Gubra

Nov 29, 2009 21:17


Following how much I loved Sepet the night before, I decided to come for the screening of Gubra, which I had not intended before watching Sepet, but the latter left me inextricably hooked.  Now I want to get the DVDs of the Orked Trilogy, and I was recommended Talentime as well.

Like Sepet did, the moment the film started, it started to tell its message.  I'm referring of course to the scene where the caller of the azaan walks to the mosque in the pre-dawn darkness, and along the way, speaks kindly to a stray dog, even patting its head.  The message is simple: before you start criticising others or making demands because of your religion, make sure you know your religion well enough first.  Remember the hooha a few years back when this Malay woman wrote to the ST Forum to demand that dogs be banned from taxis, and similar letters appeared calling for bans of dogs from places like McDonald's and the like?  A lot of Muslims believed wholeheartedly that they were not allowed to touch dogs, whereas the correct teaching is merely that if it so happens that a dog's saliva touches you, you need to wash wherever was touched by it.  As the scene was acted out, I noticed very carefully what the muezzin did: he patted the dog on the head, stroked it a bit on the back, but he never touched anywhere near the dog's nose.  After the dog moved off, the muezzin continued walking on to the mosque, as though nothing had happened.

Other little semi-hidden references included the scene where Alan and Orked are in the pick-up, and she said one thing she loved about Malaysia was the fact that you could switch on the radio, and have a multitude of languages readily available.  Then one of them said something about how they could never imagine living in a place where everybody could only speak the same language.  I saw this as a tongue-in-cheek indictment of Singapore, of how Singaporeans seem to be losing their ability to speak any dialect other than Mandarin, and in doing so, lose a lot of their colour, culture and heritage in the process.  If you notice, the dominant Chinese dialect used in Sepet and Gubra is Cantonese.  Yet when Alan switched on the radio, it played a Mandarin channel.

Unfortunately, the use of mood music in Gubra, although good, was not as breathtaking as the Song To The Moon in Sepet (the music used here being the Adagio un poco mosso from Beethoven's Emperor Concerto).

One scene I particularly liked was when Orked discovered what her husband was really up to, and as she went to confront the other woman, Alan and Arif both looked at her walking off.  I really liked the juxtaposition of the current husband who betrayed her and the brother of the former boyfriend, her only link to the man who loved her more than himself, and who broke her heart because he was taken from her even though he promised he would never leave.

A scene which made me, and the whole audience in particular, laugh out loud was when Alan was explaining that he was divorced from his Singaporean wife and musing that she never thought he was good enough for her, ending off with "serves me right for marrying a Singaporean".  I don't know what the rest of the crowd were laughing at, but I was laughing not because I felt that it was funny how he felt that, yes, he would never be good enough for a Singaporean girl, but because it's a reflection of how many Singaporean women these days tend to aim so high and think so highly of themselves that most men would never be good enough.



A particularly poignant scene I felt was the ending, which juxtaposed Kiah and Mas at prayers together contrapuntally with scenes of Alan and his daughter at prayers in a church.  This helped to hammer home Yasmin's pet message in case you have not been thinking too much during the film: that despite our differences in practices, in faiths, in customs, beneath it all, we are all the same.  During that scene, Kiah was seen breaking into tears and being comforted by Mas.  Was it because of what happened in her room?  Or was it because Temah had died?  It was never really explained.

Speaking of unexplained loose ends, Yasmin never really explained why is it that the post-credit scene showed Orked snuggling up to Jason and both were wearing wedding rings; this brought comparisons with the end of Sepet, where Orked is seen finally telling Jason she loved him even though he lay dead on the ground with his phone ringing.  I thought quite hard about it and came up with a couple of plausible explanations of what Yasmin was trying to say.

One of the comments I received about this not just open-ended but even wide-open puzzle ending was that Yasmin couldn't make up her mind about what ending she wanted and so she gave this ambiguous ending.  But if you think a bit more about the ending moments of the film, you'll notice that Yasmin knew perfectly well what she wanted to say.  Take the scene where Kiah surprises Mas at her home, what was that thing that Kiah had to do back home?  What was she saving the money for?  And later, what happened between Temah's former boyfriend and Kiah behind the closed door?  Why did Yasmin time this event to occur at the same time as the morning azaan, which calls out "God is the greatest"?

All these things are not something that Yasmin couldn't make up her mind on what she wanted: she deliberately inserted these couple of minutes into the film and if they had been removed, it would not have affected the flow of the film.  In fact, inserting these two scenes created more questions than closure, and that is exactly what Yasmin sought to do: to throw us open questions to which we have to figure out her answers on our own.

Yasmin has always sought to compel her audiences to think for themselves, instead of blindly accepting what has been spoon-fed to them.  This is a common trait in her films, so in the same vein, it is only natural that she will make you think for yourself to decode and discern her message.  And it is always in the smallest details, or even removed entirely from the process of image and sound.  If you don't think about what you didn't see or didn't hear, you will never get it.

A good example of this is the short film that she did for 15Malaysia.  It may only be 2 minutes long, but the wealth and intensity of the scene fills much more than that.  Nevertheless, comments from some people were that it was "boring" and "no action".  They just didn't bother to see beyond the image and listen to that message that the pregnant moment of silence was saying:

image Click to view



If you can see only what light reveals
and hear only what sound announces,
Then in truth you do not see nor do you
hear.

The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you,
but in what he cannot reveal to you.
Therefore, if you would understand him,
listen not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.

- Kahlil Gibran -
Sand and Foam
§ Quod vide:
Straits Times review of Gubra, from Yasmin's blog

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