Curious Objects

Idola

Sharifah Aleya débuts as the unfortunate teenager trapped in modernizing Malaysia: she gets a successful sharia lawyer (Normala Shamsuddin) for a big sister and suffers from a taste for Jeslina Hashim’s music. Poor her, she idolizes both singer and sister; but the lawyer doesn’t approve of the crooning sinner or her fan club’s wet T-shirt weekend. What’s a girl to do? She sneaks her way into the tour van and speeds up the plot to the opposites-attract romance between her lawyer sister and the singer’s composer brother. In Aziz M. Osman’s message movie, Normala Shamsuddin scurries around and acts uptight; she’s busy making new unfounded judgments and having the previous ones reversed. Meanwhile, bespectacled Norman Hakim affects cool with conscience and—for all you bigots out there—is also shockingly brainy and sensitive: he graduates from some overseas university and writes meaningful lyrics. The director then proceeds to lecture us on the fallacy of prejudices, the possible marriage of art and intellect, the distinction between moral and immoral artists, and so on and so forth; but in the zeal to subvert unholy stereotypes, he reveals much but doesn’t quite convince—it all comes out insecure, guilt-ridden, conflicted. The movie itself resorts to stereotypes when noone is looking: Kasmadiana is the social-climbing bitch who wears tasteless jewelry and seduces ex-husband, Danny X-Factor the supposedly seductive rock star who wears a wig and likes to climb half-innocent girls. The man is almost not there (the wig hides his only reason for being), but true to the movie’s didactic tone, he gives precious phonetics lesson.