Hui Yee Gan

If It’s Not Now, Then When? mostly takes place in an apartment inhabited by three members of a family (though never at the same time): mother Pearlly Chua (from Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone), daughter Tan Bee Hung and young son Kenny Gan. Their father seems recently to have died. The mother leaves early and returns late, out on long walks in the park with a lover whom the daughter and her best friend try to spy on. The daughter pecks away at a computer at work and has a desultory affair with her married boss, which he carries on between his business and family phone calls. And the son breaks into cars and “recycles” the electronics he finds.

Father and son wrestle with love in a small Malaysian fishing village. While father looks up an old lover he should have married years ago, his son faces a dilemma. Will he choose the girl he’s in love with, or the daughter of his boss?

Berg has just come to Kuala Lumpur and agrees to share a room with Andrew. He meets the other occupants of the house, including the ghost of a murdered girl and a struggling screenwriter whose wife works as a hooker. He also finds out about the mysterious disappearance of an artist who had been a previous tenant. Berg himself is plagued by inertia and the memory of a lost love, and needs to reconcile this with his new life in the city.

Heavily influenced by Jean-Luc Godard, this experimental piece of anti-cinema is about a group of Chinese Communist gangsters dealing with betrayal, disillusionment and the absence of love.