Genre: Drama
Director: Teo Eng Tiong
Cast: Yvonne Lim, Bernard Tan, Liang Tian, Steven Woon, Louis Lim
RunTime: 1 hr 24 mins
Released By: GV
Rating: PG
Official Website: http://www.truthbetoldmovie.com

Opening Day: 4 October 2007

Synopsis:

An assignment takes TV producer Renee Donovan back to a neighbourhood she ran away from 10 years ago. There, a resident, Old Teo, recognizes her. At every turn, he threatens to reveal her secrets. As Renee struggles to cover her real identity to complete the assignment, she is forced to confront her past and the shameful secrets which surface as a result.An assignment takes TV producer Renee Donovan back to a neighbourhood she ran away from 10 years ago. There, a resident, Old Teo, recognizes her. At every turn, he threatens to reveal her secrets. As Renee struggles to cover her real identity to complete the assignment, she is forced to confront her past and the shameful secrets which surface as a result.

Movie Review:

Any native Singaporean will recognize some familiar faces in Truth be Told, especially if one grew up in the late 1990s, an era supple with a stable of strong Mediacorp actors and was a huge fan of mandarin drama series on Channel 8. [Side note: It was of great comfort to the reviewer when she found out that one of her favourite Mediacorp actresses played the lead role].

However, besides the nostalgic cast and its well-intended messages, Truth be Told is frankly, a “rojak” of mess. It is sort of self-explanatory, really (spoiler alert):

Renee (Yvonne Lim) returns to Singapore after a few years’ of absence, and is a reporter for a local TV station, and hosts “Exposed!”, a programme bent on exposing the truth behind the unknown in Singapore (this is how literal TBT gets). She follows a news lead in Blk 33, a HDB flat made of 1 room studio apartments in Tiong Bahru where there have been 4 suicides in a month, all reported to be caused by financial reasons.

She bumps into a reporter from a rival TV station (that’s a major plot-hole) who is surprised to see that Renee has replaced the previous (and hints that there’s more to meets the eye regarding her resignation).

Damien (Bernard Tan), the camera-man debates with Renee over which lead to follow: Damien wants to follow the more exciting and provocative story of the loan sharks in the area, whereas Renee’s intrigue in an old lady, who disappears at the speed of lightning and is seen picking food off the ground, slowly grows into a stubborn obsession.

In the midst of searching the block for information on the mysterious old lady, Renee is mistaken for Ling, a girl who looks exactly like her and used to live in Blk 33. She denies this vehemently and Teo, an old man who happens to be a close friend of Ling’s father (AND later revealed in –in my opinion – the movie’s most interesting sub-plot to be the loan sharks’head honcho. Phew!), decides to do some investigative work to find out the truth.

Once in a while, the movie pans from past to present, and we find out that Renee is indeed Ling; her denial is rooted in the fact that she married a 52 year old professor at the Australian university she attended against her estranged father’s wishes.

However, she is currently going through a painful divorce, and is fighting for custody of her child, of which she seems to be on the losing end.

Okay, I think that’s enough to catch my drift. There are like 2-3 more sub-plots that I didn’t mention or elaborate on, and one of which (“old mysterious, ghostly granny”) has what you can call a “weak” twist ending.

Watching Truth be Told is like ordering 3 bowls of ice kachang on an impulse to contain your immense craving, but halfway through you realize you can’t stomach it all, and by the 2nd bowl, your stomach is on the verge of throwing itself up. I dig what the movie is trying to say, but there are way too many things going on (I lost count; 6-7 SUB-PLOTS?), way too many unresolved issues, and worse of all, a bland and dry ending to top it off. One could easily have predicted that sort of ending from a mile away, and conjured a more complete one at that.

Truth be Told has a lot of potential, and though it’s not good, it’s worth a watch. It would have been a more coherent movie if the team behind it isolated a few issues from the pile, and focused on those. A valiant attempt at the very least; well, it manages to accurately portray a typical Singaporean behaviour: “Kiasu-ness”.

Movie Rating:



(Truth is… really lost in a maze of issues)

Review by Casandra Wong