Garin's int'l reputation further extended

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): Comedic actress Rosanna Arquette and the director of the brilliant hyper-violent Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino, were among the judges at the 1994 Taormina International Film Festival in Italy (July 27-Aug.2) where Garin Nugroho's film Letter for an Angel, Surat Untuk Bidadari, won the `Cariddi d'Oro' for best film.

It was the winner from among twelve films invited, including entries from France, Italy, the United States, all of which were selected for exhibiting `new trends' in feature filmmaking.

Letter for an Angel has further extended the international reputation of Garin Nugroho as one of Indonesia's foremost contemporary directors. In the 1980s he won awards for Best Documentary Film at the Indonesian Film Festivals of l986 and l989 and for his fiction feature, Cinta dalam Sepotong Roti, Love in a Slice of Bread, he was awarded the prize of Best Young Director at the Asia Pacific Film Festival, South Korea, in l992. This year Letter for an Angel has been screened at film festivals in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney (this year's Asia Pacific Festival Venue), Melbourne, Tokyo, and Berlin, where it won the Berliner Zeitung Prize in the Forum des Jungen films. In November Angel goes to the London Film Festival.

Garin reports that the Taormina judges recommended Letter for an Angle for its particular combination of tragedy with comedy and for its mix of pop and traditional culture. To give an example: There is a scene in the film (to which the film returns several times) where the central character Lewa refuses to identify a sketch in his school textbook with his mother, whom he lost years ago in a bus accident. The sketch is of an average woman in traditional dress, still he will not conform and recite the caption -- Ini Ibu, this is mother.

Fantasy world

She must be found. Insistent and questioning, he is led to the hulk of a bus in a nearby ravine. Tangled grasses sprout from inside but weathering has done little to dull the lurid advertisements on its sides (such is the persistence of advertising culture). This the bus in which his mother died. Lewa walks around it slowly and comes face to face with an image of pop idol Madonna. There she is, flying hair, bright red lips. Eureka! For Lewa this is mother, care-giver and protector and not the self-consciously "bad girl" adored most especially by young teenage girls in the West.

In a world where so few pieces of the puzzle fit, where Lewa is without family (his mother is dead and then his father and close friend die during the course of the film), where the fabric of traditional village life is being riven by strife, the boy finds solace in modern technology. It is with a camera, a Polaroid, which produces a print pronto, that Lewa secures his view of reality. What you see is what you get after you press the button, even if it has gloss finish and looks a bit blanched, as instant photos tend to.

Robbed of his childhood by circumstance, Lewa builds a fantasy world to inhabit and he begins correspondence with an `angel.' In regular letters he writes to her of his pain and longing when there is no one else around who seems able to listen. In the space where he sleeps her facsimile floats on a string, like him, connected by a thread to the world around him.

Another hero of the west, Mikhail Gorbachev, enters Lewa's life when the boy discovers his photograph in a magazine. "If this man is a hero, why then does he look so confused?" -- Lewa is such a difficult child, so many questions! The boy has been told it is the photograph of a great leader, but Lewa looks at him skeptically. Gorbachev has a hand over his face and his features seem collapsed with worry -- photographers the bane of the politician in this age of mechanical reproduction. Lewa learnt early in life to identify the reality in the image over the reality of the written and spoken word, and he announces `Pictures and reality,' `This book is lies.'

Windy's Lewa, whom Garin `discovers' two short days before shooting, carries his role with assurance. Several of the characters -- Berlian Merah, Kuda Liar, Malaria Tua -- are professional actors but the rest of the characters, like Windy, were chosen from the local people of Sumba.

In his struggle with the gang of village heavies, led by Kuda Liar who fancies himself as an Elvis Presley crooner, which force the villagers to hand over their lands, Lewa's father dies. The funeral takes place. The sequences are actually taken from a documentary of a real funeral with a real corpse and real mourners, complete with the ritual killing of a horse.

Village eccentric

A short while later Lewa returns to school with the ultimate objet trouve -- a stiff, his father's corpse. This is my father and this is his photograph, see they are one and the same! His classmates flee in horror. Why do they accuse me of being bad when I only wanted the real face of my father, not his text book caricature ? No one can answer him and Lewa is showing early signs of becoming the village eccentric.

Visually this is an arresting film. Frequent panning shots sweep panoramas which could be `Arabia' with its barren landscapes, its people and their horses. But no, there is evidence that the twentieth century has arrived when suddenly the camera finds a downed plane -- and it is `owner-occupied.' You might think that this piece of modern technology would be no less out of context had it landed on the moon. Not so, these Sumbanese have readily assimilated this alien shape and taken it unto themselves, as they have done television, rock'n'roll, the motor launch, the photographic camera, and the bus.

But modernity is not welcome everywhere. As Lewa discovers when he wanders after his horse into a neighboring village. He `steals' a photo of a young girl around his own age. Why, he asks her, doesn't she have breasts -- probably comparing her pre- adolescent chest to the advertising images of full-blown women. Adults of the village come upon them and Lewa's stolen photograph develops into a full-scale, three-dimensional incident between the villages. Pride is at stake and things turn ugly. There is a battle. Like all wars, notes Garin, it is hard to explain why people fight each other.

It appears that the battle, like other sequences of this remarkable film, is represented with veracity. The village king with whom the director negotiated had insisted that nothing should be `fake.' During the 32 days of production, the film crew were able to secure images of traditional verisimilitude in a documentary scenario. The battle, the ritual Sumbanese battle between bareback horsemen armed with lances, marshaled up such enthusiasm that the filmmakers could not put a stop to it, and it continued. The battle `finished' in the post-production process in Singapore. It can be risky pointing cameras at people.

If I have a problem with this impressive film it is with the continuity. Perhaps, and it would not be surprising were it so, the filmmakers (Garin and his crew, who were largely drawn from among his students at the Jakarta Arts Institute) were ultimately overwhelmed with the wealth of raw footage they accumulated. Opening sequences are rather confused and it takes time for the narrative to find its footing. In effect, it is the problem of film balanced between documentary and fiction; the film is driven on the one hand by its attention to detail of lifestyle as it is lived, on the other hand these revelations tend to get in the way of the drive of the narrative. Yet, the images of Letter for an Angel, harsh by the director's own admission, stay with you long after the lights come up. With its desert mountain backdrops, barren and treeless, it communicates timelessness and placelessness. Like the scenario of a moral fable on the predicament of pluralism the world over.