The Beautiful Washing Machine

James Lee's film The Beautiful Washing Machine is hypnotic and intriguing, though I'm not sure whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts or the plot holes are so deep as to be inescapable.

Lee's style is very Tsai Ming-Liang: empty interiors, uncommunicative characters, and slow/no camera movement. Clearly, major themes are consumer emptiness and urban isolation, as the film returns repeatedly to featureless supermarkets and antiseptic office cubicles. It's a Malaysian film, set in Kuala Lumpur, though its bland modernist settings have no identifying characteristics (to me, they somehow evoke Singapore). The use of DV cameras adds to the film's intentionally artificial, homogenised atmosphere, though it also results in murky photography, often making faces difficult to identify.

The film begins as an office drone, Teoh, buys a washing machine. He takes it home, though it only works intermittently. Then, one night, he finds a mute, submissive young women sitting next to the machine. Her appearance is not explained, and he hardly seems surprised to see her. She becomes his live-in maid, and he even pimps her out to strangers, one of whom later stabs him to death.

When Teoh is killed, the mysterious women is taken in by a middle-aged man, again as a maid, though she is then raped by his son-in-law. The woman is destined to be exploited and abused by the men to whom she attaches herself.

The woman, who never speaks and remains nameless, is perhaps a symbol of female oppression and submission, though if this is Lee's intention it hardly makes for a profound subtext. More interesting is the possibility that the woman is some kind of literal extension/creation of the washing machine (as the same machine is inexplicably seen in the middle-aged man's house).