It's very rare that a movie feels like it's speaking directly to me, that really hits me on a fundamental level. "Shirkers," however, fits the bill. It's a documentary made in extraordinary circumstances about a lost film, also titled "Shirkers." Netflix released it with little fanfare last year, about a week before they released Orson Welles' "The Other Side of the Wind." Unlike that film, alas, the original "Shirkers" is doomed to remain unfinished.
Once upon time in the summer of 1992, a trio of college-aged Singaporean film-lovers, Sandi Tan, Jasmine Ng, and Sophia Siddique, decided to follow their dreams and make an indie road movie together. At the end of the film shoot, their unstable teacher and mentor George Cardona, made off with all the footage and was never to be heard from again. Roughly twenty years later, the materials were recovered after Cardona died. Sandi Tan, who scripted and starred in the film, decided to resurrect "Shirkers" as a documentary about what happened in 1992, and the impact it had on her life and the lives of her friends.
Could there be anything more emblematic of the struggles of female filmmakers and minority filmmakers, than a film where a white male con-artist literally steals the work and money of the Asian female creative team, sabotaging what could have been several very promising filmmaking careers? Hollywood loves films about scrappy young filmmakers, and we've seen several of them over the years. There have also been the stories of filmmaking attempts gone wrong, or gone sideways, like 2017's "The Disaster Artist." However, I've rarely seen one like this, a painful example of a film project destroyed through an act of unimaginable malice.
However, the film isn't really about the crime. While Tan does spend some time picking apart Georges Cardona's psyche and his sad little history of grifts and betrayals, I'm glad that for the most part "Shirkers" is about Sandi Tan. She uses most of the film to tell her own story of being a film enthusiast and burgeoning filmmaker in a country that barely had a filmmaking community to speak of in the 1990s. And then, twenty-odd years later, about her journey to reclaim her work and finally put the old ghosts to rest. I identified with her passion something fierce. And it's so satisfying to see Tan cement her status as a filmmaker in the end, even if it's not with the film she started out making in 1992.
Most of the documentary's effectiveness comes from the way it's been pieced together, using nostalgic archival materials, interviews, and copious amounts of the unfinished "Shirkers." The more I saw of the colorful, absurdist film that Tan and her friends were trying to make, the more I wanted to see the finished product. Sadly, it's eventually revealed that too many elements are missing, including the entire original audio track, for this to be possible. Still, Tan's use of various clips creates this wonderfully appealing mirage of the film that could have been.
Ultimately, "Shirkers" is celebratory of creativity and perseverance and the joys of moviemaking in a way that I found tremendously appealing. Even though the film wasn't finished, the experience of making it touched the lives of everyone involved, and Tan's repurposing of the surviving footage ensures that their efforts are finally being seen and appreciated. I love that the final moments of the documentary are turned over to the man who composed the music for "Shirkers," which was never recovered. He gets to recreate a few minutes of it for audiences to hear at last, as the credits roll by.
Finally, on a personal note, I remarked a few months ago that in 2018 I felt like I was finally the target audience, thanks to multiple films and shows suddenly coming out lead by Asian women over thirty. We can add "Shirkers" to the list, one that may be the most relevant to me of all, because it features Asian women who love film as much as I do, who share the same kind of creative impulses and geeky worldview. It's a comforting feeling to know that I'm not as rare a bird as I thought I was.
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