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.