The steady crime flow of James Lee's Call If You Need Me. A penetrating, if uncinematic, look at Malaysia’s criminal underworld
By Ed Rampell
While I was watching veteran Malaysian director-writer James Lee’s crime drama Call If You Need Me I had to restrain myself from yelling at the screen: “Move the camera! After all, that’s why they call it ‘movies.’ And it’s okay to cut once in a while. Close ups are allowed, too!” Compared to another Southeast Asian underworld film, Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang’s 1999 kinetic Bangkok Dangerous, Lee’s film appeared as if it was lensed in slow motion and almost entirely in long shot. Seemingly devoid of film form, Call If You Need Me looked more like filmed theatre than a motion picture.
Nevertheless, I ended up finding this drama about uprooted villagers who move to the Malaysian capital of a grubby-looking Kuala Lumpur, where they pursue a life in crime, to be absorbing and strangely affecting. So I don’t know if Lee’s cinematic vernacular is really that limited or if the filmmaker deliberately made these directorial choices in order to allow his story to simply unfold, like real instead of reel life, before viewers’ eyes.
Call If You Need Me opens with country boy Or Kia (Sunny Pang) arriving at Kuala Lumpur, where he is taken under the wing of another ex-villager, Ah Soon (Pete Teo), who has become a leader of a smalltime gang of collectors. These K.L. hoods have a penchant for popping pills and screening porn. Tellingly, they have alienated love lives; Ah Soon is unable to bridge the gap between he and his girlfriend, Ah Peng (Thian See Chua), while Or Kia, who is rising through the gangster ranks like a sort of Malaysian Scarface, unenthusiastically consorts with hookers, while trying to stifle his student sister’s sexuality.
For the most part these low level low lifes’ idea of “packing heat” is grabbing hammers and sticks in order to do battle with rival criminals. Public Enemies this movie ain’t. It is, however, an understated, wistful look -- similar to another LAFF entry this year, the Mexican documentary, Rehje -- at displaced rural people turned topsy-turvy by big city life. This, of course, is an old theme in Western novels such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, but under the guise of a mobster melodrama James Lee has updated this tale of the uprooted and loss of innocence to the 21st century realities of Malaysia. Sometimes, you really can’t go home again.
