I had heard mixed things about "Be With Me"...The critics, with whom I never agree, loved the film....Several of my friends, whose opinions I value, called it "pretentious".
I usually HATE movies like "Be With Me"....I hate pretentious movies, I hate slow movies, and I REALLY HATE movies with very little dialogue....
Well, "Be With Me" is slightly pretentious, very slow and has very little dialogue. It's not perfect and for the first fifteen minutes I was wondering exactly where the director was going....But it all comes together, and it ends up being a very sad, very inspiring, very relateable movie! I'd never heard of Theresa Chan, an amazing Singaporean woman who after being becoming deaf and blind at age 14, managed to learn English, write a series of books, travel the world and do a lot of volunteer/charity work....and now star in a movie! Her story really makes you want to do something with your life. Obviously, it's hard to make an "exciting" movie about a woman who obviously has a great deal of trouble speaking, but her story was very interesting (and is mostly told in subtitles)....She's definitely a woman who puts the rest of us to shame.
As a side-note, I would like to note that in my home country, the USA, there is a sizable minority of immigrants who live there for twenty years, and still cannot speak any English. In the country where I now live (Thailand), the majority of foreign residents (including many Americans) do not make any effort to learn Thai. And yet this amazing deaf and blind woman (raised speaking only Cantonese) can learn to speak and write English, and write several books in the language!!!! People should be ashamed at their laziness! The other three stories in the movie are more "arty" but all of them are handled fairly well. As much as we probably don't want to admit it, the vast majority of humankind can probably relate to the three stories of more traditional loneliness in the film....After losing his wife, a man loses the will to live.....A girl is spurned by her new "crush" for no apparent reason....Even the slow, fat man with a heart of gold was sympathetic....
And as this IS a Southeast Asian movie, there's even a ghost!! Anyway, this was a flawed film (too many closeup shots of people eating...), but definitely a surprisingly good one. 7.5/10
