Wonderland review: Mark Lee and Peter Yu trade sad stories in poignant drama set in 1980s S’pore

Wonderland (PG13)
Starring Mark Lee, Peter Yu, Xenia Tan
Directed by Chai Yee Wei
This poignant Singaporean drama about fathers and separated daughters, underpinned by merciful white lies necessary to keep both life and hope persevering, is heavy-going.
But after watching, you’d wanna say some things to the people you love. Good things.
The award-winning Wonderland, directed by Chai Yee Wei (That Girl in Pinafore), is a touching, nostalgic and finely framed tale about parental love, untold truths, aching memories and communal support.
Okay, it’s slow-moving, quite bare and arthouse-bleak. Plus there’s a numbing overplay of an evergreen getai song, Missing By Riverside, holding special significance for the simple folks lingering day by day here.
This isn’t about a slice of life in tough Singapore. It’s the trudge of life.
But mostly, this pic is about a brotherly friendship late in life between two leftover lonely souls that’s propelled by a pair of veteran actors onscreen together terrifically for the first time.
Mark Lee and Peter Yu are truly good as accidentally bonded middle-aged men, Loke and Tan, who live opposite each other in tiny flats across a narrow HDB corridor. Despite residing at a low SES rung of society, they’re humane remnants spouting Hokkien so surprisingly unchecked it immediately makes this movie gloriously authentic.
That accidental incident — or fated joke — is Loke’s home address being put wrongly as Tan’s. Thus resulting in the former’s very personal letters from his daughter overseas sent mistakenly to the latter who opens them casually. Ironically, Tan eventually ends up reading and writing letters in English for Loke to mail to his angmoh-educated girl, Eileen (Xenia Tan resembling a young Yeo Yann Yann), since Loke knows zero English.
In 1988, Wonderland Amusement Park at Kallang closes down. The site — filmed in Malaysia — is a metaphorical setting for changing modernity and lasting sentimentality within Loke, an incense shop owner selling offerings for the dead. He wistfully recalls meeting his late wife at the theme park in halcyon flashbacks as Eileen heads off to America to study.
Father and daughter keep secrets. Loke, concealing lung cancer, sells his kampong house to move to his flat to pay for Eileen’s studies, but lies that the money is his savings. While Eileen doesn’t reveal that she knows the real truth about her mom’s distressing death despite her dad’s efforts to hide it.
But these are unspoken matters bearing no impediment to their loving relationship until tragedy strikes.
The focus then shifts to Peter Yu’s Tan, a reformed man who’s turned to God to atone for past gambling-addict sins. He senses in Loke a redemptive, musical kindred spirit — Tan plays the piano, Loke blows a harmonica — who’s separated from his daughter the way he’s estranged from his own child, a situation that apparently mirrors Yu’s own real-life experience.
Corralling a motley bunch of neighbours – an endearing group of uncles and aunties forming a HDB “wonderland” — from the cosy residents’ hangout in the void deck to help out, Tan decides to perpetuate a big lie to keep Loke from knowing a devastating truth following the tragedy.
“If he finds out now, he will be just like one of us … hopeless individuals,” Tan explains his act of deceit cum love, arguing that stark reality can be unhelpfully cruel as the friends engage in a sweet little cover-up.
Here, director Chai, working from a script by producer-writer, Michelle Chang, could’ve perhaps made his stance about useful lies clearer.
He sets his flick as a pensive passage of loss, pain and false comfort well. But until it really kicks in, we don’t really notice his main point as we’re absorbed into Wonderland’s realistic local world of ordinary people left behind by change and the just-as-ordinary folks who rise up to help them.
You’d wish too that Wonderland — the amusement park — could’ve come more into effective, mythical play instead being just a backdrop for emotional introspection.
But everything is ameliorated by the superb presence of Mark Lee and Peter Yu, a combo clearly ready for all reasons and seasons, ideally Hokkien.
In Wonderland here about necessary lies, they are wonderful performers as its veritable big truth. (4/5 stars) out in cinemas
Photo: Mocha Chai Laboratories