Eric Khoo's No Day Off

I have extremely mixed feelings about Eric Khoo's new short film No Day Off. I was initially outraged, feeling very uncomfortable with Khoo's demonization of middle-class Singaporeans who employ maids. He reduces them into stereotypes (compounded by the fact that we don't actually see the Singaporean characters but only hear their voices offscreen) and statistics (which is at odds to his supposed humanization of maids - after all, we're all only statistics). No doubt it's, as a friend said, middle-class guilt that drives the movie, but belonging to the exact class of people he criticizes in this movie, it made me angry to think that it is Khoo - himself one of the richest people in Singapore - who is the one to adopt such a holier-than-thou stand and make such a criticism. The people in the first two segments are portrayed as downright obnoxious and condescending, without a single redeeming quality about them. Especially when told in vignette-style interspersed with statistics (by which, I take to assume, he is trying to indict EVERYONE from this class), it makes any reading of objectivity moot.

It tries to balance out the Singaporean-middle-class bashing with a relatively more sensitive third segment, but the damage has been done and the fact that the last segment's characters are Indian instead of the previous two's Chinese characters makes me wonder if he's trying to say that, after all, it's a race thing; or perhaps it's part of an artist's natural self-loathing act to reflect on and criticize one's own status. Maybe, I don't know. In short, in the process of 'humanizing' some people, he has drained the rest of Singapore from its humanity; the same argument as to defend the defenseless, we must first attack the people who are in power.

Yes, his point is noble. The film was made, ostensibly, in reaction to the recently enacted government policy that dismisses the compulsory off day for maids. But I think to make such a point, the issue of maids and their relationship with their employers has to be handled more sensitively and deeply, instead of being incendiary or skewed. The most dangerous thing about stereotyping and attacking the middle-class is causing the movie to lose some credibility along the way, which might cause the message to be lost to some.

After all this initial outrage had died down, however, what I find I can't forget is the beautiful face of the lead actress. She carries her role with such a strong and sensitive presence that it commands the screen and breaks free from Khoo's occasional heavy-handedness. It is, after all, an extraordinarily good film, viewed outside of its politics and its newspaper-clipping-style melodrama.

But probably the thing that irked me most was that it is true - that such melodrama does happen, and such obnoxious and condescending stereotypes do exist. And being part of their class gives me an equal amount of guilt and shame (which I might have instictively reacted to with anger), even though I might not think I'm guilty of such things. Knowing that there are people like that is what makes me ashamed.

At the end of the day, I guess my opinion does not matter to much. The audience seemed to have love it and that's what matters most maybe. If Khoo can get through to us by giving us another guilt bag to puncture (although it's not at all like Workingman's Death - Khoo's movie has much more dignity to it), then I believe it has more than justified its aim. If it can shame the government into retracting that law, or shame Singaporeans into treating their own maids better, then all the more it should be seen by the masses, who are numbed into ignoring the things we don't often see. After all there are all kinds of people, though the good people are not all good and the bad people are not all bad. I can't really presume anyone's stereotyping anything either, when I'm often first in line to admit that stereotypes are true and exist everywhere around us. Oh well what do I know.