4:30 (2007)

Directed by: Royston Tan | 93 minutes | drama | Actors: Young-jun Kim, Xiao Li Yuan

Royston Tan is a promising new filmmaker from Temasek Polytechnic University in Singapore. Their ‘Moving Images’ training promises young motivated filmmakers a chance to make their cinematographic dreams a reality and to follow in Tan’s footsteps. Because he missed it. Since 1995, Tan has won a bevy of awards for his artistic music videos and short films. The productions ’15’ and ‘Monkeylove’ in particular stood out, but other work by Tan is also highly regarded.

And why actually? ‘4:30′, a full-length film from 2005, is an abrupt turning point for Tan’s oeuvre, which previously focused on visually stimulating films with a lot of music and dance. The story of lonely boy Xiao Wu whose quest for human contact is wrapped by Tan in a world illuminated with dark and green colors, is a representation of loneliness as a feeling. In any case, this is an important thread through more of Tan’s works, as he himself explains: “the creative process is an opportunity to communicate with your inner self.” The dealing of the inner with the outer world expressed in images. Not light food for an evening at the movies.

Xiao Wu’s mother is away on business and he is home alone. Moreover, he misses his father. He processes his loneliness in his own way. The person closest to him (literally) is Jung, a man who rents a room in the apartment where Wu lives and who is having such a hard time dealing with the loss of his partner that he regularly contemplates suicide. He also processes his loneliness in his own way.

The film makes extensive use of green, dark colors and listless locations to emphasize the emotional loneliness of the protagonists. Furthermore, Tan uses long shots and hardly any dialogue is spoken. It is clear that ‘4:30’ is not a film that the average cinemagoer can enjoy. He is too ‘difficult’ for that. This is a film that tries to get the viewer to think along and experience how Xiao Wu and Jung interact with each other in their loneliness. For the film lover who likes to be addressed by a film on a different intellectual level and who has experience with this, ‘4:30’ is undoubtedly a successful experience.