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'60s TGs in Singapore

By Mardi Clark

Bugis Street, currently showing in Seattle, is the latest film in the "transgender" genre to come down the pike. Set and filmed on location in Singapore by veteran Hong Kong director Yon Fan ("In Between", 1993 and "Promising Miss Bowie", 1990) and starring Vietnamese actress Hiep Thi Le as Lien (Oliver Stone's "Heaven and Earth" 1993 and "Dead Men Can't Dance" 1996) as a 16- year-old girl who steps off a boat from her rural island home to take a job as a desk clerk and maid at the Sin Sin Hotel on Bugis Street in the late 1960s. Seemingly populated by beautiful single women, she soon discovers two shocking realities in rather quick succession...first that the Sin Sin Hotel rents their rooms by the hour and second..._all_ the girls are "ladyboys" ...transvestites and transexuals!

The film deals with basically two issues; a depiction of the life of the ladyboy prostitutes in Singapore and Lien's coming of age as a woman (she has her first period in the midst of a ladyboy catfight). The reality of dealing with issues like boyfriends, dating, and femininity, let alone attitudes about sexuality, take on a unique perspective in the environment in which Lien finds herself...for instance the mixture of camp, humor and tradjedy is implicit in the sequence where the girls "fix up" Lien in their version of femininity--black vinyl mini and stiletto heeled thi-hi's...and comment that "She's gonna make _lots_ of money!" Her interaction with a girl's live-in boyfriend is a darkly humorous but basically tragic spin of a seemingly unavoidable fate---which when played against her unfulfilled teenaged infatuation with a nameless student of a nearby academy, illuminates the depth and distance between what is -- and, for her, what will never be.

Bugis Girls

The depiction of the lives of the girls is presented in several ways...first in their interactions with their customers, as with a young American sailor early in the film, to "interviews" staged as home movies taken of each other during their off time. Since these girls are the genuine article and not actresses (_that_ is often glaringly obvious...), parts of the film have an almost documentary aspect which I found very interesting.

Also explored was their relationship with their neighborhood, customers, their boyfriends and each other-- relationships often violent and alternately sexual and sometimes frought with a real ambivalence but always starkly portrayed as either light or dark. The shock of seeing a character go from a screaming, violent characature of a whore to a kind, empathetic "big-sister" is wrenching in it's reality and illuminating of the flawed depths within us all. That the film covers a lot of ground and utilizes simply too many significant characters while failing to fully develop any single one (with the exception of Lien), is regrettable...one is left wanting to get to know some of these girls a bit better.

The arrival of Lola, an exquisite girl affecting haughty glamour just returned from the far-away high-society wonderland of Paree, gives a needed injection of character and life into the film. Back to be with her mother who is dying in the local hospital, Lola seems at first to be a distant and contrived person. But through Lien's innocence and the circumstance of her mother's impending death, she is brought back to earth and finds herself unmasked in more than a figurativly emotional way as well. The depiction of her emerging humanity is actually one of the better parts of the movie. Alternately hawking cosmetics to the other girls (how about some "Breast Enhancer Cream, hmmm?) and pretentiously flaunting her Parisian sensibilities towards a sometimes unappreciative and skeptical audience of her fellow "guests", she develops a mentoring friendship with Lien, but one which eventually becomes more concerned with issues of direction and worth in the circumstances they both find themselves. The threat of a seemingly inevitable future in prostitution for the once innocent and childlishly optomistic Lien confronts her with questions of what happiness is ...and where to find it in a place many would consider hopelessly depraved.

"Bugis Street" is currently playing at the Broadway Market Theater in Seattle,WA. It was previously shown at several film festivals, such as the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian film Festival and the Vancouver Film Festival earlier this year. For more information on future showings etc. go to the distributor's website http://www.marginfilms.com.



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