Curious Objects

Perempuan, Isteri, dan ...

There is so much promise to the idea, so many premises on the plot, that what the film finally delivers feels less like a completed whole than a half conceit. Perhaps to describe U-Wei Haji Shaari's controversial second film as a daring venture is accurate enough, if we do not mean to flatter; it is the curious tourist who teeters at the edge of a caldera but then sprints downhill at the slightest sign of rumbling. Sofia Jane plays Zaleha, an innocent runaway bride who eloped with a sleazy punk and followed her heart, but was soon turned prostitute once the jilted groom (Nasir Bilal Khan) found them both and took bloody revenge. He married her and brought her home; she wanted to change and be the good wife. Alas, this being a cautionary tale of the Black Widow kind, the tainted woman cannot help but destroy both men and morality. The film can sometimes be heard to scream female empowerment and sexual liberation, but the high-and-mighty slogan cries become utterly garbled within the technicality of a confused storyline—it's all concept and no conviction. And careful character study this is not: the cast comes complete with the Innocent Village Girl, the Sleazy City Punk, the Angry Impotent Husband, the Sensual Wife; the director simply chooses the correct permutation and then the camera captures the confrontation at a safe middle distance. The acting ranges from laughingly bad to affectedly annoying; when Sofia Jane's Zaleha beams innocently to her growling husband, is she projecting a muted subtlety, or is she just muted? But the worst acting is courtesy of Nasir Bilal Khan; he should be reminded that the shouting histrionics, proper though it may be on the stage, makes the close-up shot of his contorted facial muscles a pain to watch on-screen—it is visage acrobatics, and that’s not a good thing. The film has been attacked by feminist and religious groups alike, for disappointing cowardice, perhaps; there's the strangely eerie irony of a conspicuously feminist and exploitatively sexual movie that finally condemns sex and women in a convenient garb of last-minute prudery, like the evening school ustaz who crudely entertains and then wants to teach some lesson, too. But give partial credit to U-Wei; the national censor board, in an attempt to prevent accidental mishaps with electrical appliances, has decided to wield scissors on a key sequence involving the wife and her rice cooker, arguably the film’s most infamous and indelible image. In Malay.