Be With Me (2005, Dir. Eric Khoo)
“Is true love truly there, my love?”
Romance gained and lost, the tenuousness of connection, the accidental happinesses and tragedies of urban life, the healing properties of food — you might think it’s a remake of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, but Singaporean director Eric Khoo’s Be With Me has a few curveballs to throw. Acknowledged as the godfather of Singapore’s modern film scene, Khoo is best known in the West for Mee Pok Man, which used gentle means to tell the romantic tale of a simple noodle seller and his love for the dead woman in his apartment. Be With Me doesn’t contain anything nearly as jarring, but there it does shake up the familiar ingredients with some arresting touches.
Ostensibly three stories about love (helpfully titled in the credits as “Meant to Be,” “Finding Love,” and “So in Love”) that barely intersect, the film’s unifying factor is Theresa Chan (played by the real Theresa Chan). Blind and deaf since a young age, Chan has persevered and written an autobiography about her experiences, and the film presents a healthy portion of her story, rendered as silent text which underscores the action on screen (scenes of Chan shopping for food, cooking dinner, teaching disabled children at a local school). These scenes, plotless are they are, constitute the heart of the film, and supply a much-needed subtext to the three tales that are the movie’s “fictional” elements. In “Finding Love,” an overweight security guard known only as Fatty gains a crush on a stylish businesswoman,
