Female film characters skirt with stereotypes
By Bruce Emond
JAKARTA (JP): Scrubbed of the canvas of makeup she uses in performances, the protagonist in Penari (Dancer) presses her face against the glass of an aquarium.
Sila is both lusciously ingenuous and forlorn. Like the exotic fish trapped and swimming to nowhere, she is shackled by traditional gender roles and circumstances.
Metaphors come fast and furious in Nan T. Achnas' Penari, originally produced as a TV film for private station ANteve from Seno Gumira Adjidarma's adaptation of his short story.
There is no denying that Nan is a gifted director. She possesses technical smarts, particularly in her use of the play of light, flashbacks to flesh out character motivation and the ability to structure scenes for greatest emotional impact.
It is evident from the opening sequence when Sila cavorts before the lolling mouths and outstretched arms of patrons in the club, a tasty morsel served up for public consumption.
Nevertheless, Penari -- hardly a slice of life for most women and with a tendency to veer perilously close to melodrama -- was a curious choice for screening and an accompanying discussion during the recent ASEAN Women's Month at the ASEAN Secretariat.
Despite its obvious merits, the film's selection seemed more a sad reflection of the lean times of the Indonesian film industry in general and chronically slim pickings for women than representative of the region as a a whole.
Tellingly, Penari skirted with the popular images of women in the abundant sinetron TV drama which continue to define "women's ways" in stereotypes.
In the no-brainer storylines churned out by local TV stations, women are frequently pitted as paradoxical figures of pleasure or pathos, the vamp with her sights set on wresting a coveted man away from a woe-is-me frump who wears her suffering as a badge of female fortitude.
Sila knows a woman's hard lot in life from painful childhood experiences. She witnessed her mother's servile surrender to patriarchal tyranny; in a flashback, the young girl snoops on her mother tenderly washing a man's feet, only for him to violently cuff her across the head.
A grown-up Sila leaves the family home for the big city and begins a relationship with an older man, Ubet, himself caught in a loveless marriage.
The stereotypes show through. The young, nubile Sila parlays her looks into enjoying the trappings of life as a mistress but she is savvy enough to know her salad days will be short-lived.
"We don't have much time before the wrinkles start to show and there will be younger ones to replace us," she laments to a jaded fellow dancer.
Ubet's spurned wife, meanwhile, schemes on the quiet, pulling the purse strings to try to bring her straying hubby back to the family home.
She has his credit line cut off and is not averse to ordering two henchmen to rough up one of Ubet's mistresses, the very same friend to whom Sila confided her fears about her waning shelf life. In a scene of high camp, the avenging wife sits behind a screen and orchestrates the torture in dulcet tones dripping with malice.
The male characters do not fare much better in the depictions.
The father figure in Sila's childhood is a brute, and Ubet is an irresponsible, fickle playboy lacking the backbone to forsake money and a cozy life to get away from his overbearing wife. In an astute twist on traditional gender roles, Ubet is the "kept man", deriving status from his female partner.
Sila's realization that Ubet will never leave his wife spurs her to attempt to establish her own independence through dancing. This presents an unsettling feminist dilemma; the woman exploits her sexuality for her own ends but she is still subjugating herself to the desires of men.
Her comeuppance occurs when the wife orders her henchmen (goons would be a better description for the vaudevillian antics of the two actors) to do away with her rival. Sila lies trapped and dying in a construction site well as the henchmen frolic with a troupe of jaipong traditional dancers, literally dancing on her grave in a searing image.
Although Nan was unable to attend the discussion after the film, BJD Gayatri from the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ) talked at length about the persistence of female stereotypes.
She cited Ripley in the Alien films as a woman who defied the nurturer role clumped on female characters.
"Ripley starts out as a scientist who has to learn to be a warrior. But, she also retains the nurturer role because she sets out to save a child who is notably not her own offspring."
Gayatri believes education of viewers, critics and those within the film industry is essential in the quest for female characters who are more than one-dimensional.
"We have a tendency to smash the mirror when it shows that we are ugly. Instead, we have to look at the ways we can confront stereotypes, even in our daily lives when it involves the assumptions we make about women who smoke or women returning home from work late at night."