In his poetic and intelligent feature directorial debut, Chris Chong Chan Fui improbably elevates karaoke videos into the realm of allegory. But the film is far from a treatise on the art of music videos. Instead, it concerns a young man named Betik (Zahiril Adzim) and his illusions regarding what it means to come home.
Indeed, homecoming is the major theme. Though the film is not autobiographical, this is clearly a personal work. Chong is a former Toronto resident who started his filmmaking career here, working for the Images Film Festival and eventually winning this Festival's Best Canadian Short Film award for two consecutive years. He has since moved back to Malaysia permanently, and Karaoke is his first work made wholly in his native homeland. His return to Kota Kinabalu thus helped inspire this narrative, though he manages to keep a controlled emotional distance from the subject.
Karaoke videos act here as a metaphor for how fantasy is projected upon patently false images of beauty and perfection. Likewise, Betik has an idealized view of his return home to rural Malaysia from Kuala Lumpur: his mother happily receiving her son back, and his eventually taking over the family karaoke bar. But once he is there, reality proves to be starkly different than what he had imagined.
Another theme runs concurrent to Betik's tale. Palm oil is a major industry in Malaysia, and acres and acres of palms trees fan across the country. But these trees are artificially grown as products – what were once forests are now just rows of identical crops, ready to be harvested. Chong's keen observations are reminiscent of Jia Zhang-ke's docudrama works. The processing of palm trees is bluntly presented here, adding another discourse of artificiality to the idea of returning to the serene countryside.
Despite the weighty ideas explored in Karaoke, the film is not without humour, as shown in the amusing final scene that effectively satirizes the making of a karaoke video. That this segment also functions as a statement about the protagonist's mindset is a testament to the filmmaker's controlled vision. Plus, the music is catchy!
Raymond Phathanavirangoon
Chris Chong Chan Fui was born in Malaysia and began his filmmaking career in Toronto. He directed the short films
Crash Skid Love (98),
Minus (00),
Notebook on Lightning Bolts & Turntables (00),
Music Might Have Deceived Us (00),
Let Me Start By Saying (01),
Tuesday Be My Friend (06),
POOL (07) and
Block B (08), the latter two of which won Best Canadian Short Film at the Festival.
Karaoke (09) is his feature directorial debut.