The film is also positive proof that criticism and celebration of national identity can go hand in hand.

On first encounter, this looks like a patchwork quilt of random vignettes.

The film wanders from the grand spectacle of the National Day parades to the neighbourhood cosiness of a madrasah celebrating its sports day with tudung-clad schoolgirls singing cheerleading chants that code-switch cheerfully between Arabic and English.

The avant-garde artistry of pianist Margaret Leng-Tan is set in counterpoint to the simple rhythmic ditty conjured by Liang Yu Tao as she hawks tissue paper to passersby at the MRT station.

But as the film unspools, it reveals itself to be slyly subversive as well. Tan declares her intention, with so much unassuming subtlety that casual viewers will miss it on first encounter, from the beginning.

The bombast of the National Day parade opening is undercut in the next scene by the lonely sight of busker Melvyn Cedello singing a mournful love ballad: 'Wasted days and wasted nights, I have left for you behind/for you don't belong to me/your heart belongs to someone else.'

Tan observes, not only acutely but also with an unflinchingly critical eye. In ferreting out the lost, the marginalised and the forgotten, she insists that Singaporeans see themselves, warts and all.

As her camera captures the well-heeled office crowd at Raffles Place hurrying unseeingly past Gn Kok Lin, an elderly man in clogs and ratty sweat-stained shirt playing insistently on his harmonica and juggling tennis balls, Tan's gaze contains within its unwavering focus a quiet rebuke.

But the wonderful thing about Tan is that she is never dictatorial in tone. Like the best documentary film-makers, she possesses not only great curiosity but genuine empathy for her eccentric subjects. She is never patronising.

In training her cameras on buskers like Gn and Liang, she gently insists on inclusion, reminding Singaporeans that such personalities exist in our midst whether we see them or not. And she revels in the diversity that these odd sparks bring to our clean structured Republic.

There is no greater exemplar of Tan's celebration of the quotidian than in a wonderful sequence in the middle of the film, when she sets Leng-Tan, with her toy piano, in the middle of a void deck and has the world-renowned Singapore-born artist play composer John Cage's 4'33'. During the piece, which is four minutes 33 seconds of silence, the ambient noise of the average HDB void deck takes centrestage.

In moments like these, the film evokes more warm fuzzy pride in being Singaporean than all the grandiose fireworks of National Day.