'Tropic of Emerald' reveals a cross-cultural romance

By Jane Freebury

SUKABUMI, West Java (JP): Filming has just been completed on location in Java for a new Dutch feature in production, the Tropic of Emerald. Although it is similar to the French Indochine and the British Passage to India in that it is set during the twilight of an empire, it is a cross-cultural romance that the filmmakers feel will resonate with the multicultural world of today.

Just the other week up in Sukabumi, about 70 kilometers south of Jakarta, the director Orlow Seunke and producer Wim Lehnhausen were a pair of edgy men. Shooting for Tropic of Emerald was nearly done after close on a four-month shoot, but the rains had decided to intervene and try and mess with the schedule. The day before, a deluge brought down two of the nine huts on the set, a specially constructed prison compound. By midday the following day, however, both structures were virtually up again and the only inconvenience for the film crew was ensuring that banging hammers couldn't be heard during takes.

Last week, the dramas before and behind the camera were over. Orlow and Wim and their key cast and crew are now back in Europe and the film is now, as they say, in the hands of the editor. It's probably a toss up as to what is harder: cutting the "raw material" in the editing suite or juggling a hundred cast and crew with the tempestuous elements of the tropics.

Post-production on the 120-minute Tropic of Emerald is due to be completed a year from now. The score is yet to be written, but an orchestra is booked to perform it and the release will coincide with the Dutch Film Festival. In Indonesia, it will screen as a television miniseries, divided into four episodes of 48 minutes each. In Holland, it will also be shown on television, in three slightly longer episodes.

The budget for this Dutch production is above middle-range, at nearly 5M guilders (around US$3.5 million) which is similar to the figures for low medium-budget productions in other countries.

Typically, the small national film industries are in an altogether different division to the Hollywood heavyweights, for which these production figures would not even cover the advertising budget.

Last week in Sukabumi, it was the windup for final takes. Final wrap-up. The final weeks had been set aside for the prison camp sequences. Sketches from actual POW diaries were used to research the right look for the camp, constructed of three thousand pieces of bamboo. The living quarters were topped with a palm leaf roof. For construction, the local kampong was used as a reference and the camp went up in 12 days.

Prisoners

The terraces of banana trees had gone and in their place stood nine huts, sleeping quarters for 28 prisoners each. A hospital, a munitions store (built by the prisoners "in action"), a kitchen and an office made up the rest of the camp. A perimeter fence, complete with barbed wire and four watch towers, drew the line between flattened bare earth within and the thicket of banana foliage without. A little further down the hill, the green curtain gave way to hills beyond. "Escape", they breathed.

Beyond the film set, the locals of Sukabumi watched on. The landowner, friends and family watched proceedings from the overlooking house. Others watched from nearby terraces or through jagged DIY windows in the rattan wall: a partially successful attempt at privacy on the set.

Actors' heads were shaven or severely cropped for these scenes. But in the order of things in the film's narrative chronology, the prison scenes are of course midway through the watershed decade in Indonesia, 1939 to 1949, that saw the Dutch East Indies become the Republic of Indonesia.

This part of the action finds the lead character, a young Dutchman, interned along with the rest of his countrymen. Theo Staats (Dutch actor Pierre Bokma) had just stepped off ship from Holland several years before, set to make himself a career in the colony. He had started out on his uncle's rubber plantation, but he also began an affair with a local married woman. Ems (played by Esmee de la Bretonierre), is an Indo-European with the dress and habits of a European, and the wife of another Dutchman.

In the editing suite, their romance will be structured, epic fashion, with historical events for each year chronicled by archival material from Holland, from the Imperial War Museum in London, and so forth. The pattern planned is for each year of the 1939 - 1949 decade to be introduced with black and white archival material, from which the action will proceed briefly in black and white film stock, and then move into color.

In financial terms, Tropic of Emerald is not a coproduction, with only around 4 percent Indonesian money. However, 75 percent of the crew on location are Indonesian. Key personnel are European: the director (who, with Mieke de Jong, was also screenwriter), the cinematographer Tom Erisman, the male and female leads already mentioned and the art director and the costume designer, both Belgian. But the drama is a woman's story, including the growth of Ems' independence, analogous with the national "coming-of-age". Integral to this process of self- realization is the character Christine, played by internationally known Indonesian actress Christine Hakim. She has a small but significant role to play.

On the prison set that day, amongst the figures with shaven heads and dangly limbs, is Theo Staats. He is interned like the rest of his countrymen in Japanese-held Java. His figure is stooped and he has just been cruelly blinded, but in action, he looks like just one among many. At least at this camp, the internees wore clothes. At others they weren't, going naked or just wearing a little "netting". All were convincing POWs, except perhaps for the fact that some looked well-fed.

A reminder to doubters of actual conditions is a sign to the right of the row of toilets, exhorting prisoners to fill the waiting buckets. Two buckets of urine a day to keep hunger pangs away. Urine was used for yeast to bake bread the next day.

Sun

Imagine Scene X, Take Y: At this point, everyone is suffering a little, at least under the intensity of the sun. Several takes into the "letter-opening scene", the cast are sweating seriously, either under Block-Out or inside military uniforms.

Jack, a young Canadian business graduate of Chinese descent, is a Japanese soldier on set today. His uniform was made by "wardrobes" the day before yesterday, but tents and military equipment were supplied with the cooperation of the Indonesian army. On a backpacking holiday, Jack was discovered in a bar on Jl. Jaksa. How was he to act the part? "Just be mean and walk!" he was instructed.

Theo, reputedly 80 years old, is one of several among the crowd of extras intimately involved in the camp experience. He played the avuncular figure of the camp cook. A real-life former internee of Japanese prison camps in Java and Thailand during World War II, Theo has a story or two to tell.

So too does another Dutch extra. Ealko was actually born in Sukabumi in 1942, but orphaned in the war. His mother, who died in camp in 1944, is buried in Bandung. His civil servant father was killed during hostilities, but missing in action. Ealko was too young to remember things vividly -- anyway, women and children up to 12 years of age were interned separately from men -- but he has some sense of deja vu.

Aside from international adventurers -- like the amiable Stein from Norway who was running a couple of hotels back home and is now backpacking around the world -- there are people from Bali, Yogyakarta and Jakarta. Irene, Magda, Karen and Angela are expat wives and a JIS senior has managed a small part, too. Overall, the cast and crew numbered around 95, including some 20 extras flown in at the last minute from Holland.

Sukabumi locals were intimately involved in Tropic of Emerald. For one or two, the experience triggered past memories. An elderly local woman became distraught during a scene where "Japanese soldiers" were separating male villagers from their families.

This is said to have actually happened to her during the Japanese occupation.

Other connections and shared history become apparent. Orlow Seunke is married to an Indo-European woman in Holland, and has been a frequent visitor to Indonesia over the last 12 years.

During a five-year period, he ran filmmaking workshops for the film department at the Institut Kesenian Jakarta. He reflects on the fact that people are mixing more, worldwide.

Just before he finished filming, Orlow heard that he had won the prize at home for Best TV Drama of 1995 with his Frans and Duits, a light comedy about two school teachers in the 1960s working on an island in north Holland. Orlow's first cinema feature, A Taste of Water, was released in 1982, and Tropic of Emerald is his fourth feature film for cinema.

Where did the film's title come from? "Girdle of emerald" is a famous phrase from the 19th-century classic on colonialism, Max Havelaar. The "tropic" suggests the torrid zone of Henry Miller's tropic(s) of Cancer and Capricorn. Overall, a semiotic which seems to suggest the need to withdraw from what intellectually you know is not yours, yet it draws you towards it, sensually. Wim at some point mentioned the "pain and love" of that last period of the Dutch in Indonesia.

But is this old ground or new ground? Will there be some historical reassessment? Will it have more to say to Indonesian audiences than, say, Oeroeg? We will have to wait a year to see.