Garin's int'l reputation further extended

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.