GEORGE TOWN, May 17 — When You Mean the World to Me made its debut as a 45-minute play at the George Town Festival in 2014, there was hardly a dry eye in the house.
The play had a five-day run and every show was sold out.
Three years later, You Mean the World to Me is a movie and again, there was hardly a dry eye in the cinema by the time the end credits rolled.
Of course what stands out most in the movie is the lilting cadence of Penang Hokkien; the first Malaysian — or any film really — movie to be shot entirely in Penang Hokkien!
It was such an accurate representation of Penangites’ unique jumbled lingo and a throwback to a time when Penang Hokkien was still commonly spoken in most households.
Familiar phrases such as cha bo heng (effeminate), kap siao (which means to talk nonsense), chui kam kim (which refers to someone who doesn’t talk much) and pang sai ka lai cui jamban (a phrase to mean doing things at the very last minute ) peppered the movie.
Naturally these phrases drew appreciative laughs from the audience in the cinema, proving that director Saw Teong Hin’s insistence on filming the entire movie in Penang Hokkien was the right choice.
The dialect used as well as cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s brilliant capture of a 1970s Penang and the current bustling city of George Town made the movie a truly Penang experience on its own.
As for the semi-autobiographical storyline depicting Saw’s own childhood, the raw emotions of the film director tortured by his past felt very authentic.
Frederick Lee, who also portrayed Sunny in the 2014 play, managed to present a more rounded Sunny in the slow-paced family drama compared to the shorter 45-minute play. Where the play was concise, the movie was just the perfect length to flesh out Sunny’s character.
Just like the play, the movie starts with Sunny visiting his sister, Ah Hoon, on the eve of Chinese New Year but when their two aunts join them for dinner, he leaves abruptly. From there, the story about his mother, mentally challenged elder brother
Ah Boy, and his drunkard father Ah Seng slowly unfolds.
Singaporean Neo Swee Lin, who acted as the mother in both the play and the movie, was a convincing harried mother who had to deal with a mentally challenged son, a drunkard defeated husband, a scared teenage daughter and a small son while trying to feed everybody.
There were moments of joy where she doted on the young Sunny — taking him to the movies and dancing around with him — but these were overshadowed by incidents involving Ah Boy where she appeared to favour the older boy.
In the movie, Sunny’s uneasy relationship with Ah Boy was given more emphasis as was his isolation in school where he was teased by his rich schoolmates.
It all comes to a head when Sunny witnesses an incident between Ah Boy and his mother one day after school. The confusion he felt and the bitterness at his mother’s seeming favouritism of Ah Boy stayed with Sunny till he grew up.
In the movie, Sunny is making a movie about his childhood in the movie and though this was a little confusing, it added another dimension to the story.
The device of a movie within a movie makes the audience realise we are not just seeing everything from Sunny’s point of view… here he is trying to give a big picture perspective to what transpired all those years ago.
The theme song at the end by Taiwanese Zhao Chuan — Kiam Sia Li (Thank you) — tells of his deep gratitude and appreciation for his family and his regrets for not holding his mother and family dear to him all those years ago.
You Mean The World To Me, released nationwide on May 4, is also called Hai Kinn Xin Loo in Hokkien, which incidentally is the old Hokkien name for Victoria Street in Penang. It literally means “new road by the sea front.” It was also where Saw’s family home used to be.
The movie is distributed by Astro Shaw in Malaysia while MM2 Entertainment released the movie in Taiwan and Singapore. It is still playing in most major cinemas in Malaysia.
