Told in 8 chapters, a visual essay on frivolous consummation and its ensuing tragedies gradually unfold. With the title “Me and My Country Pornography”, one expects a political critique delivered with innuendo. Yet the result seems to be the reverse. Experimental filmmaker Lin Htet Aung patiently teases out visual patterns that morph and develop, prodding at our conceptions of the sex act with seeming political connotations. Though viable to frustrate audiences by spending more than half of its 8-minute runtime in elusivity, “Me and My Country Pornography”'s boredom invites introspection, making it an intriguing contribution to Taiwan International Documentary Festival's (TIDF) Focus Programme: “Metaphor of the Times: The Reality Named Myanmar”.
Me and My Country Pornography is screening at Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival
Shrouded in the frontal, grainy aesthetics of silent actuality films, the chamber narrative offers scant explanations. The first chapter, raunchily titled ‘Quickie' sees a man walking repetitively across the frame, which is a split screen sutured back together. When he disappears into the edge of the first frame, he quickly re-emerges into the next and continues his path. In the following chapter, ‘Foreplay', his walks are given an additional pause before the intersecting line, as if sexual foreplay were a blank hesitation before the moment of crossing the boundary. When we reach the third chapter, ‘Intercourse', the man remains seated in the first frame and against our expectations, a doppelganger of himself begins to walk in the second frame.
As his actions loop on, we are given time to examine the two rooms in each frame, where family photos, a calendar and ephemera decorate one end of a dining space, and a Buddhist altar occupies another. While these details reap little in the way of hard solid facts, they declare the space to be lived in, belonging to an average family. In their absence, sexual perversions are invading every corner of their home.
Like tropes and foreshadowings, these filmic patterns must be hammered in with patience. With time, they push us beyond watching a story to active observation, divulging new revelations at every turn. Meanwhile, this motif of gradual change continues in a landscape map that morphs with every chapter, its cartographic boundary lines blurring, distorting, expanding, contracting. Miniscule, pawn-like characters in the map travel about and soon two naked figures are consummating openly to their chagrin. Again, sex is seen as an invasive act that can demarcate, strengthen or destroy boundaries. The pornographic encounter does not just happen once and fade away, but leaves widespread literal and metaphorical residual traces, affecting the players involved and implicating external others.
These happenings all nudge us towards asking: what makes sex, sex? Which might be the same as asking, what makes a transgressive act, truly transgressive?
Is it the repetitive act of barging in itself? Or the romantic foreplay and inspiration around it? Is it the players in question, or the consequence of what is born? One hopes to resist the easiest associations that come to mind, of taking this repetitive act of being ‘screwed' as an allegory for the repetitive socio-political trauma faced by Myanmar. Rather, the movement of consummation can also mean an exchange of ideas, an alliance. Or as implied by the final chapter, titled ‘Unwanted Child', the result of interminglings, which might be a blessing or a curse. This is where Lin Htet Aung seems to refuse to elaborate. By the end, the visual patterns dominate a substantial portion, but serve little more than a surface link. We do not yet understand why or how the country pornography is left to produce unwanted consequences, or a generation under constant socio-political unrest.
Check the interview with the director
But while its tenuous ideas leave more to be desired, “Me and My Country Pornography” evokes a clear sentiment. As our man knowingly crosses the frame again and again, it becomes clear that he is aware of the rectangular frame entrapping him inside this film. Of the boundaries he must continually try to escape. Is sex just the act itself? Or is it encompassed in the build-up, or coming apart and leaving when it is over? And even then, the residual effects will last for a long time.
Admittedly, “Me and My Country Pornography” might stand more substantially when contextualized within TIDF's Focus program. A lineup of Burmese films: narratives, documentaries, experimental works made since the coup of 2021, which also includes Lin Htet Aung's newer and longer work, “Once Upon A Time There Was A Mom”. Despite the former's lackings, its addition to the program provides the opportunity for audiences to consider the full breadth of his ongoing formalistic experiments, a key effort alongside contemporaries such as Moe Myat May Zarchi, Aung Min, The Maw Naing, Thaiddhi, Thu Thu Shein, Aung Phyoe and many others, some anonymous. Collectively, these artists cast new, incisive light on unpacking both the emotional and societal intricacies of Myanmar's plight.
