nwasianweekly.com
Mar. 29, 2008

By N. P. Thompson
Northwest Asian Weekly

The Indonesian “Opera Jawa” begins with the most quotable subtitle of any foreign film in many a moon: “In a pig’s liver, one can see an entire life.” The overweight troubadour who sings this line continues: “You can read anyone’s fate in it.” By his side, as if to demonstrate a liver’s reliability as an indicator of futures, a smiling trio lovingly admires a quivering organ. The beaming expressions on the faces of a husband, wife, and village elder suggest that they have a defective liver on their hands; for here, as in most operas, things are going to turn out badly. And despite writer-director Garin Nugroho’s surrealist bent, the opera he creates has more in common with the folk tragedy of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” than with the splashiness of a Bollywood musical.
 
The movie draws inspiration from “The Abduction of Sinta,” the third canto in the Hindu poet Valmiki’s ancient epic “The Ramayana,” an allegorical work that has roughly the same significance for Southeast Asia as “The Iliad” has for the West. A screen title informs us that “The Abduction of Sinta” has often been dramatized in Javanese dance and puppet theatre, something to remember when taking in the ritualistic choreography of “Opera Jawa,” wherein the leading lady can be seriously menaced by a “dragon” that’s all too obviously a train of persons hiding underneath bed linens.
 
In one of the film’s most entrancing sequences, Nugroho pays direct homage to the story’s puppet theatre lineage. The limpid beauty Artika Sari Devi, a former Miss Universe contestant, plays Siti, who, we’re told, once danced the role of Sinta, prior to abandoning her art out of “respect for her husband.” She finds a series of white candles on the ground outside her house and, venturing into the night, spies row after row of identical white flames – adorning a courtyard and floating on the surface of a cement pool. As the low, metallic overtones of a gently percussive gamelan strike the soundtrack, we discover Ludiro, the man who desires Siti, crouching among the candles, planting them as if to lure her. In a stunning shot, her silhouette passes across a white wall, with his figure, likewise in shadow, trailing behind. Unbeknownst to them, a third outline appears: an ape-like creature whose menacing gestures are in sinister, gyrating contrast to the nearly still background of bare branches and watery ripples from light on the pool.
 
Nugroho revels in visual and aural non-sequiturs. He doesn’t tell us that the longhaired Ludiro (a smashing performance by the dancer Eko Supriyanto) is a butcher; we have to intuit that from the entrance Nugroho stages for him – stepping out from the cover of a hook-dangling cattle carcass for his first big production number, in which Supriyanto maneuvers around mannequin heads, spray-painted red and gold, on plates on the floor, while singing that anyone who opposes, “My commerce or my power…Thy blood shall spill forth and drench the earth.” The well-muscled Supriyanto, who choreographed his own moves and who spends most of the film bare-chested, save for a sleeveless vest or two, later has tabletop jazz dance in a bar. Swathed in cigar smoke and accompanied by a guitar that sounds like an African kora, Supriyanto swivels his hips, extends his knees, and pivots on his ankles and toes in a style somewhat reminiscent of Bob Fosse’s early work.
 
Much of the main action here has to do with Ludiro’s romantic, at times epic, courtship of the married Siti, including the unraveling of a vast red carpet that begins in the low center of the frame and stretches into infinity across the width of the screen. Bordered by verdant tropical foliage, Siti bicycles down the red swath until the carpet dovetails into a curtain. At the edge of this threshold, the luminous Devi wanders into a garden of fuchsia, orange and red flowers as tall as her waist. She seems to have entered a kind of wonderland. (Though perhaps she’s always in one.)
 
Nugroho often mixes up the timeframe, so that the events unfolding in this village could occur at almost any point in history. When Ludiro corrals troops into battle, we see armies clad in everything from bells on leg warmers to Indian chief headdresses, modern military caps and red ruffled fringe – an assortment of which costume designer Samuel Watimena can be justly proud. Two or three times, a television announcer reports on civil unrest, yet these rectangular TV sets broadcast no images – the screens being crusted over by a coating of sand and dried mud.
  
Rahayu Supanggah’s gamelan score beguilingly carries the movie through a range of moods, and cinematographer Teoh Gay Hian does brilliantly textured wide-angle work, perhaps never more so than in an on-the-beach finale where the caresses of a man and woman are photographed through a fluttering veil of windswept yellow gauze.