Curious Objects

Jogho

In a bullfighting arena, the celebrating man is shot dead in the forehead by the upset loser, his blood smeared into a sanguine expression of faith and rage. Thus begins U-Wei Haji Shaari’s movie about a Malay village near the Thai border, but the narrative doesn’t exactly brim over with the explosive violence of that opening sequence; instead, it casually alternates between half-boiled suspense and clumsy acts of revenge. The director, rightfully it seems, has no interest in contrived drama; he lets his actors loose in the endless expanse of the paddy field to look for their killer, their mission, their uprooted sense of being. The camera captures everything and comments on nothing, closing-up on contradictions without hammering home the point: the pious father who gambles and vows vendetta, the vigilantes who alternate Korans and brothel girls in their laps, the bloody bullfight on the peaceful paddy field. The movie is a sympathetic and sober examination of men’s foolish pride and women’s helpless resignation; it never tries to rise into a singing praise of arrogance, but refuses to settle into an easy rhetoric of indignation, either. U-Wei is fascinated by boundaries of all kinds—national, sexual, religious—and his movie makes a spectacle out of the contest of pride among people who have nothing else to pit. With brilliant performance by Khalid Salleh as the bullfighting champion, whose thickly-accented lines sometimes yield to revelatory wrinkles. In Malay, almost.