[DVD] Talentime (2009)

Dearly Departed, and Missed
Like Mukhsin, Yasmin Ahmad's final feature film Talentime had a theatrical release in Singapore, but unfortunately there isn't distribution for the DVD. So those in Singapore will have to make do with the Malaysian DVD release, and unfortunately the reproduction leaves much to be desired. It's also not easy to hunt down a copy with English subtitles, and thankfully I had a friend do that for me recently given a trip to Kuala Lumpur.

It's almost touch and go, given that the details of the DVD printed on the sleeve, for some unknown reason, only lists down the film as having Malay subtitles only. After all, Yasmin's Talentime has a mixture of the major languages used in her country Malaysia, and I believe English was one of the dominant languages used by the characters in the film, since the teenagers are in a multi-racial co-ed school, and have to rely on English, other than Bahasa, as the lingua-franca. Having watched this a number of times already, I can probably get by with not having the English subtitles available, but that would suck if I were to rewatch the film some time down the road. What you could do, if you manage to track down a copy at a shop, is to request that the DVD be played, so that you could have a chance to verify if the subtitles are available in Malay only, or has English ones available. But the DVDs are getting scarce, so I'd recommend that you'd grab any copy available first in any case.

For the brilliance of her films, the DVD releases of her filmography has unfortunately been found wanting. Rabun is only available on VCD and is out of print, and so is Sepet - the Singapore DVD release having the best reproduction and the Malaysian one requiring cuts to be made. Singapore's DVD release of Gubra is also the best version out there, but after that film, the rest didn't really have a proper transfer. Mukhsin was in letterbox format and seemed to have been lifted from a fairly bad print, with care put into audio presentation instead, and so was Muallaf, although the latter was in an anamorphic widescreen presentation, and more importantly, without cuts. Talentime though was again in the letterbox presentation, with some detectable noise in the print.

You can read my review of Talentime here.

The Region Free DVD by Primeworks Studios and MVM Home Entertainment presents the film in the letterbox format, with subtitles available in Malay and English, despite having it printed on the DVD sleeve as "Bahasa Malaysia" only, and even imprinting that notice on the DVD disc itself. So as already mentioned, track a copy down, and request for a verification. Audio is available in Stereo only, and scene selection is over 9 chapters. There are no extras found in this release, which is a real pity. But you can probably make do with the blog entries that can be found in Yasmin's blogs The Storyteller and The Filmmaker, where she dropped nuggets of information from her films, especially the later ones, including Talentime.

My hope is that one day, all of Yasmin Ahmad's films could be remastered properly so that future generations can get to enjoy her films in the manner as they were intended. It may not be easy navigating through all the rights and ownership, but if there's a will, there will be a way.