Movie Review 'Shirkers'

You have likely never seen a documentary quite like Shirkers. Part mystery part fiction movie, part character study and part in-depth personal examination, Shirkers contains multitudes of filmic fascinations. This Netflix production is ambitious, ingenious and a wonderful work of self-reflective art.

Shirkers tells the story of a group of outcasts in Singapore who decide to combine their unique talents and make a movie like no one has seen before in Singapore. Shirkers had a myriad of influences and yet, from what we see of it, is wholly unique in style, humor and artistic daring. It shows a group of people with a unique voice.

Sandi Tan wrote the screenplay for Shirkers and starred in the movie as S, a killer of sorts. Sandi's closest friends Sophia and Jasmine provide behind the scenes support applying their talents in front of and behind the camera, helping fill out Sandi's odd vision as a few of the people who could understand that vision at the time.

Corralling this talented group is an American by the name of Georges Cardona. Cardona worked in Singapore in the early 1990's as a college professor teaching film. His only credit prior to becoming the director of Shirkers was as a Director of Photography on something called The Last Slumber Party, which you can imagine is not exactly a Citizen Kane–style classic.

Nevertheless, Cardona had a way about him. As Sandi Tan tells it in Shirkers, Cardona had a way of convincing you of his competence and talent without having to demonstrate it. He was kind and strange, friendly and odd. He was also the only one they knew with any experience with a film camera and thus was a director as much by desire as default.

What is important to remember is that Sandi Tan did feel, at the time, in the early 1990's, that Georges Cardona was her friend. The two spent a lot of time together though Georges was married. Sandi maintains that their relationship was never intimate but the film contains hints that Sandi has a thing for the kind of older man that Georges exemplifies. I believe her when she says they weren't intimate but it's not hard to imagine that Cardona was interested in being more than friends based off of her stories about him.

We will never know what Georges Cardona actually thought of felt. A man of bizarre mystery, Cardona kicks the plot of Shirkers the documentary into motion when he is supposed to be editing the film into its final form and instead, he disappears, taking with him the only print of Shirkers and leaving behind only minor clues. These clues include cryptic audio tapes he sends to Tan who is off trying to start adulthood while hoping against hope that her friend will somehow come through.

We will come to find that the seeds of Georges Cardona's betrayal were sewn throughout the making of Shirkers. When Sandi sets up an a musician friend to provide a soundtrack for Shirkers, the friend is met with a bizarre encounter with Cardona who makes off with the only recording of the score without ever sharing it with Sandi or anyone else on the production.

Tan frames Cardona as a figure of myth which matches with his strange behavior. Cardona we learn liked to create myths around himself. One of his favorite myths regard his time in Hollywood where he claims to have been the inspiration for James Spader's sexually voracious yet remote character in Sex, Lies and Videotape. He offers no evidence of his relationship with that films creator, writer-director Steven Soderbergh, it's just a story that he likes to tell. One of many, it would appear.

My description is much more straightforward from a narrative perspective than what we actually get in Shirkers. Sandi Tan weaves the story with a great deal more art than I am using in my description. Though Shirkers has elements typical of the documentary genre, things like direct to camera interviews and narration, Tan uses scenes from Shirkers the movie and some of her highly unique art to give Shirkers the documentary a look that belongs wholly to Shirkers.

While the mystery of what happened to Shirkers the movie makes up part of the narrative of the documentary but perhaps just as interesting is Tan's self-lacerating examination of herself. Tan and her friend Jasmine Ng have a particularly prickly back and forth with each calling out the other for sins both major and minor in their social interaction.

Tan is a fascinating filmmaker with a unique vision. She is guarded and defiant and yet self-aware and empathetic. She has an edge of anger toward Georges Cardona that never dissipates throughout the documentary which is real and human. This isn't a journey toward forgiveness for a wayward friend, it's a journey toward acceptance of circumstances beyond the control of those affected by them.

Sandy Tan, Sophia Siddique Harvey, and Jasmine Ng have realized their goals in becoming part of the film world in academia, in industry and artistry. Shirkers has never been forgotten and thanks to this documentary it will remain unforgettable but the destruction of their collective filmmaking dream did not slow down these remarkable women, not entirely.

In a way there is a glimmer of the #MeToo movement bubbling under Shirkers. A man took from a group of talented women something they can never get back. This man may not have had much power but what little power he did have, he exercised by making off with the movie and absconding with what was at the time, the life's work of these young, talented women.

It's that quiet metaphor that gives Shirkers even more resonance and power than it appears to have. While it is a notable mystery story, a Hollywood movie making story, it's also a story of strength and artistry and overcoming obstacles beyond your control, obstacles that should not have ever existed and only existed because one man's ego-maniacal thievery. He took something that was not his and that he can never truly give back.