Call If You Need Me
International Showcase
(Malaysia, 2009, 104 mins)
In Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Directed By: James Lee
Executive Producers: Liew Seng Tat, Amir Muhammad
Producer: Tan Chui Mui
Screenwriter: James Lee
Cinematographer: J. Ishmael
Editor: James Lee
Cast: Sunny Pang, Pete Teo, Chua Thien See
Music: Ronnie Khoo
Gentle, easy-going Or Kia moves from the countryside to Kuala Lumpur to work for his cousin and best friend Ah Soon, a mid-level gangster and enforcer. While Or Kia works hard to put a sister through school, Ah Soon cares for an unstable girlfriend prone to mysterious disappearances. As they both sink deeper into a nocturnal world of debts, drugs, and betrayal, Or Kia’s loyalties are strained when Ah Soon falls out of favor with the bosses and tries to escape the business.
James Lee’s low-key gangster epic is a major work from the Malaysian independent film scene, centered around production company Da Huang (formed by Lee, Amir Muhammad, and Tan Chui Mui). Shooting on digital, often at night, Lee composes a series of immaculate set pieces of his beautiful losers smoking, waiting, dancing and drifting. Opening with a casual dinner sequence that is one of the most sublime representations of innocence before the fall in recent memory, Lee builds a slow-burning drama full of romance and despair that is unlike any other recent crime film.
-- Travis Miles
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