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.
Trapped in the safe but stultifying rural existence of Jemapoh, a young man embarks on a road journey to Manchester in search for a missing father and some harmless danger, and ultimately, discovers himself. With him from the village is a football-fan friend; along the way they meet a guy and a girl and share the ride. This directorial debut is a promising innovation in Malaysian moviemaking: the plot is as atypical as a local film gets, and the political jab in an early scene deserves mention for uncommon bravery. But Hishamuddin Rais lets his directorial intents be consciously known rather than subtly felt: the plot swerves hard to avoid conventional storytelling that it veers close to nonsense, and the political jab is such a sudden punch that it is more annoying than convincing. In one ridiculous scene, the young man discusses village life with his village friend, and suddenly philosophizes in a language more suited to a sermon than a script. The whole film feels like a patching-together of unmotivated events along a slippery storyline, but there are sweet, sentimental moments that rescue this celebration of youthful exuberance from the bits of jarring contrivance. In Malay.
The comedy has all the charms of a Happy Meal: satisfying, but easily forgettable. Fired at a French restaurant, a waiter suddenly finds himself working in a roti canai stall. His overnasalized, almost mocking French air proves marketable; soon they attract more customers than flies. The stall has its problem: a rival snatches its staffs and later its patrons, and the movie will soon revolve around the mild hooliganisms between competing incompetents. Director Aziz M Osman packed his comedy with an eclectic array of jokes, hoping any would stick—slapsticks, innuendos, puns, parodies—but expect no wits or insights: this is a movie directed to the gang's fan base; children, that is. There is something that could have been a self-conscious metacomedic wink that finally comes out as a repulsive shameless promotion. In a particularly amusing auterial slip, a couple of token Indian and Chinese characters wistfully appreciate their good fortunes in an obvious message of national unity, but we later find them being the buyers of the Malay owners' land; a rather unconscious sentiment, perhaps? But the movie's appeal ultimately derives from its cutish innocence and our realization that the even the bad guys are actually good—and funny—at heart.
A prince and a princess, a sidekick with bad breath, and a failure of a script. This film flops about in uncertainty, and the actors carry the show like it is something they have to do. Yusri of KRU, who seems to sport a perpetually hesitant grin, looks away from the camera as if to assure us that the film is strictly a business venture. The script projects the characters as royalties with no regal elegance: they talk like badly-dressed robots made vulgar by protocol. The music is often overbearing; if the audience forgets to laugh at a supposed comic relief, count on a pounding of the piano or a bleating trumpet to remind them.
Twelve adolescent brats go deep into the jungle looking for assigned trouble and manage to wreak havoc on unsuspecting audience. Or perhaps, deserving audience who should have known better; the movie poster sports the name of the director, the ever incomparable Razak Mohaideen, with his academic credential proudly emblazoned. The movie is obviously not high-art, but it is not craft, either. It is clear that the actors are badly-paid students from the professor’s lecture; there are so many of them that he can murder them in protracted sequences. It is, he said, to give the students the chance to act—he is half right. The soundtrack is a disturbing cacophony of pop music and what the good professor mistakenly conceives as pop music; and to add to the auditory torture a certain girl will scream the name of a purported hero again and again, and again. The only suspense in this movie is the anxious wait we suffer as we earnestly pray that the tardy vampire will strangle her.
Razak Mohaideen’s celebration of collegial love plays like an orgy where the frat-boy host masturbates and the guests merely swallow (their own saliva, that is). In this case, the selfish host is Razak himself: the professor is so fascinated with the hormonal quirks of campus love, so caught-up in student politics and student banal talks, that his college movie forgets the very basics of freshman-level moviemaking. The obvious word for it is “sophomoric.” Razak seems intent to bond with the seniors and dismiss the faculty and juniors—he wants to be the cool professor—but he comes across as the clueless pretender—the one who says “All right, guuuys” and “That’s a wrap” and other film-prof hipspeaks. (Someone tell the professor that college hazing doesn’t usually end up with the juniors uncontrollably dancing to music.) The movie’s few winks are of the crudest kind; it’s garish and desperately recycled, like the batting of Azza’s heavily mascaraed lashes. Erra Fazira should be kept a few yards away from the dubbing microphone because she must shout when she’s supposed to pretend to whimper. Yusri is awkward and fake, and he, like his brother Edry does to clothing in an accidental venture into boudoir filmmaking, gets ready to shed the few remaining layers of dignity. When his character is hit by a car earlier in the movie, we almost wish him something. The director’s understanding of sidekicks is amusingly literal; he grabs them in when the romance sags and kicks them aside when the comedy stinks. Of course, at some point, the boy sidekick will dispense unexpected insight to the hero; the girl sidekick will comfort the heroine, but these moments of humanity are few and far between among the stretches of humiliating pratfalls. Oh yes, the synopsis: it’s the same old story of the tomboy-ish girl who has a crush on the player-ish boy, the same old story of clashing types and unlikely love—with new, unplumbed lows.
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.
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.
An honest and hardworking father (Khalid Salleh) dispenses worldly wisdom to his son (Ngasrizal Ngasri), teaches him to recite the Koran, and takes him as trusted accomplice in the man’s barn-burning missions. Outcast from one unfriendly village, the family soon moves to another, where the father finds work until a perceived injury to dignity compels him to administer his unique brand of justice—as long as the adoring son remains loyal accomplice. Long himself the proud outcast of the Malay mainstream cinema, U-Wei Haji Shaari has turned his directorial attention from the empty feminist sloganeering of his previous works to an authentic study of masculine grief and filial piety; this movie is his most mature and affecting; it’s a proud, lean masterpiece. U-Wei adapted the script from a short story of William Faulkner, but took Faulkner’s post-Civil War white sharecropper and made him a modern-day Javanese laborer, losing neither the grease nor the grit of the written narrative. The gamelan piece and the man’s soulful singing reach high into the pitch-blackened sky; they merge into a rueful requiem to anguished pride, a piercing howl of grief. Khalid Salleh’s portrayal of the man the world refuses to understand is simultaneously understated and moving; he dignifies defeat. The camera studiously massages the father’s clouded face, searching for the spontaneous immediacies of reactions, gestures, glances, but he coldly reveals none: the reactions are protracted and studied, the gestures expressionless and restrained, the glances leery and timid. But like the fire ravaging the barns, the smoldered, seething rage finally explodes with violent menace. In Malay.