听 Life is a bit of a snooze for the 11-year-old hero of this Singaporean drama - or it would be, if this adolescent insomniac could get some shut-eye. Instead he tip-toes around his apartment at 4:30 in the morning, spying on the Korean tenant his absent mom has left in charge. The wordless non-relationship between this needy youth and his suicidal 'uncle' is as elliptical as everything else in this strange anti-drama, that may have some viewers contemplating suicide themselves.
Having made his name with 15, a censor-baiting look at five teenagers running wild in his native Singapore, director Royston Tan has gone to the opposite extreme by composing a film where nothing much happens, extremely slowly. It's a portrait on loneliness really, his neglected protagonist's yearning for a father figure - even one as inappropriate as pill-popping alcoholic Jung (Young-jun Kim) - mirrored by the latter's longing for his dead girlfriend. Beneath this, however, lies an implied subtext of latent homoeroticism, Xiao Li Yuan's compulsion to collect Jung's pubic hair and creep into his bed at night hinting there is more going on here than meets the eye. (In one scene Xiao surprises his lodger by urinating in his bathtub.)
"LIKE WATCHING PAINT DRY"
Tan raises a few smiles showing Xiao misbehaving at school, tormenting a Tai Chi class and pretending to surf on a trembling ironing board. And there will be a few who'll be affected by his poetic ending with its touch of the supernatural. For the most part, though, 4:30 is like watching paint dry, without the paint.
4:30 is out in the UK on 23rd November 2007.
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