Gone Shopping

The Director’s cut of Gone Shopping will premiere at the 10th edition of the Udine Far East Film Festival. Gone Shopping is the feature debut of director-writer Wee Li Lin. The filmmaker’s background in short film is reflected in the movie’s plot which may be seen as an intricate fusion of three independent stories, all set in the city-state’s shopping centres. Singapore is often perceived as the ultimate shopping paradise, its major shopping malls being virtual temples of luxury and opulence, pretending to offer happiness as well. This is, however, what the film’s characters will not find.
For Clara (played by the TV personality Kym Ng), a forty-year-old tai tai, or lady of leisure, shopping is a “therapy” which she hopes will cure her emotional deprivation, disillusions with her relationship and life’s general aimlessness. Not even a chance meeting with an old flame Valentine (Adrian Pang) can offer Clara a way out of the trap of her gilded but meaningless existence. Aaron (Aaron Kao), a juvenile twenty-three-year-old bored in his nine-to-five job, skips work to hang around in shopping centres in search of excitement, company, and perhaps manhood, falls for his friend’s sister Hui Hui (Magdalene Tan), an empty-headed Cosplay (costume-play) fanatic. Renu (Sonia Nair) is a smart eight-year-old Tamil girl abandoned by her parents in Little India’s Mustafa departmental store. She explores the nooks and crannies of the warren-like discount shopping complex where she also becomes a witness to an elaborate scam.
The director methodically deconstructs the glamorous veneer of the shopping centres to show what they really are: a make-believe world, a futile escape from reality, a world in which material possession and accumulation are supposed to replace true emotions, human warmth, spiritual values and personal communication. The film’s strength lies in the well-written script, the director’s assured style as well as the accomplished performances of Adrian Pang and Kym Ng and Sonia Nair, whose controlled and subdued delivery stand above the acting average in Singapore films.