The film 'Oeroeg' straddles two culture

The film 'Oeroeg' straddles two culture

By Jane Scott

JAKARTA (JP): Oeroeg is a feature film jointly produced by
Indonesia, the Netherlands and Germany which was screened for a
brief season here early this month.

It is so unusual in Jakarta these days to watch a film that is
set in Indonesia from the soft, upholstered seat of an up market
cinema! Oeroeg was shown in Cinema 21 against Legends of the Fall
and Outbreak last week. This week it moves on.

On 13 June it will open in six second-rung cinemas around the
city, while from late July it will be shown on the state-owned
TVRI television station in four episodes. A 1993 international
production, it involved four film companies, including sole
producer in Indonesia, Budiati Abiyoga's Prasidi Teta
Film/Mutiara Eranusa Film. The other three companies are Added
Film Holland, Multi Media NV, and Lichtblick Filmproduction.

The first thing to say about this film is that it tells an
absorbing story and that, structurally, it works like a well-made
theater play, with mistaken identities and moments of lost and
found. On this soundly-constructed base, the narrative sequences
roll backwards and forwards between 1940s Indonesia and the
country's colonial past, when segregated classes of Indonesian
schoolchildren were taught about the Rhine River in Europe before
they learnt about the river systems of their own country.

The film is set in the twilight of the Dutch colonial regime
in Indonesia, prior to World War II, and in the harsh period up
to 1949, when Holland recognized Indonesia's independence.

It tells the story of Johan ten Berghe, the son of a tea
plantation owner, who grew up in Indonesia when it was under
Dutch rule and returned to it later as an adult, as a soldier
doing military service. Johan has a past to recover, a father to
make contact with and a very important friend to find -- Urug,
the son of one of his father's employees.

The integration of flashback scenes in Oeroeg (also known as
Going Home) works very well. It isn't necessary to chase these
apparently non-sequential moments around and off the screen to
file them away into their "proper" places, because the narrative
centers on the consciousness of Johan, who grew up in Indonesia
as a boy and has returned to it to recover (restore?) his past.
First he must find his father, the house that his family once
lived in and his childhood friend, Urug. He has some old
photographs to go by.

But where is home for the man who spent his youth playing on
the red earth among serried tea plants? It was in the pre-dawn of
innocence, before the Indonesian struggle for independence.

A key scene near the start is a quick low-angle shot of a
figure on the balcony of an official building. Bare-footed, this
figure is straddling a balustrade while tearing the blue strip
off the bottom of a Dutch flag -- and then he is arrested. In
narrative terms, the momentary scene is the key to the
misunderstanding in the relationship between the two main
characters around whom the historical drama is built.

Johan and Urug are a Dutchman and an Indonesian who shared
their childhoods together in a rural idyll in West Java, in and
around Johan's father's Kebon Jati, a tea plantation in the
fertile hills. Johan and Urug entered into a pact to be blood
brothers but the friendship became harder to maintain under the
glare of fatherly disapproval, and family pressure gradually
came between the two boys. Scrambling around the garden and
getting one's white sunsuit dirty was improper. Sons of other
plantation owners are brought in on Johan's birthday,
interrupting Johan's game of tennis with Urug. When the newcomers
mistake him for the ball boy, Urug stalks off.

Another event severs childhood loyalties. Late after a garden
party at Johan's home a group of revelers take a barge and punt
out into the darkness on the lake, the lake where the witch with
long green hair lives in the depths. Little Johan falls in but is
rescued by Urug's father who then, himself, apparently ends up
drowning. Johan, from whose point of view the tale unfolds, is
recovering or unconscious so we do not know exactly what has
happened. We assume, as does Johan, that Deppoh drowned while
trying to save the life of his employer's son. The truth, when it
comes out, is sadder than that: Deppoh had drowned after jumping
in a second time, this time to retrieve his employer's silver fob
watch.

As a soldier doing his military service, Johan has returned to
Indonesia, returned "home". He looks for his elderly father but
is informed that he has left Batavia (filmed, incidentally, in
Surabaya) and returned to the tea plantation. Johan is given
permission to enter hostile territory and attempts to get back to
the house where his father lives alone, among the overgrowth, his
memories and the bric-a-brac left behind by house's previous
residents, the Japanese. But Johan arrives to find that his
father is slumped, lifeless, in a chair, having been shot just
moments before. Johan believes that the assassin was the person
he saw leaving the property moments before -- and he believes
that the fleeing figure was Urug.

Believing that Urug the freedom fighter has murdered his
father, Johan is like a man possessed, and he puts his life and
the lives of fellow soldiers in danger with his obsession to
ascertain the identity of his father's killer. Armed with a
photograph of the young Urug, Johan hopes that he can identify
his father's killer. Tracking him down however, now that they are
both soldiers on opposing sides, unlocks a vicious series of
incidents, as Johan's quest propels him deeper into Indonesian
army territory and deeper into the politics of his position and
that of his former friend.

Oeroeg has an alternative title: Going Home. Like the two
sides to the proverbial coin, the film's titling suggests that
there are two perspectives from which it may be viewed,
understood or judged: that of the former, colonial, culture; and
that of the formerly colonized people. But the story is largely
Johan's, and that of his cultural perspective.

Nevertheless, as a production which straddles two cultures
with a shared history Oeroeg manages to strike a balance -- in
a territory sprung with traps for the foolhardy filmmaker. Scenes
of torture and counter-atrocity are handled in such a way that
they do not serve to propagandize either position. Scenes at a
cinema screening Tarzan to two audiences, one (colonialist) in
front of the screen and the other (colonized) behind the screen,
are as comic as they are disturbing.

The balance between the Indonesian and Dutch positions is
quite an achievement. Not through offering multiple perspectives,
like those films that fashionably offer shifting points of view
and alternative endings, that decline to offer reading positions,
or willfully confuse the viewer with dissonant image and
soundtrack. Rather, it achieves a balance through a general,
respectful even-handedness. The only English spoken in the film,
"Dutchman Go Home" (shouted, incidentally, by a well-known
Indonesian actor dressed as an independence fighter) will have a
certain resonance with post-colonial audiences everywhere.

Oeroeg' is in Dutch and Indonesian language dialogue, with
Indonesian subtitles. If you are not fluent in either language
but are interested in seeing a good film, outside run-of-the-mill
high-octane action -- and in practicing your listening
comprehension of bahasa Indonesia -- take yourself along next
week.