WET SEASON: Damp And Cold

WET SEASON: Damp And Cold

Director Anthony Chen returns eight years after his wonderful, career-making debut film Ilo Ilo, with Wet Season. Still playing off of age-dynamics and employing two of the same actors from his 2013 film – Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia LerChen’s sophomore effort is much more muted and paced, featuring long still shots and a cooler and melancholier atmosphere. The movie unfortunately is also a lot less engaging, despite the provocative nature of its plot – a forbidden intimacy developing between a teacher and a student.

Trapped and Lonely

Wet Season begins with a lonely Chinese teacher named Mrs. Ling (Yeo Yann Yann). She is a person trapped on all sides in a Singapore that seems to close in on her more and more as time passes. Her marriage is unfulfilling, with her husband constantly away (is he having an affair?) and her elderly father basically incapacitated and unable to communicate beyond mere grunts. Her job isn’t all that important either. She teaches Chinese, in a school and culture of Singapore where Chinese is simply not a language of priority (it’s never clarified, probably purposefully, whether the language is specifically Mandarin or Cantonese). The students don’t quite care about the subject, constantly falling asleep or playing on their cell phones in class. Several students fail their finals and need to take a remedial class with her. One of them is a boy named Kok Wei Lun (Koh La Jier).

WET SEASON: Damp And Cold
source: Golden Village Pictures

The interesting sequences of this rather glacially paced movie come and go without a moment’s notice and are few and far in between to really bolster what surrounds them. One of these is in the remedial class where Wei Lun shows his infatuation with Ling. During a test, as Ling goes to the window to look out from it, depressed and tired with everything in her life, Wei Lun photographs her from his cell phone. The camera’s focus shifting off of Ling to the photographed image of her being held by Wei Lun’s hand brings a moment of innocent pubescent impulse into something more sinister.

A Quieter and Less Interesting Sophmore Effort

Chen’s depiction of a teacher-student relationship is complicated in its feelings and it’s to the film’s credit that it neither depicts this as a scandalous piece of pulp nor fluffs it like a twee romance. Instead, it uses Ling’s vulnerable beckoning for some form of affection and acceptance and Wei Lun’s teenage pubescent sex urges as the meeting of two helpless individuals who need a release within lives that simply don’t provide one. Their meetings are mechanical, depressing, and constantly in question during the act – Ling’s facial expressions, affectingly portrayed by Yeoh, suggest she’s wondering if she is even capable of feeling pleasure anymore.

WET SEASON: Damp And Cold
source: Golden Village Pictures

Wei Lun, after their extremely awkward sexual encounter, simply smiles the kind of smile you have when a child finally gets what he wants, with no real understanding of its implications and no real deeper meaning. Anthony Chen’s age-dynamic cinema is good at getting at the heart of the frustrations and differences between two people who navigate each other from completely different points in life and even different nationalities and cultures – in Ilo Ilo the maid is a Filipino immigrant to Jiale’s privileged upper-middle-class Singaporean youth, and in Wet Season, Ling is Malaysian while Wei Lun is Singaporean.

Conclusion

It’s a slog to get to these small interesting moments, however, in a movie that plays the subtlety card to frustrating effect. In the film’s approach to try depicting its scandalous central relationship as naturally occurring as possible, Wet Season sacrifices narrative or emotional thrust. While characters are so clearly established in Ilo Ilo and their personalities fleshed out from just a few seconds of screen-time to trigger and anticipation where the sparks are gonna fly, Wet Season plays it coy to the point that Chen’s central characters don’t garner any interest. They don’t have the distinguishing personalities that complement their situations. Sophomore efforts like this are naturally going to be more frustrated especially when following up a brilliant debut, but considering the eight-year gap in release, one wishes Wet Season had the sort of creative risk-taking its premise beckons for.

Have you seen Wet Season? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below!

Wet Season is currently streaming in virtual cinemas across the United States.


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