The Movie That No One Saw

by May Seah

  At first, it seemed as if her lipstick were out to sabotage them. The flawless brushstrokes of bright red, carefully and expertly applied by the make-up artist to Holliday’s full and sensuous lips, insisted on smearing and bleeding in all the wrong directions whenever he pressed his mouth to hers.

  Then, his hands had been all wrong. “Stop blocking my face from the camera!” Holliday had whined, agitatedly straightening bits of her hair that had strayed out of place when he’d seized her by the back of the neck one too many times. “Yes, your hands look quite unnatural,” the director had said, squinting at his monitor. “Try to reposition them again. And angle your head to convey more desire, please.”

  By then, everyone, even the crew, was starting to flag, but still, they had to press on. After several more unsuccessful takes, the director said, “Uh, Jon, can you change your expression a little? You look a bit…uh, well…nauseous.”

  That had been the last straw for Holliday, who had screeched and flapped and huffed like an affronted budgerigar. “What is up with you? We’ve done, like, ten thousand kissing scenes together and you’ve never once been like this. Do I smell bad today or something?” She gasped sharply and said, “It’s because I put on half a kilo, isn’t it? I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that crouton last week!”

  During the break, she’d stormed up and cornered him in the corridor of the dressing rooms. Her hair was out of place, her cheeks were feverish and her camisole had slipped down so that she was almost scandalously déshabillé.

  “Why don’t you want to kiss me?” she demanded, arms akimbo and ample bosom heaving. She’d had time to stew properly, and was hopping mad. “Do you know how many other actors would sacrifice their firstborns for a chance to do a kissing scene opposite me? Do you know how many plebeians out there would sell their souls for a chance to kiss my bunion pads? Are you insane?” She shoved him violently against the wall.

  Indeed, he’d learnt at that fateful moment, hell hath no fury like a woman who knew you had kissed her begrudgingly and could not even muster up the conviction to make it look sincere.

  Before he could venture a response, she had pinned his shoulders roughly to the wall. “Kiss me now,” she commanded, pushing her face up against his so that all he could see was the menacing glint in her eye and on the tip of her nose, which was in need of powdering.

  If the reporter from No Star Too C-List Online had happened to walk by at that moment, Keh thought to himself, she might have spontaneously combusted.

  “Wait, Holliday!” he’d shouted. “Hold that pose! Yes! The light is just right! It’s hitting your face at just the right angle and intensity. You’re glowing like a Vermeer. You’ve never looked better. Don’t move! It’s perfect!” He whipped out his phone, extricated his arms from her frozen talons and started furiously snapping photos of her face from all angles.

  It had been a narrow escape.

  In essence, he knew Holliday Heng was right. He was not performing. And his performance stubbornly refused to improve in subsequent scenes either. He desperately needed to snap out of this bizarre rut. He tried giving himself pep talks. He tried cold showers. He read a self-help book. He downloaded a meditation app. None of it worked.

  Meanwhile, the acting trophies sitting on his shelves at home mocked him daily.

  In anxiety and frustration, he had even gone to see a doctor, regretting the course of action immediately upon entering the consultation room and realising he had no physical symptoms to report. The medical examination had yielded nothing but the cleanest bill of health and a plastic baggie of what the nurse’s face plainly told him were placebo pills for the placation of chronic hypochondriacs.

  Most worrying of all was the thought that he had lost his acting ability forever. If that were the case, it was the end of his career, which could not possibly continue with any measure of dignity. People would find out the truth—that Adjonis Keh could not act and had never been able to act. And, assuming they didn’t lynch him in a public square, he would be relegated to making appearances on variety shows until his popularity or looks ran out, whichever came first.

  The last time he could recall feeling so close to powerlessness was on the occasion that April had appeared on his set and he had shut down just for that brief instant. The sensation was still fresh in his mind. But this had nothing to do with April. She hadn’t come anywhere near this production, nor had he even been in her presence recently. This was confined to this set, this script, this cast, this Movie That Everybody Saw.

  He wondered briefly who had come up with the idea of making a film about a group of people making a film in the first place. It seemed to him either a very brilliant or very stupid move, and he was not sure he could live with the arbitrariness of that. In any case, it was playing a cruel and uncalled-for prank on his life.

  The next day was even worse.

  They filmed on location at Changi Airport, a scene in which Henry was running through the impassive glass doors too late to declare his never-ending love for Violette before she escaped on a plane, having stolen the footage of their movie and stuffed it in her carry-on.

  The production team had commandeered a small section of the departure hall and the shiny granite floors were cluttered with security barricades, folding chairs, trolleys and other equipment. Keh had arrived earlier than his call time, hoping the atmosphere would trigger his inner actor into wakefulness, and spent those moments pacing up and down distractedly, causing crew members to warn one another in low voices to stay out of Jon Keh’s way.

  “All you have to do is run,” he told himself. “This isn’t even a subtle emotional scene. No tiny eye twitches or lip trembles. It’s a scene about physicality. All you have to do is run. Catch that girl before she leaves forever on a jet plane. Run with desperation on your face and in your limbs. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. A twelve-year-old could do it. All you have to do is run.”

  But from the start of the first take, he knew it was a lost cause.

  The first few takes, he made a false start. “Sorry, can we do that again?” he called to the director. On the third take, he forced himself to run on. But he heard the call of “cut” soon after.

  Every time “action” was called and he burst forward in a sprint, his legs didn’t even feel like his own. They were like prosthetic legs that had somehow gotten attached to his torso, over which he had almost no control. He had to look down to make sure that yes, there were legs beneath him, and yes, there were two of them. And his face was cooperating even less.

  By the end of the seventh take, he was exhausted.

  “Jon, even your running lacks emotion,” the director complained. “You’re supposed to be in love with this woman. She means everything to you. You can’t bear to lose her. I’ve seen people trying to outrun the parking attendant who look more harried than you do.”

  “It’s the shoes,” he panted in panic as he tried to catch his breath, believing the statement to be true as the words left his mouth. He signalled to the wardrobe girl, who skittered sideways in terror. “Go and tell the image designer to change all my shoes. What other pairs did you bring with you?”

  “Jon.” The director got up from his chair, strode towards him and put one arm around his shoulder. “Come with me. Let’s have a little talk.”

  There were certain phrases guaranteed to strike fear into a man’s heart, and “We need to talk” was right up there with the best of them, along with things like “retrenchment”, “foreclosure” and “prostate examination”. With dread in his veins, Keh followed the director outside.

  The heat clasped them immediately to its suffocating bosom as they walked out of the automatic glass doors, but it did not seem to bother Gareth Abraham, who leaned against the side of the building and lit a cigarette. He was an acclaimed and respected director, nearly sixty years old, but bearded and grizzled such that he looked even older and rather forbidding. In fact, he did have a temper that could flare up quite violently on set, but it was generally
acknowledged that this was never without just provocation.

  By some miracle, in spite of his many years in the industry, this was the first time that Keh had found himself working with him. He felt mortified that this particular director’s first impressions of him as an actor were so unrepresentative of what he knew he could actually do.

  But instead of yelling, Gareth Abraham took a drag on his cigarette, looked him in the eye and said, “Have you ever been in love, Jon?”

  Involuntarily, April’s image flashed immediately into his head— her inquisitive eyes, her tumbling hair. “Umm,” he mumbled.

  To his surprise, the director turned away, pulled out his phone and started watching a video. Keh could hear a woman’s voice and laughter emanating from the speaker.

  “These are videos of my wife,” Gareth said slowly, eventually looking up from his phone. “She died three years ago. She was the one who always gave me ideas when I was uninspired, always made me laugh, always used to remind me to keep my temper in check. All I have left are these videos of her. I didn’t direct any of them, and yet they are all that count in my life. Here, she’s smiling, singing, eating, being silly, being clumsy—alive. I watch them over and over and over, every day, all the time.”

  Keh stood motionless as the director’s gravelly voice became husky and he stared down at his screen, where the image of a woman was still moving.

  When he next spoke, he was business-like again. “Maybe you haven’t loved and lost deeply, and that’s why you’re having trouble. But that’s what I need to see, son. Okay? I’ve seen some of your work. I know you can do better. Next time, I won’t be so easy on you.” He clapped him on the shoulder and walked slowly away, betraying just the suggestion of a stiff limp.

  Keh trailed back behind him, feeling more inadequate than ever. As he walked towards the trolleys laden with equipment, he felt dozens of onlookers’ eyes on him.

  When filming on location, you could never count on privacy. Today, members of the public had gathered around the cordoned-off filming area to gawk in curiosity at the cameras and lights.

  He was used to people staring while he worked, but this time, it felt like they were all judging him. They practically had little scorecards in their hands, nodding grimly to one another as they all raised their zeros in unison.

  Actually, what they were raising were their phones. Several of them were busily photographing and recording him.

  This was nothing new. But as he stood there in mid-stride, the ghost of a thought occurred to him, so subtly that it barely registered in his consciousness.

  Perhaps his inability to portray the role had to do with his inability to do what these people were doing, so naturally and so nonchalantly, without even realising the advantage they had over him.

  If he were only able to watch himself on screen—perhaps he would know what it felt like to be an actor.

  17

  As he pulled into his condominium, parked his car and trudged towards the lifts that night, Keh reflected bitterly that perhaps he was due, anyway, for a bit of a quarter-life crisis.

  Things had been going too well for him. He should have seen this coming. Success was like a cat: she never favoured any one person indefinitely. And in the entertainment industry in particular, the vicissitudes of fortune were ruthlessly turbulent and unpredictable.

  Of course, in his moments of pessimistic fatalism, he had allowed himself to imagine that his downfall would be an unexpected scandal, a disfiguring disease or some teenaged usurper who was all abs and whitened teeth. He never imagined that his undoing would be the sudden inability to pretend.

  We must do what we were born to do, or we die, he reflected to himself morosely. He had been born to pretend.

  As he got into the lift, he heard the sound of heavy footsteps rushing up. The shiny silver doors, which were beginning to close, slid open again. It was Junqiang, whose face lit up when he saw him. “Jon Keh, my man!” he cried, bounding inside. Today, he was wearing what looked like a raincoat in all three primary colours, over camouprint trousers and high-tops. There was still a little bit of stubborn Marilyn Monroe makeup clinging to his eyelids.

  Keh forced a smile. “You’re in a good mood,” he remarked, trying not to sound resentful.

  “I am. Do you know why?” Junqiang whipped out his phone and pressed play on a video before hastily drawing it away and apologising. “Sorry—I forgot you can’t look. But man, if only you could see this video in its gory entirety.”

  “The cheater husband?”

  “You guessed it. I finally got him. Making out with the other woman. His face shows up so clear, it could almost be in 4K resolution.” He stared at the screen and sighed deeply. “It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. They were very careful. But they finally slipped up. In a parking lot outside a McDonald’s. And I was there to catch it.” He grinned at Keh. “It’s like one of your dramas, isn’t it? But this video is more valuable to me and Ling than all the film in the world. It’s safe in the Cloud now. And it’s the ticket to our happiness.” He kissed his phone reverentially.

  “Congratulations,” Keh said, his smile now coming naturally. “Marilyn and Minion Dave can soon be married.”

  “Yeah! Except she’s Minion Bob now.” He beamed beatifically.

  Weighed down as he was by his own troubles, Keh could not help but be happy for his friend’s good fortune. Not being able to look at Junqiang’s video had been an untimely slap in the face, yes. But Keh could find it in himself to be glad that things were going right in somebody’s life.

  And it seemed that fortune, which doted on him with such fickleness, was handing out treats like a suburban housewife on Halloween night. Barely an hour later, as he was getting out of the shower, his phone beeped with a text from Minnie.

  “I’m officially an heiress!!!” it said, going on to declare a string of emojis.

  “The map’s been found?” he replied via voice message.

  Seconds later, her text announced: “File found in Cloud, complete with address and map, deed to the land and house, and all the other legal mumbo jumbo. Looks like Great-Grandaunt wasn’t a Luddite, after all.”

  “I’ll congratulate you properly when I see you. Drinks are on you,” he replied.

  He then went to bed and spent fitful hours tossing under the covers.

  18

  Who was Henry? This was the question that plagued him day and night.

  He could see the character so clearly in his mind’s eye, and yet, when he tried to zoom in on him, there was only a blurred space where his face ought to be.

  It was all he could think about when he looked into his bathroom mirror and saw the symmetrical eyes; the razor-straight nose, the left eyelid that was slightly more pronounced than the right, the firm jawline with a hint of five o’clock shadow.

  Had Henry arrived at that particular point in his life, at that particular timing, for a particular reason? Was he too stupid to discern that reason?

  None of the characters he had inhabited in his acting career had ever loomed as large as Henry did, hovering over him like an unspeakable threat. He had always been able to manipulate his characters like pantomime puppets and then, when finished with them, sweep them completely out of his consciousness like frothy bubbles as he moved on to the next one.

  But Henry towered and stifled and suffocated like a mounting accumulation of all the fears and insecurities Keh had ever faced in his career, more solid and unbreakable than anything he had ever experienced.

  Even in the early days of his career, when he had struggled to come to terms with the fact that he would always receive vicious, unreasoning, soul-crushing attacks from online haters who took offense with his acting, his lifestyle, the company he kept, the food he ate, the clothes he wore and the face he had been born with, he had never felt such asphyxiating anxiety. This was an angst of a much different kind. He recognised it as pure fear.

  And yet he was certain that Henry was also a friend who was entirely li
ke-minded and knew exactly what he was going through. After all, there was no one more like him than Henry was. Henry was also an actor who had a job to do. He knew that the space between “action” and “cut” was as large as the sky and as little as a foetus’ heartbeat. That was the space it was necessary to occupy, fill, conquer, if you wanted to be happy. If Henry was oppressing Keh, it was because he could not help it.

  It was Henry that he needed to become. And yet, he was conscious that Henry had already overpowered him, from the moment of his conception in the mind of some scriptwriter who had no idea what monster they had so irresponsibly birthed, fatted and unleashed.

  There was no one who could help him, he knew. To anyone else, it must have looked like the easiest thing in the world: to act a character that was basically yourself. What was so difficult about that? You didn’t even have to act. You could just show up and not do any work at all. All you had to do was exist. Keep doing what you always did. Zero effort, enormous pay cheque.

  Holliday Heng had no problems with it. She swanned onto the set every day (usually late) looking more relaxed, confident and imperious than ever, delivering all her lines with conviction. She didn’t need to engage in any long discussions with the director about her character’s progression or how she should approach her scenes. In fact, she was giving the performance of her career. He had never seen her do so few bad takes. If she kept this up, with this movie, she might actually have a chance at that acting award that had eluded her so persistently.

  Keh wondered why he could not just do the thing that other people could do so effortlessly.

  “But I don’t need to prove anything to anyone,” he thought, before realising with sudden dread that the act of thinking that thought had made it untrue.

  And then he wanted, more than anything, to vanquish the taunting challenge that Henry posed in an act of heroism, courage and sheer determination.