Daily Archives: 10/08/2005

if cornelia agatha is snubbed at the festival film indonesia (ffi) for best actress category, i should question the ability of the event’s juries in determining good acting quality.

surely she does act and not to the extent of inhabiting the role yet, at least she has not reached the level of being her “regi” character by still maintaining her shampoo-advertisement hair while playing a highly drug-addicted junkie, but at the scope of acting as junkie, cornelia agatha does give a convincing portrayal in such a controlled manner that we are taken to believe the emotional availability she has as an actress in delivering the assigned duty very well. it is not much then that during her appearance in one of late-nite talk shows where she promoted her film, the host praised her by stating, “this is one of the closest portrayals of a junkie ever portrayed on a big screen.”
i can’t agree more, although it might be nicer if only the director would dwell more on scenes where she desperately longs for her drugs and convinces her dealer to forge the expenses. if only the director would like to spend some time watching leonardo di caprio in basketball diaries, then the same chilling effect can be reached through cornelia’s embodiment to her character.

luckily, cornelia gets an equally good companion who manages to bring out their own best in every scene done together. playing in a more subtle manner, sausan excels in otherwise limited range of acting ability, yet the nature of her character allows her to show minimum effort to maximum result, and giving us no other option but to emphatize with her role here. i guess a nod for supporting actress will not be too much to give as a token of recognition.

however, the praises might stop at this point since cornelia and sausan are the only two elements in making this depressive film bearable and worth watching. i can’t help but having a strong suspicion that they take their own initiative to act well for their own sake, without any necessary guidance from the director who might be busy arranging other elements to be put up nicely on the big screen, to some disappointing result. this might be repetitive, but a stereotype of how one gets involved in a hell-ride of drug taking is too often to be presented, and i was surprised to see this still comes out eventhough the writer of the novel in which the film is based on is invited on board to pen the script. either that, or the limited duration time hinders a deeper character development that would do good this film.

other than that, i am not going to comment on how i wish to see more of shanty in her relaxed presence here, or how i long for more lenient censor cut that abruptly butchers some of cornelia’s scenes, but the bottomline remains to the fact that you might see this film to see a good school of acting, and set aside trivial errors as usually appear in any indonesian films.

once in a while, comes a film worth every single piece of bad comment on the film’s lack of good quality. the redundancy you may notice on the previous sentence is intended to create similar effect to the film.

if they think that indonesian film audience still has not gotten enough dose of brainless teen-flick, think again. the situation has reached the effect of feeding-the-beast, in which the audience soon need to be rushed for treatment of OD-ed by flood of nihilistic love story, whereas producers soon have to endure circle effect of being forced to start all over again in creating a new trend.

nevermind the story, you’ve read or seen it dozens of times before. in fact, spoilers are highly needed to decipher many unbalanced shots not supposedly presented on a big screen as they fit much better on a small screen. what we need to know is why the film seems to lack of direction.

a good director will not have scenes like a girl playing basketball in between three cars circling her moves, or a zoom-in to a packet of tissue, or some 30-second half-lit room where the character utters one single unimportant word.

a good director will think of more coherent logic to make a proper ending. modern literary audience who has consumed contemporary works of arts will not be satisfied with deus-ex-machina concept as it will only show the director’s lack of vision and rushing to finish the story as soon as possible.
(if i see rudy soedjarwo laughing about the latter, i can only pity him since ‘tentang dia’ suffers from the same problem.)

now it is time for indonesian film producers to consider which films they need to show to the press, and which ones are not. after all, how do you expect to comment on this response from one of the reporters upon watching this film:

“oh, the film is awfully fun, i had a good time. seriously! you’d no idea how fun it could be to find many, and i mean many, scenes to bash throughout the entire film!”

it happened.