Review: In ‘Shirkers,’ Stolen Footage and Dashed Dreams

“Shirkers” is director Sandi Tan’s first feature — the first, at least, that anyone has been allowed to see. Back in 1992, as a rebellious 19-year-old in Singapore, she wrote and starred in a subversive road movie about a female assassin, enlisting her closest friends, Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique, to help with editing and production. The completed project, captured on 70 canisters of donated 16-millimeter film, was then relinquished to its director: a slippery, middle-age American film teacher named Georges Cardona. They never saw him again.

Like a photograph slowly developing before our eyes, “Shirkers” (which was also the title of the original picture) is both mystery and manhunt, a captivating account of shattered friendship and betrayed trust. The skill of the editing (by Tan and two colleagues), though, is key: Interviews are woven organically throughout the narrative, and little nuggets of rewarding information are withheld until the final stretches. In this way, the movie is constantly surprising and delighting us, not least in its creative use of the original film’s footage. Those long-lost images, miraculously recovered by Tan two decades after their disappearance, would send her on a quest to reconnect with her former collaborators and make sense of her past.

The result is a strange, warm and winding tale of movie love and knifing disappointment, nudged along by Tan’s soft and pleasant narration. An oddly intense teenager with a widely read zine and a variety of international pen pals, she chafed against a rigidly conservative government that banned chewing gum and stifled access to the indie cinema she and her friends craved. When they met Cardona at a filmmaking workshop, he seemed a charismatic kindred spirit, and Tan was intellectually smitten despite the suspicions of her friends. A 40-year-old married man who liked to drive around at night with much younger women, just talking about movies, didn’t seem quite kosher.

Those drives would continue after Tan moved to America, including a road trip to New Orleans where Cardona grew up. The relationship might have been platonic, yet it was ardent, giving his treachery the stab of a love gone wrong. This infuses “Shirkers” with a powerful sense of loss, of chances missed and a what-might-have-been tone that isn’t entirely about those stolen canisters.

Present-day interviews with Jasmine and Sophie reveal the ingenuity of their contributions and deepen our understanding of the Cardona dynamic, as well as uncover the burrs of disputes that linger in the women’s memories. Somehow, though, the film never sinks into sourness. This is especially surprising as those original clips, shot on the streets of Singapore with a cast of family and friends, arebright and quirky and inventive enough to suggest the possibility of something wonderful and weird: the baby steps of a cult classic.

These ghostly, long-ago scenes, artifacts from a painful past, at times turn this new “Shirkers” into an act of exorcism, a purging of regrets and questions that have bedeviled the adult Tan, now a novelist in Los Angeles, for longer than she would like. The love she has for that footage remains inextricably bound up with nostalgia for her younger self, for the dreams of a determined young woman who longed for a bigger world and a wider audience. A shirker, she tells us, is someone who runs away. On the evidence of this movie, Cardona might not have been the only one running.

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‘Shirkers’

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.