Review | Wet Season film review: Golden Horse-winning Singaporean drama charts forbidden teacher-student relationship
- A woman teacher near middle age falls for a male high school student. Her desire for gratification gets mixed up with her maternal instincts
- The film, directed by Anthony Chen, has strong performances from the lead actors, but the ending feels anticlimactic
3/5 stars
Again set in contemporary Singapore, during the endless rains of one balmy summer, Wet Season charts the unconventional relationship forged between Ling (Yeo) and high school student Wei Lun (Koh). As is often the case, the warm wet weather is employed as a metaphor for simmering sexual desire.
Ling is being neglected by her husband, Andrew (Christopher Lee Ming-shun), who is perpetually absent from the marital home, leaving her to tend to his ailing father (Yang Shi Bin). Her yearning to become a mother goes unanswered, while at work she is constantly reminded, by faculty and students alike, that her subject is increasingly redundant in their modern, progressive city.
Ling finds an unlikely soulmate in Wei Lun, a latchkey kid whose parents insist he keep up his Chinese studies. Soon their after-school classes together have become a welcome respite from the pressures of home life for both of them. They spend more and more time together, until eventually a line is crossed from which they cannot return.
The film illustrates a Singaporean prejudice against Malaysians like Ling, for their outdated methods and world view, as her husband and colleagues alike begin to distance themselves. What Ling sees as a nurturing of tradition is perceived as archaic by everyone else.
All, that is, except Wei Lun, a surrogate son with a passion for traditional wushu martial arts. But Ling’s desire for physical gratification becomes entangled with her unrequited maternal instincts, and the confused, inarticulate teen struggles to determine their boundaries.
Chen has claimed that Ling is not a victim of her own fate and displays a silent resilience as she battles through life. What we see on screen, conversely, is a series of ill-advised decisions from an increasingly desperate woman.
Once her relationship with Wei Lun is introduced, the drama is only ever headed in one direction, but Chen seems more reluctant even than his characters to consummate their forbidden relationship.
As a result, Wet Season proves somewhat anticlimactic. Despite the strong central performances, particularly from Koh, who has come a long way since he played the pudgy little brat in Ilo Ilo, the lead actors are given insufficient time to explore the implications of their actions. Instead, Chen allows the skies to clear just as their story was getting interesting.
