Tomorrow Is a Long Time 2024
Life is not the most fulfilling for sixteen-year-old Meng: Lounging at home with his grieving father on a daily basis, being excluded from his family’s past, and forced into bullying other kids at school. Everything changes when he is thrown into a life-altering adventure that propels him into an exciting unfamiliar landscape.
Review
It is perhaps somewhat lazy to namedrop the likes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang when describing a certain kind of Southeast Asian cinema, but when discussing Jow Zhi Wei’s lovely debut Tomorrow Is a Long Time it is almost inevitable. The aesthetic approach Jow Zhi Wei takes, the long moments of silence, camera slowly panning, all evoke the masters of contemplative cinema. This is ‘slow cinema’ at its finest, especially because Jow Zhi Wei isn’t aping his more famous predecessors but shares sensibilities and sensitivity with them. A delicate coming-of-age story that doesn’t follow a traditional three-act structure but rather cuts the story in half not just in the narrative sense but also in visual approach, Tomorrow Is a Long Time is a film for an audience with patience, and one that touches upon several thorny subjects in Singapore society.
Between a difficult relationship with an always working father (Leon Dai) and the deteriorating health of his grandmother, 17-year-old Meng (a wonderful performance by Edward Tan), a sensitive kid in an isolated position, is a bit of a loner. Preyed upon by a group of school bullies, he becomes a member of their gang through a series of cruel initiation rites. His widowed father is working long hours at a pest control company, where the pressure of having to provide for his son and the health issues from the toxic chemicals he works with make his labor increasingly hard. When an illegal co-worker dies on one of his shifts and he is urged to move the body, guilt starts gnawing at his already overworked heart. Meng in the meantime has gotten himself in trouble following an act of violence that his new ‘friends’ try to let him take the fall for. He is given the option to do military service, and with nothing left to lose he takes the opportunity.
