Where is the Love?

or Why Puteri Gunung Ledang Did Not Get an Oscar Nomination *snicker-grrlplease-rollseyes*

Where to begin lah?

Puteri Gunung Ledang is a beautiful movie. Beautiful colors, beautiful scenery, (mostly) beautiful people, beautiful shots. It seems to me, the only thing Malaysian cinema has going for itself at the mo' is its cinematography. We got some pretty good DPs out there. But that's where it stops. Everything else leaves much to be desired.

The movie tries to be authentic in its language and use of the bangsawan speak. Basically, it's speaking in verse, like Shakespeare's plays. It's all beautiful and lyrical when you read it on a page, but conveying its meaning and trying to make it sound like you speak like this everyday even when asking for the chamber-pot is quite another matter. Not many actors can pull it off. It's all in your inflections and tone, your pauses, your facial expressions even. How else can "forsooth!" make sense in everyday speech? Get it right, it will seem to the audience the most natural interjection in the world. Get it wrong, the audience will realize this person is just acting.

And when the audience is thinking more about your acting than what is actually going on on the screen, when their suspension of disbelief is interrupted, the movie has already failed.

And this is where PGL failed, to me. Everyone in the movie seem to think they're in a drama sekolah menengah. They got their costumes and their keris, and their little istana, so let's call everybody kanda and dinda and make a movie!

Everyone except Rahim Razali. Listen to the man. Listen to the way he gently chides Hang Tuah for being torn between a woman and his king. He could use the same words to reprimand his children in 2005 and it wouldn't seem out of place at all. Listening to him and seeing his face, you could see the cogs of Tun Perak's brains working, there's always something stirring underneath that stoic expression. He's not just woodenly spouting bangsawan lines. He's making it make sense.

Then there's the love story. Or what we're supposed to believe as a love story. If you want me to root for the two main characters, if you want me to sympathise with their situation, if you want me to care about what happens to them, you have to make me believe they are really in love. You have to tell me why they fell in love with each other.

Why is Gusti Puteri so important to Hang Tuah? What is she to him? Did she make him feel young again, is she the only one who sees him as someone beyond the great Malaccan warrior, did he feel life is nothing but endless repetition of abjections to the ruler, and she made him feel worth living again? Why is she worth the betrayal he is about to commit? Similarly, why is Hang Tuah important to Gusti Puteri? Is he the only one who sees that she is more than a chattel, a bargaining chip? Does he make her feel like a woman, does he make her feel safe, does he understand her desires to be more than a princess in a royal court? Why is he so important she is willing to leave her homeland for him and shack up in a remote mountain waiting for him to show up? Where is this "cinta" that is so "suci"?

I didn't get all that. All I got was a swish of flowers in a dancing ceremony. And I'm supposed to believe that's how they fall in love? A private dance lesson, a swim in the river and a couple of Salem High Country shots doesn't quite cut it, ok?

I didn't care for the two people (manly man though M.Nasir may be), therefore when the time came for Hang Tuah to do what he did, to sacrifice his standing with the Sultan, to give up everything he had, it all seemed meaningless to me. The actions did not have its proper motivations. It fell flat.

And I didn't get all the "Demak wants to attack us" thing. If they had taken the time to explain the relationship a little bit, show us a map, exposition lah sikit, whatever, I could appreciate the urgency to marry off Gusti Putri to the highest bidder. Showing Ali Setan in a serban and long beard (oh wait, is that supposed to be the universal symbol of ominous threat and terror?) and then throwing a tantrum is supposed to convince me Java is in danger?

Let's pretend I'm someone who doodled Mrs Jordan Knight all over her history textbook and completely missed the part about Sultan Mahmud (or whatever his name was) and his relationship with Java and all that. Refresh my memory, then. If it's part of the conflict, if it's integral to the plot, if it's a reason our young heroine wants to leave her country, then explain it to us. It doesn't have to be a full-scale history lecture, just a few lines to make us understand the nature and weight of the threat.

What did they do to make me realise Demak was a threat? They used the soundtrack. At the beginning of the film, when the Prime Minister was telling the Java ruler Demak was sending their envoy, the music suddenly got ominous and big gongs banged forlornly. And I suddenly felt, "Oh, am I supposed to feel nervous right now?" Dude. Not subtle at all.

It's true that a musical score can highlight the core emotions of certain scenes, sad scenes can be sadder, happy ones happier, battle scenes more terrible. But the use of the musical score in this scene was so abrupt, and the acting did not convey to me any sort of urgency whatsoever, it did not work at all. It's the equivalent of the laughter track on a bad sitcom. You just go "Oh, was that supposed to be funny?" Beware of movies with a soundtrack that tries to tell you how you're supposed to feel. Lame lame lame lame.

It's nowhere near worthy of any awards, please don't kid yourselves. The story was not strong, the acting was horrendous (Tiara, dahi berkerut 24 jam tak cukup nak dapat best actress, ok? You need more range, woman), and the set that they were so proud of, that they supposedly researched for, was disappointing. Not enough grandeur for a palace that was supposed to be in the Zaman Kegemilangan Melaka.

I suppose I'm hard on this movie because I kept hearing that it was to be the movie of Malaysian cinema. With however much money they put into it, the outcome did not reflect that. You can spend millions or just 500 bucks, if the story sucks, the movie will suck. If you don't take the time to develop your characters, there will not be any emotional investment in the audience's part, and you'd just be wasting their time and money. A good movie is not just about colorful shots, rich costumes and immaculate hairdos or even epic battle-scenes. It's a story that takes the audience in, with characters we can root for, we can identify with, regardless of the time and place the movie is supposed to be in. A story we can learn from. A story we'll remember.

Try again.