Female film characters skirt with stereotypes

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."