Director Kohei Oguri dedicates film to Christine Hakim

Director Kohei Oguri dedicates film to Christine Hakim

By Gotot Prakosa

JAKARTA (JP): Christine Hakim, one of Indonesia's prominent
actress, is painstakingly preparing herself for the role of an
Asian girl in her next movie Nemuru Otoko, (A Man of Sleep).

For the last few months, she has spent her time in Japan to
learn the country's language and lifestyle in order to adjust
herself to her coming role in her newest film.

This film will be directed by Kohei Oguri, a director who has
won a number of awards in various international film festivals --
including Cannes.

Oguri has requested that Christine abstain from making
contacts with any Indonesians, even with her closest colleagues.
Contacts with her family are to be kept at minimum. This is the
kind of learning method that the director wants her to use so
that she could more quickly adopt the character that she's
playing in the movie. It seems that Christine has accepted the
suggestion, and it also seems that she's enjoying this
assignment.

Kohei Oguri was born in 1945. He began to learn to write
scenarios from Masahiro Shinoda and Kiriro Urayama, during the
periods he worked as assistant director for them. Then he moved
on and directed his first film, Muddy River (Doro No Kawa) in
1980. The film earned positive comments from critics and the
public, although it was considered too serious for the Japanese
audience and therefore had difficulty in marketing there at
first. Only after it received a prestigious award, the Silver
Prize, from the Moscow Film Festival in 1981 did the largest film
company of Japan, Toei, have enough confidence to market it. It
turned out to be a great success -- even commercially.

According to Gene Moskowitz, a prominent critic from the
Variety magazine, with his first piece Oguri demonstrated deep
feelings and the rare ability to express real Japanese
characters.

In the opinion of a Japanese film expert, Donald Richie, Oguri
brought a new image to Japanese film, which used to be
characterized by studio productions loaded with violence,
pornography, and anything that did not involve profound thoughts
on the Japanese culture.

In the meantime, Korosawa had become a celebrity and
internationally known, while both Mizoguchi and Osu were no
longer able to work on new films. Oguri then enjoyed an
increasingly important position by adding a new genre to the
motion picture industry of Japan as he exploited ethnic
specificity and indigenous life.

In 1984, Oguri produced his second film, For Kayako. In the
same year, the film earned the Georges Sedul Prize. His next
film, The Sting of Death, was completed in 1990, and it earned
the 1990 Grand Prix Prize at Cannes Film Festival.

In 1993, Oguri and a colleague and close friend of his from
Indonesia, Slamet Rahardjo, made a compilation film. According to
them, this film was called a "correspondence film".

It took the format of correspondence between the two
directors. In it, Oguri worked on his own film based on his
interpretation of Rahardjo's first film, "Rembulan dan Matahari"
(Moon and Sun) in order to depict life in Indonesia. Shots were
made in various places in Indonesia, including Kalimantan, East
Java, East Nusa Tenggara, as well as the slum area in Tanah
Abang, Jakarta.

For his part, Rahardjo worked on a film in Japan to describe
the Japanese life based on Oguri's works Muddy River and For
Kayako. The resulting "correspondence film" was later shown by
NHK and received controversial reactions, since the format and
the creation techniques were considered too unconventional. It
was also regarded as too partial to the individuals, as if it
were the audience's task to try to understand the directors.

To counter the criticism, Oguri argued that what had been
created was indeed personal in nature, while this type of film
had long been abandoned by the motion-picture community.

Oguri got acquainted with Christine through her films that
were shown in Japan. They also met at several festivals during
which their films were played. When Oguri was working on his film
in Indonesia, he got to know Christine better. He then decided to
ask Christine to be in one of his films, the screenplay for which
was to be written specifically to suit her personality so only
she could play the leading role. Last March, Christine, Oguri and
his crew began the shooting of the new film.

The film, A Man of Sleep, portrays the life of a small town
community in northern Japan that is close to a traditional harbor
and surrounded by woods. In one corner of this tiny town there is
a bar full of Asian women who work there. The story unfolds as it
pictures a small family from that town with a member, a man,
suffering from a coma. This man sleeps throughout the entire
film. The family decided to leave him sleeping to death in the
woods.

But he is found by one of the Asian women who wanders into the
woods. The plot reaches a new stage as the woman realizes that
she has encountered a dead man who, according to local myths, has
been swallowed by the woods.

Christine once admitted that it was not easy to follow Oguri's
thoughts. In order to best understand his wishes, she had to read
the script over and over again. A lot of interpretation is
involved, which requires a lot of energy. Christine seems to have
devoted all of herself, like she has always done each time she
was to play a role in a film. That is typical of Christine Hakim.

This 38-year-old woman always devotes her full life to the
roles she plays in her films. She did so in her film, Tjoet Nya'
Dhien, which won the hearts of the Japanese when it was shown
there during the Tokyo Film Festival and then run in cinemas
throughout Japan.

After the making of A Man of Sleep is completed, hopefully
this month, Christine has another assignment waiting for her. The
Fukuoka Asian Film Festival has invited her to serve as one of
the international judges -- along with people from America,
Europe and Japan.

This woman, who has been living for motion pictures for 23
years, clearly confirms the belief that, although Indonesia's
national film industry has not yet recovered from its slump,
there are still some who, with full dedication, work for its
revival -- here and abroad.

Gotot Prakosa is a painter turned a movie director and a
lecturer at the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ).