This Malaysian slow cinema mood piece may be slight with narrative but it re-centers the protagonist, a Vietnamese illegal immigrant who does odd jobs, in her own space of existential longing.
Review #2,784
Dir. Chia Chee Sum
2023 | Malaysia, Singapore | Drama | 90 min | 1.85:1 | Various languages
PG (passed clean)
Cast: Thi Diu Ta, Aster Yeow Ee, Abdul Manaf bin Rejab
Plot: Hanh, an undocumented Vietnamese in KL secretly meets with her daughter who lives with the local adoptive parents, She continues her door-to-door housekeeping in an apartment area in Kuala Lumpur, where the decades-old buildings are home to both locals and foreigners.
Awards: Nom. for New Currents Award (Busan)
International Sales: Diversion
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Illegal Immigrants; Community; Mother-Daughter Relationship
Narrative Style: Straightforward/Elliptical
Pace: Slow
Audience Type: General Arthouse
Viewed: Oldham Theatre (part of Asian Film Archive’s Releases)
Spoilers: No
There is a scene in Oasis of Now where an old man asks the protagonist to come into his flat and have something to eat. This little living space reminds me of my childhood days visiting my late granduncle at Ghim Moh during the Lunar New Year. It has the same layout.
While Ghim Moh is in Singapore and the flat has since been torn down, the scene in Chia Chee Sum’s debut feature is set in Malaysia in a similarly old-school estate.
In a Q&A conducted after the screening that I attended, Chia repeatedly mentioned that Oasis of Now was a film that tried to depict the ‘feelings’ that these spaces had elucidated in his memory. I understood what he was saying.
It is with this ‘affective’ approach that I think one should take to meet his film halfway. The other half will depend on how well you can recognise the value of slow cinema in this sort of cinematic treatment of memory, time and space.
“I’ll teach you how to play the stones game.”
After all, Oasis of Now isn’t a film with grand, operatic melodramatic sweeps, so these ‘feelings’ aren’t necessarily felt from an emotional point of view and in the traditional sense; instead, they are reflective of subtle inner shifts within one’s (constant) emotional state.
The whole film feels just like that, that comforting constancy, that re-centering of one’s mind and body, no matter the circumstance.
The circumstances aren’t particularly dire for the Vietnamese protagonist, an illegal immigrant who does odd jobs, but they still weigh on her mind, especially her thoughts about her young daughter, whom she has asked another much more well-to-do family to help raise.
The occasional crossing of paths with her daughter is punctuated by no more than a few words, but they are re-centering encounters, and so are the protagonist’s solo walks and restful moments in familiar stairwells, which become spaces of existential longing.
Oasis of Now is a non-narrative mood piece (with a surprising melting pot of different languages) that should interest cinephiles with a vested interest in a kind of pan-Southeast Asian cinema.
Grade: B
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 
An excellent review. I haven’t heard of this one but your review had given me a strong reason to see it. I’ve often been drawn toward stories of immigrants in movies. Having immigrated to Canada during childhood, I always find movies about the immigrations process to be relatable. For instance, one of my most beloved films that deals with this topic is “Past Lives”. My favorite film of 2023. I am still upset by the fact that it won no Oscars. Here’s why I loved it:
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