A slow burning crime story brings together lives of many people of different ethnical backgrounds in Lim Kah Wai‘s nearly two hour long, ambitious sixth long-feature “Come & Go”. Interwoven are the destinies of migrant workers from other parts of Asia lured to the country of splendid by promises of a better future and working contracts that are worth literally nothing, with those of the locals struggling to survive.
“Come and Go” is screening at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
There is a young men from Vietnam (Lien Binh Phat) bound to a terrible 3-year contract to perform the most degrading jobs, Nepalese people who dream of opening their own restaurants or making their culture visible to a wider audience, a Burmese student (Nang Tracy) who has to take on two jobs to be able to pay her tuition fees, sex tourists and seemingly “good” immigrants with a good background and families, who actually live a double, filth-financed lives without the knowledge of their spouses. There is also a business guy from Malaysia who tries to sell his domestic food concepts to big companies who are seeking for solutions to boost their offer for tourists.
In focus are also destinies of young Japanese women forlorn in Osaka's fuming hot pot of high rents and slim chances of fair job opportunities. Not being able to afford the life there, they are condemned to make very unpleasant compromises, if ready to take the elevator few storeys below their psychological and moral limits. If they don't feel like filling in for the humiliating offers of sexual services, there are girls recruited from somewhere else, promised an easy way to earn big money.
There are barely any men who are not perverts in “Come & Go”, apart for low-skill foreign workers and a couple of other, including an old lonely man who's taking any odd job to escape being alone at home. “Speaking of sick, what is more perverted than the Japanese Hentai?” is the question that the pornography-obsessed Taiwanese man (Lee Kang-sheng) asks the Japanese porn films producer/ director during their negotiation about new hot girls from Japan to be “sold” to Chinese millionaires.
Big promises, empty promises and lies are central topics of “Come & Go”, written and directed by Lim Kah-Wai who goes unpleasant paths to show how the mechanism of master & servant relations really functions. But actually, the film is a crime story with a murder that needs to be solved and that somehow turns all the protagonists of the film to suspects. This quite intriguing mystery built on the alleged real estate fraud that was planned by mobsters to earn lots of money before the Olympics in 2020, never quite ignites.
The intersection between many vignettes is complicated, demanding of the viewer much more than the ability to stay awake over the course of over two and the half hours. The idea in itself is exciting – showing that nothing happens just like that and that all people can be connected in certain way, if not directly, then by sharing similar destinies. But, it's too much of the good. This souffle was made of too many rich ingredients and it's taste is a dash too intense.
The film premiered in Tokyo, and is currently screening at PÖFF (Tallinn Black Nights) in the Current Waves program.
