881, Royston Tan, 2007
I can usually tell how much I am enjoying a film by how quickly it makes me cry. 881, Royston Tan’s campy epic about the Singaporean tradition of Getai singing, has my mascara streaked before the end of the opening credits and my cheeks moist throughout its entirety. The tone that Tan evokes is so genuine and endearing that it is hard to imagine even the hardest heart disliking this film, no matter how absurd it’s content.
881(pronounced in Chiense as ‘papaya’) chronicles the adopted sisterhood of the very fetching Big Papaya (Yan Yan Yeo) and Little Papaya (Mindee Ong) who follow their dreams of performing on the cutthroat Getai circuit. Steeped in a strange fusion of spirituality and fantasy, the Getai is a song and dance performance undertaken in the seventh month of the calendar to honor the spirits of the departed. Somehow in
They are aided along their way to success by the irrepressible Auntie Ling’s (Ling Ling Liu) talents as a seamstress, Auntie’s estranged sister the ‘goddess of Getai’ (again Ling Ling Liu) who endows the sisters with magical voices, and Auntie Ling’s deaf-mute son who is described as a sex fiend who spends most of the film comically petting his pet ‘cock’. These performances are spot on, performed with great humor and pathos.
The Getai Godess!
As with all great tragedies, the plot oscillates between the key themes of love, death and (ultimately) transcendence. When the introductory narration tells us that Big Papaya will be dead before 25 of cancer, we know that the visual extravagance of the film (which could so easily be lost to surface) becomes the double for the irrepressible essence of the sisters celebrated through the joy of colour and song.
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