Why ‘Shirkers’ Is The Must-See Documentary Of The Moment

American journalists at European film festivals tend to travel in packs. Back when I covered France’s fabled Cannes Film Festival, from the years 2005 through 2008, I was in a crew with four other critics, all of whom lived in L.A.; I knew them through affiliations with the Village Voice and other alternative newspapers. One of them was Sandi Tan, who in this period was “pivoting,” as the kids say today, from criticism to fiction writing; she was working on what sounded like a long, involved novel. (The resultant book, 2012’s The Black Isle, was indeed that.)

It took a little while for Sandi and I to understand each other’s wavelengths. She was super quiet and very observant, in a droll way that made me think that she viewed me (not to mention almost everything else) with some suspicion. I, on the other hand, was brash and out-front and kind of plus-size (not that you’d ever infer such things from my writing). I soon came to appreciate Sandi’s observational chops as she applied her dry wit to the fare we were taking in. She could flick away a mediocre film like dirt off her shoulder, in a sentence of seven words or less that was as funny as it was deadly accurate. And soon she came to appreciate (or at least tolerate) my general air of boisterousness.

We lost direct touch not soon after my last Cannes, and a couple of years before she would receive a package that would change her life, and make her a filmmaker again.

Again? Few people in Sandi’s American circle had known that she had ever been a filmmaker in the first place. But years before, back in her home country of Singapore, just as she was coming out of her teens,  Sandi had contrived and conspired to make a feature film called Shirkers. The movie was to be a surreal, punk-and-Lynch-(and more!)-inflected tale of a young woman traversing the island country (which can be travelled from end to end by car in about 45 minutes) and meeting interesting people, some of whom she kills.

The package Sandi received was the footage of that 1992-shot film, which she had believed irretrievably lost. Getting it back set Sandi off on a road trip/detective story, the result of which is a new film, also called Shirkers, a documentary now playing on Netflix.

Much of Shirkers tells of Sandi’s life as a movie-and-music crazed teen in the late ’80s. She and her best friend Jasmine Kin Kia Ng made photocopied fanzines chronicling their obsessions and befriended a very small group of post-punk minded teens. With Sophia Siddique Harvey, they launched the Shirkers project under the stewardship of Georges Cardona, an enigmatic/charismatic American in Singapore with an intriguing past. (One of his claims is that he was the basis for the James Spader character in sex, lies, & videotape, which, aside from being completely and utterly not true, raises the question of just who would brag of such a thing anyway.) If Cardona was instrumental to the film’s physical production, he was also responsible for its eventual disappearance.

Shirkers tells a story too weird, creepy, poignant and haunting for me to spoil you with too many of its details here. And it tells the story with an imaginative assurance that marks Sandi as a born filmmaker. Yes, the lineaments of traditional documentary are here: present-day talking-head interviews, narration conducted in well-modulated tone. But the fluidity with which Tan edits the archival footage, the visual surprises she throws in, and the frankness of her own self-told chronicle, imbue Shirkers with several singular qualities, not the least of them being the observant wit I so admired in Sandi when I first got to know her. The movie also shines a fascinating light on the Singapore of the pre Crazy Rich Asians era, a small country practically hell-bent on economic blockbuster status, one that could effortlessly make outliers of passionate creators like Sandi and her friends. If the story of betrayal here is harrowing, the stories of where Sandi’s friendships with Jasmine and Sophia resolved are genuinely heartening.

I’ve seen descriptions of Shirkers that conclude, because of its immediate subject matter and setting, that it’s some kind of “niche” film. I can’t say I agree. Anybody who’s ever had a dream of making or accomplishing a work of art of any other signal of achievement, and who had that dream senselessly snatched away, and found a path to move forward anyway, will find an affinity here. Shirkers shows how dreams can turn to nightmares, but also how they can turn around, generate new dreams, and yield meaningful resolutions that we had perhaps not dreamed of ever before.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny  reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com , the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Watch Shirkers on Netflix