Taiwan-based Wei Liang Chiang and You Qiao Yin have made this feature directing debut in the Directors’ Fortnight selection at Cannes. It evokes an almost Zen state of suffering and sadness – a feeling that penetrates the film’s fabric like months of steady rain in a rural landscape.
If that sounds like a daunting prospect, it is, and this movie requires patience and attention, a calibration of your viewing expectations to match its stasis. Yet it’s an andante tempo that makes its moments of drama, and even sensation all the more striking. The film’s executive producer is Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien: his influences are there, and there is also something of the work of Tsai Ming-liang.
The scene is a Taiwanese province where many illegal Asian migrant workers – from Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand – are exploited and abused; they endure their invisibility as the ultimate insidious mortification deriving from their lack of status. One scene combines drama and a kind of dour black comedy when a batch of new workers arrive at the railway station bearing tourist visas and met by tourist reps, but then, clearly by secret arrangement, break away from their notional hosts and, trundling their wheelie-bags, run towards the gangmasters’ vans, to be spirited away while the officials protest loudly and impotently.
One such is Oom (Wanlop Rungkumjad), who works as a caregiver, an important and lucrative area for the gangs. He tends, among others, to an infirm woman and her severely disabled wheelchair-using son, as well as another elderly patient. It is Oom’s awful burden to be a decent, compassionate human being who feels he has to do his job well, and his conscientious attitude is recognised and exploited by Hsing, or “Boss” (Yu-hong Hong). Oom, his trusty, is pressed into service when one of the other workers falls fatally sick and Boss needs his help clearing up this culpable and grotesque situation: Oom’s anguish and guilt only binds him closer to the unspeakable Boss.
Boss has set up a “dormitory” for his serf-workers and it is during one of his breezy and callous visits to this place that he is surrounded by angry people demanding to know when they will be paid. It becomes only too clear that Boss is himself beholden to another, more senior mobster, who runs illegals in businesses such as shipping and slaughterhouses, and who has subcontracted the caregiving racket to Boss, who has perhaps required buy-in cash that should have been used for the workers’ payment.
The compassion business becomes its own symbol of wretchedness. Oom sees himself in his patients, and one asks of him a very great favour with regard to the disabled man, to whom Oom has tended in the most intimate way.
In this thicket of despair and indifference, Oom has a kind of vision of grace. He is at one with them, in their suffering and pain. It is a secular transcendence, a union of Oom and his patient and his dead fellow worker, which brings a knowledge of the world. It’s a sombre, sober movie but made with impressive artistry.
• Mongrel screened at the Cannes film festival.
