Review of Chants of Lotus (2007) by Nining A — 09 Mar 2009

Awesome movie I just saw. I had never seen an Indonesian film before this and I didn't know what to expect. It's actually four short films that are thematically connected. The stories are powerful and quite depressing...like "Requiem for a Dream" depressing. Each story focuses on a single woman, her experience of being a woman in Indonesia, and how that affects and is affected by her society. More specifically, the stories relate to sex in some horrific way.

Also, if a character in the films is a man, he probably deserves to be painfully killed for being a rotten bastard. There's only one male character who's actually a decent guy (not counting unimportant random doctors). I don't think the movies were trying to say that men are all scum, but rather that all too often women have to deal with men who are. And it's not like all the female supporting characters are likable people either. Still, when the movie ended, I definitely had this feeling of "Damn, men suck." I think that's largely because I watched four different stories in a row in which most men treated women like crap. I don't think I would've felt the same if I had watched them one at a time.

The back-to-back organization also accentuates the feeling of the women being stuck, with no clear path to escape their situations. I'm guessing the directors actually wanted this. At the end of each story, we leave a woman protagonist in one bad end just to find another hopeless scenario in the next story.