by Aksharaa Agarwal
What more is there? The questions and answers of Eric Khoo’s Spirit World.
Meeting heroes is a peculiar privilege. Knowing them before you meet them is stranger. With art, we put ourselves out there. We cannot say we aren’t known. And for all its peculiarity, this kind of meeting and knowing is strangely familiar; haunted, perhaps, be a sense of being-meant-to-be.
I could be talking about how Yuzo, the protagonist of Eric Khoo’s multilingual feature Spirit World, finally gets to meet Claire Emery, his beloved French musician, when she just so happens to join him in the afterlife. The timing seems like fate surpassing oceans, language barriers, and even death when one crosses over beyond the veil just a few days before the other. Emery herself is going through the motions of grief when she takes up a gig in Japan as a way to keep herself moving. It turns out to be her last.
When Emery arrives, to that other realm outside of her body, in a strange country she hasn’t visited since she was young, she isn’t alone. They meet on a bridge; symbolic in itself, and there’s an instant recognition, borne of connection.
There’s the similarities anyone could draw: both were musicians in their lifetimes, both parents to children who seem to have lost themselves to the world. There’s the tension of not knowing what one has to say, and still, being able to communicate perfectly. The reminiscence, the call to music or drawing or cooking, that effort to create something which could be shared, which is really a seeking of some other- it seems the word ‘Spirit’ could apply to anything.
So I could be talking about all this, and so much else this work manages to say in its evenly paced, tender, driven runtime.
I could also be talking about how Mr. Khoo himself walked past me.
It’s special, he says, having made this film, since at its heart are protagonists Yuzo, and his son Hayato, whose father’s passing sets him on a journey into himself. It’s special because his own sons worked on the film he directed, alongside him written poignantly by his son Edward, produced by son James, and scored softly by son Christopher.
It’s special because Catherine Deneuve, whose singing was notably dubbed over all those years ago in the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, finally finds her voice on screen. For the film, she recorded three original songs and as Hayato remarks at her concert, her voice hasn’t changed at all. Each one is laden with meaning, and is deeply resonant.
Of all that has been said about this film the striking dialogue and visuals, the performances, the popular influences, the complexities of filming post-covid, on a multilingual set…it is the unprecedented serendipities surrounding it which stand out.
Khoo detailed them in a Q&A following the screening how actors Masaaki Sakai and Yukata Takenouchi were real life fans of Catherine, how the unconventional production schedule worked surprisingly in tandem with the weather- and in what he left unsaid, about his creative process.
He had one word to say ‘spirit’.
This film is about going deeper. It’s about the convexes of silence, absences, in-betweens. Khoo himself remarks that the logic of why Yuzo and Emery remain is explained by Hayato. At the same time, this depth isn’t some esoteric external only reachable through concentration or strife. The film insists on the contrary this Spirit World is here, now. With all its silences, absences, in-betweens. With all its haunting.
A companion of Mr. Khoo’s, a wonderful lady in bright red, came up to me after to address his quick, curt response to my question on his creative process. ‘His mother,’ she said, ‘when asked in Singapore, that’s what he answered.’ Khoo often credits his mother for instilling the love of cinema in him, detailing how she’d take him to the movies, horror being her genre of choice.
So many converging lines. So much had to happen to make that moment possible. A confluence of what can only be called magic. The magic Khoo wields, is in gently uncovering it, not laying it bare, but simply letting it reveal itself, for all of us to realise. It is a communal magic, and it lingered over the cinema hall as the credits rolled and the lights went up.
Of course it followed me home. It follows us all, everywhere. After all, it has always existed. It’s haunting. This Spirit World.
And when we shook hands, we both said, thank you.