A Sense Of Raw Humanity

IN WET SEASON, you never see its lead character Ling cry. When the world gets too much and the dams are about to burst, the camera finds every excuse to obscure her tears. It might film her through the rear view mirror of her car, so we see only the lower part of her face. It might shift its location so we're staring at her back. It might even shoot the wall blocking her face as she weeps. The only time we do see a tear is when she's on a surgical table for an IVF procedure. Here, unconscious from the effects of general anaesthesia, a lone tear escapes her closed eyes.

It's not because Yeo Yann Yann, the extraordinary actress playing Ling, cannot shed tears on demand. Yeo has delivered what may well be the performance of her career. But this is an intricately nuanced film that believes in delicacy and restraint. So what we see instead are the minor calibrations of Ling's face that convey the lived-in plausibility of a middle-aged woman so sucker-punched by life, that when she does what she does later with a much…