Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Red Rose - Ric Lum

Red Rose is about an unnamed young man who loses his job. The film is supposedly set in a parallel universe of a financial breakdown where he learns to get back what he has lost from his Mentor, played by Sunny Pang. You can watch the trailer here.

Red Rose has a strange opening. It opens in an old sort of office building, with those green tiled floors. Suddenly, a fight scene ensues. It does not follow any sort of narrative structure through out the whole film, which makes deciphering the message of the film an incredibly difficult one. In the beginning, you think it is about a man who has lost his job, or at least has his job taken from him, as the metaphor of the opening fight scene seems to present. Next you see what is portrayed as his "love interest" in the film.

Next you see him being accosted by Sunny Pang who wants to teach him to get his life, job and love back. Some in between all the fighting and the fake blood, you realize that you don't understand what the film is trying to say.

A voice (Sunny Pang's) over eclipses some parts of the film and it feels disjoint and at some parts preachy and sometimes funny, which I suppose is the aim of this self professed "dark comedy". If the film itself is difficult to follow, the aesthetics of it do not help in any way. There is an odd look to the film, as though it was trying to be avant garde but didn't nail it at all. In the end, it came out as pretentious and obscure, but not in a good way.

I suppose if they were looking for something twisted and trying too hard, they nailed it. If the trailer interests you, watch as the movie pulls you in the other direction.

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