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).