Sandi Tan is a woman, now in her forties, haunted by her past where in retrospect her potential was never realised: according to herself, at any rate. Growing up in Singapore, one of the wealthiest but socially conservative nations in the world, she constantly wished to rebel as a girl, seeing nothing but obstacles in her way to getting hold of the movies she needed or the music she craved, and she quickly became caught up in the nineteen-nineties fanzine scene, of which there were pockets of self-published creativity across the globe. But what she knew she was destined for was filmmaking, as she was convinced she was what the film world was looking for...
Well, Sandi did make her movie eventually, and Shirkers was it: twice. Shirkers was the name of the film she wrote and starred in back in 1992, and also the name of the documentary she wrote, directed and narrated in 2018, one which won an award at Sundance and was snapped up by Netflix for their streaming platform. After that initial buzz, it did tend to get lost in that company's content, but nevertheless picked up a cult following from some who responded to its tale of woe, a tale of young dreams cruelly thwarted and artistic powers crushed. Or at least, that was the impression Tan wished to give, as on watching this the sense of self-aggrandisement was hard to shake.
Everyone has that project they planned to take on in their younger years that, thanks to life getting in the way, they never finished, or never properly embarked upon thanks to circumstances working against them, be that financial, creative or social. Therefore you should find it simple to sympathise with Tan as she detailed her experiences, yet something about her story didn't quite ring true, not in a Catfish makes you suspicious sort of way, more a "were you really worthy of such attention for what essentially was an hour and a half of home movie footage edited together to construct a vague narrative?" sort of way. She did, however, have one killer example of intrigue: her 1992 director.
He was a man called Georges Cardona, her film studies teacher in fact, and the man who tried to help her and her friends realise their ambitions as moviemakers only to betray them at the last minute and effectively drop out of their lives. Now, according to this Tan had created a small masterpiece with the original Shirkers, it merely needed to be edited together, and big bad George had ruined her party by absconding with the footage, leaving her with a mystery that despite her attempts she never got to the bottom of. And indeed, she doesn't get to the bottom of it here, either, as while in 2011 it transpired Cardova was not wholly out of her life, and she tracked down people who knew him and felt duped by him too, this apparent rich seam simply trailed off in the documentary's latter stages.
But there was a bigger issue than that, which was Tan's original efforts, what we saw of it, looked like an amateurish mess, the results of a big, juvenile ego overreaching in what was unlikely ever to be taken seriously as anything but the noodlings and doodlings of an immature talent. The plot is nonsensical at best, as far as we can divine from the clips presented, and no matter how important it was to her, it remains pretty small beer to almost anyone else watching the 2018 efforts to draw attention towards herself as a great, lost talent. Tan actually became a novelist, so it's not as if her dreams were dashed utterly, and on this evidence literature's gain was far from cinema's loss; tellingly, in the contemporary interviews with her friends who helped her on the project way back then, they do not paint too flattering a picture of her, as she comes across as spoilt and bratty rather than blessed with a singular vision. But then again, a lot of times the biggest egos are the ones who get things done, while the rest of us fall prey to our self-doubts.
