Film review: Shirkers (2018)

This one's a documentary, and for once, not a depressing one, although it might be a little wistful.  It's directed by a middle-aged woman (Sandi Tan), now living in America, about an experience she had at the end of her teens, making a film in her home of Indonesia, with her equally precocious, quirky and rebellious friends, and with the help and encouragement of a weird middle-aged (even back then) "American" man, of mysterious origin and ethnicity (and accent).  The film in question was written by her and starred her, although her friends at the time did not think the latter was necessarily a good idea, and she now agrees.  However, her script, or the outlines of it that we are exposed to in the documentary of the same name (actually directed by Sandi, unlike the original film) does seem genuinely original and interesting.  What's particularly appealing about the documentary is that you are introduced to these kids growing up in Indonesia with whom you can instantly relate (although they evidently had a lot more courage and gumption, because the things one talked idly of doing with one's own friends, they actually did) - bored, interested in things nobody else around them was interested in, and passionately so.  It's funny, I remarked at the time that it was like a real world Ghost World, and then ten minutes later she remarks that when she saw Ghost World it immediately brought her back to this experience.  Likewise with Rushmore, if only (presumably) because the teenage anti-hero is relentlessly creative.  Anyway, the shadow looming over the whole proceedings (and Sandi and her friends Jasmine and Sophia) is the weird Georges Cardona, 

who at the time was married with a young kid, but who ran a sort of after-hours film school, and was always up for drives round the island with the girls after the class ended, late in the evening.  Creepy, one instantly thinks, but he never actually tries anything (beyond one invitation to touch his belly, while on a cross-America drive that Sandi undertakes with him alone(!), which she ignores).  He seems instead to feed on their youthful energy.  Oh yeah, and he runs off with the completed film and they never see him again.  This, of course, is a huge gut-punch, and you get the sense that it seriously derails Sandi for years (although she does go on to write film reviews for Indonesia's biggest newspaper for a while, before relocating, like Sophia (who now teaches at Vassar), to the US.  And then, out of the blue, about 20 years later, she hears from the woman who Georges was married to when she knew him, that she has the film!  Georges, meanwhile, has left her for a much younger woman and then died (aged 60), having carried around the film everywhere they went, insisting it be kept in an air-conditioned room.  Georges, on the whole, seems to be a tragic character.  He was good at manipulating people, but they also sometimes benefited - another protege from an earlier "film school" in New Orleans went on to work on Sex, Lies and Videotape - and when they did, he seemed to feel envious.  Sadly, the soundtrack was lost, but Sandi (and we) get to see the footage, and it's pretty amazing (and it captures a lost Indonesia, because the intervening years were ones of massive modernization).  Anyway, check out Shirkers - it's not like anything you've seen before, in a good way.  (Well, except maybe Ghost World, a little bit...)