Touch of the Light

Touch of the Light (2012)

Huang-Yu Shiang is a blind man going to a music class in college at Thailand. He’s being guided by his mom and later with his classmates. A woman, named Jie works at Coco (Thailand’s Starbuck) and goes to Dance Class taught by Shiang’s mom. One day, Jie saves Shiang from crossing the street on his own, and they slowly bond with their own goals. Shiang plays music on the piano that would lead him connecting other people and put into the contest with songs such as a remix of Flight of the Bumblebee (not to be confused with Bumble Boogie), Bach music, and As Time Goes By.

The theme is disability, mainly blindness in society and education.

This film was originally going to be a short film based on a real event, but was suggest being a feature length film. That kind of idea can work when done right. Short Stories in books with around 100 pages or less such as The Birds, Shawshank Redemption, Christmas Carols, and (I have to include this for personal reason I’ll do a review in the future after January 2017) Nightmare Before Christmas. These stories may be short, but they were expanded with additional characters that fit the story, explore questions that was asked about the book such as ”Did anyone noticed their Pumpkin King left Halloween?” or “What did they do with the victim and how he/ she escaped?” include music and/ or suspense onto the character(s), and other stuffs that helped the story better. However, there’s a bad way of expanding a short story into films such as Children of the Corn, The Last Mimzy, and recently with Batman: The Killing Joke. In fact, this film is very common with the Killing Joke. A short story that was added with a subplot on a woman (Barbara/ Batgirl and Jie) dealing with a generic life you see in a generic chick flick and an issues that barely connect to the overall story and feels like a separate film. Granted, we would like to see more substance onto the female character, but we want to see something unique from them than to be a love interest, boring, a body count, or a Sex in the City character. One thing that’s unique is a blind person in college, at least in film. 

We’ve seen blind characters in films before. Some blind characters done right such as Toph (Avatar: The Last Airbender), and to name a few, but there’s some done wrong such as Daredevil (the film, not the Netflix show), Garret (Quest For Camelot), and Neil Patrick Harris (Beastly). The kind of blind characters that was written to be blind as an after-thought, yet they have the same slight as if they weren’t blind or (in daredevil’s case) altered visually.

Shiang’s very common with Ray Charles since they’re both blind pianist. The difference is Ray became blind from trauma, got rich, had wife issue, was a singer, and appeared in films, as Shiang got blind from premature birth, won contest dishonorably from the pity of judges, and isn’t on any drugs. We can tell he’s blind as we see his point of view of seeing people as black silhouette in foggy world. The background music sounds nice to listen, and you can see the passion and effort Shiang and his friends when they help him add the remix beat into his piano work. Touch of the Light I would like to watch, but a short story it would work better to focus on.