There are movies that speak to your guts (or to your mind) from the
start. It's not the case with Invisible City: a documentary of one
hour long that seems to not connect with you at all. It is after a
while that you start slowly to get the point: the issue was not with
the movie, rather with you! Expecting to see a certain kind of a
story, you were caught totally unprepared for the actual subject.

I did not have the chance to visit Singapore and I guess I won't have
it ever; I know something about the city, of course: an amazing mix of
British and Asian civilization, a very clear position in the global
business.

So I was expecting from the movie to get a better idea on Singapore,
its look and feel. Well, the movie of Tan Pin Pin is about something else.

It's actually a remarkable film that has the courage and honesty to
refuse any artifice to seduce the attendance and lets the subject to
speak for itself.

It is a movie about the memory of the city: the way the memory of the
past is disappearing for ever as the last survivors are fading.The
tone is sad, with a twist of Mozartian elegant discretion and good
balance: an elegy for those who love their city and would like to
leave a mark in eternity while being aware that marks cannot be but
ephemeral.

Singapore, like so many other places on today's world, is focused
totally on the present. It's like the city was brought from another
planet this morning, with the skyline, the businesses, the busy
people. No traces, even of its most recent past. A city without history.

Is it possible for a city to exist without history? If existence means
a spirit, then a city without history does not really exist, it is
only a moment that signifies nothing.
History is made up of emotions, says one of the movie reviewers
(Stefan in Twitch Film). So, in order to find the history, the
invisible spirit, to find the significance, one should address those
people who lived the history with emotions: people who got the
significance of what they witnessed.

And here they are, in the movie: Ivan Polunin, author of a book about
Plants and Flowers of Singapore, and passionate cinematographer, with
a huge collection of film rolls about the city as it was in the
fifties; now fighting to preserve his collection from unavoidable
wear, fighting with official indifference; and Marjorie Doggett, with
her photographic album, Characters of Light - each photo is a gem, the
colonial buildings now replaced by the impersonal sky-scrappers.

Both of them, Ivan Polunin and Marjorie Doggett, are very old now,
fighting with their own wear, with failing health and fading memories;
both of them forgotten by a city that has no time for anything beyond
its present.

What about the times of fight for independence, against British rule?
One of the characters in the movie, a Chinese, was a rebel student in
the fifties: by that time Chinese high schools in Singapore were
resistance nests, harshly monitored by the colonial police; today's
students at the same school have no interest at all in his stories.

And what about the years of Japanese occupation? The traces are still
there, dangerous military debris in any given place; an old guy who
fought against occupants is listened now only by a Japanese reporter
(history has its own ways towards irony); the reporter would distort
further the story for his journal.

So, is there an invisible city, bearing the history and the spirit?
No, says the movie, only vanishing memories. But, as I said, the
sadness is balanced in the movie: it is tragic, it is not pathetic;
there is a certain noblesse in these fragile survivors.

And here comes the great quality of this movie: it deliberately
refuses to seduce you, while it is seduced by his characters.