Artificial Rain

The follow-up to his acclaimed debut Ilo Ilo, Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen’s second feature reflects many of the same thematic concerns about family relationships, domestic responsibility, and the gulf between his homeland’s self-representation and less glamorous on-the-ground realities. As Kenta McGrath contends, however, Wet Season’s comparatively rigid aesthetic and often heavy-handed symbolism come at the expense of the realism that flows through the earlier work.

Critics sometimes place patronising expectations on a director’s second film, especially if the director happens to be young and to have gained some level of success with their first effort. Even the word ‘sophomore’ – commonly used in the United States to describe a second-year high school or college student, but also more broadly to denote the second work of an artist – comes from a place of condescension. It’s a compound derived from the Greek word sophos, meaning ‘wise’, and moros, meaning ‘foolish’: a ‘wise fool’ who sits somewhere between the two poles, and for whom the jury’s still out on which way they’ll gravitate.

When one speaks of a ‘sophomore’ film, the word is usually used in a descriptive sense (a fancier way of saying ‘second’ film), but can also carry connotations more flattering than its etymology might suggest. It’s no coincidence that the term is reserved for directors exclusively, as far as cinema is concerned; identifying a sophomore film as such is also a tacit recognition of the director’s claim to authorship. Moreover, the underlying assumption is often that the director displayed in their earlier work a notable degree of personal vision or style, an auteurist sensibility against which the follow-up can be measured. This can help form a convenient framework for critics to approach the film – and probably for some directors too, for that matter – and establish some guidelines for assessing it. Does it build upon the concerns explored in the first film? What does it do that the last one didn’t, and what does it do better or worse? Is a