The ambitious Rafflesia Pong is stuck in FONY TV’s career gulag, interviewing pretentious filmmakers, like “Yeo Joon Han,” the director of film festival winners nobody watches. However, when she accidentally films the dying words of her ex-fiancée poet, she strikes reality TV gold. Suddenly, she has a shot at primetime glory as the host of Final Say, capturing dying Malaysians’ last words of wisdom. The only trick is finding interview subject to cooperative enough to die on-camera.
From art-house filmmakers to the British influenced English speaking (“Manglish”) business sector, Sell Out takes shots at some pretty fat targets. Frankly, the anti-corporate material is fairly standard stuff, albeit with a clever linguistic twist. However, the long opening interview sequence with Yeo Joon Han (certainly self-referential, but the director does not appear as himself) is a truly subversive riot. That alone is worth the price of admission. Yet, Yeo constantly deconstructs the movie musical form in clever ways. Indeed, Sell Out must have broken new ground by inviting the audience to perform the big dramatic showstopper karaoke-style.
Amidst the post-modern lunacy, Jerrica Lai’s Pong is an equally unlikely musical heroine, whose own ethical flexibility keeps viewing expectations off balance. Still, the élan she brings to the proceedings keeps the audience thoroughly invested. As Tan, Peter Davis is an earnestly engaging everyman. In a notable supporting turn, the perfectly cast Hannah Patricia Lo Wun Yee’s catty flare steals all her scenes as Pong’s Eurasian nemesis Hannah Edwards Leong. She is also rather attractive, not that such matters are noticed or remarked upon at NYAFF.
