La Luna (PG13)
109 minutes, opens on Thursday
3 stars
The story: The sleepy fictional Kampong Bras Basah in 1950s Perak, Malaysia, is jolted by the arrival of a lingerie shop and the ensuing ideological war.
La Luna, the Singapore-Malaysia co-production by local director M. Raihan Halim, was invited to premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival in October.
Assembling the stacked cast of this hugely likeable comedy was already an achievement: The actors are Malay entertainment luminaries.
Sharifah Amani is a knockout starring as indomitable city girl Hanie Abdullah, who shows up unannounced to put the “bra” in Bras Basah with her eponymous boutique.
Shaheizy Sam plays the stuffy police chief, single father to Syumaila Salihin’s 16-year-old budding feminist schoolgirl, while Nam Ron and Farah Ahmad are a middle-aged couple.
The locals are first scandalised, then inspired by Hanie. The women cannot get enough of her frillies that make them feel liberated and empowered. Passionless marriages are suddenly reinvigorated in joyful hijinks.
None of which pleases the bearded village elder, and theatre veteran Wan Hanafi Su is the face of religious intolerance as a mullah preaching hatred. He conspires to drive Hanie out of town for dishonouring Islamic mores and threatening his authority.
Raihan’s 2014 debut Banting also had a Muslim female challenge orthodoxy.
His uplifting sophomore feature is about the community finding unexpected courage to fight for change in a hamlet that is, despite its nostalgic charm, ruled by fear. There are restrictive laws on segregation and censorship, and even a sub-plot on domestic violence.
This is no melodrama: The film-maker based his screenplay on an actual arson attack against a lingerie store in Saudi Arabia.
Hot take: Do not underestimate the revolutionary power of lacy negligees or frothy humour. This feel-good crowd-pleaser has serious things to say about fundamentalism and patriarchal oppression.
The Killer (R21)
118 minutes, available on Netflix
3 stars
The story: David Fincher directs Michael Fassbender as a punctilious assassin whose life unravels after a botched job. He basically iced the wrong target.
The Killer is the hitman’s grimly comic existential drama in the wake of the blunder.
His paymasters are miffed and coming after him. In one long interior monologue, he narrates the international manhunt that takes him from the crime scene in the French capital of Paris to the Dominican Republic, then on to the United States.
The six chapters each introduces a new city and a different adversary. There is a knock-down-drag-out with The Brute (Sala Baker) and a deliciously dry Tilda Swinton, who gets likened to a Q-tip.
What stays constant is The Killer’s focus on tying up loose ends. “Stick to the plan” is his mantra. “Empathy is weakness”, and none is expected from the viewer in a neo-noir as stone-cold as its antihero.
Fincher is also the name behind Zodiac (2007) and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011). The American director, back with his Se7en (1995) screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker – they are adapting from a 1998 French graphic novel series of the same title – deconstructs the serial killer genre he elevated by paring it down to just the business of the kill.
This movie is a study in discipline on the part of the film-maker too. It is clinical and precise, with minimal plot thrills other than quick flashes of violence.
The storytelling is sleek. And Irish actor Fassbender is magnetic even as an anonymous cipher in stasis, doing yoga and chilling to British band The Smiths while staking out his mark.
The pleasure is in watching two supremely skilled professionals at work.
Hot take: This revenge odyssey is minor Fincher, but executed nonetheless in style.
