What Perempuan Tanah Jahanam and Leatherface Did to Us

What Perempuan Tanah Jahanam and Leatherface Did to Us

Written by Kurnia Cahya Putra

Love him or hate him, Joko Anwar is one of the people who gave Indonesia some sort of legitimacy when it comes to the international film industry. His movies fall in that perfect balance where they're--dare I say--"Western-ish" (whatever that means) enough for Indonesian moviegoers to love (as we tend to see "Hollywood" as the gold standard of movie making) but also foreign enough for the international audience to pique their interest. This preamble might be a bit too much for me to say that his latest outing Perempuan Tanah Jahanam (Impetigore overseas, I think) shows his decline when it comes to story-telling. The point is, I just wanted to say that Impetigore is not his best work, but internet is a crazy place, and he has a very vocal fan base which is why I feel the need to say, yes, I know what he's done for our film industry; yes, he's obviously talented; and yes, for what it's worth, I quite enjoyed Impetigore, so, this--my opinion--is not some sort of an attack or something with a malice forethought. Quite the opposite, as people acknowledged his role in our industry and put him as the Mecca of what one should do when making a movie, this article is borne out of love. I guess.

Impetigore tells the story of two best friends Maya (Anwar's muse, Tara Basro) and Dini (Marissa Anita, previously seen in Anwar's Gundala) who take a trip to Maya's hometown as they discover that she may have had some money there that can help them rebuild their life in Jakarta. Anwar jump-started the movie with quite an intense and somewhat very eye-pleasing opening scene where the uniform-clad Basro is running away from a mysterious man with a machete at the toll gate. From then on, the audience knows that something is amiss, that our protagonist is not safe, and that going home may not be the best idea. Harjosari, the aforementioned hometown, is a strange village, deep in the forest with no easy access or any children in sight (despite what Maya sees oftentimes there). Anwar built the foreboding atmosphere through incredible production design and musical score, utilizing some long shots that make one look at the corner and then sometimes, zooming in to a spot where you expect to see a monster or something alike but never actually gave it up--I guess to give us the feeling of uneasiness without retorting to cheap jump scares (they are very few and far in between).

When it comes to its technical aspect (and to some extent, the cast), Impetigore excells--and it's easy to see why as of right now, Anwar is probably one of the lucky few who has the easiest access to any resources he needs in this country to make his movie. Therefore, it is quite a shame that for a movie 10 years in the making, it crumbles in a place where you don't want it to be: the foundation. One of the things that Anwar likes to do best is building mysteries and then resolving them in one quick swoop. He has had successes with this form of narrative, most notably in Dead Time, The Forbidden Door, and The Ritual. This time, however, it bit him in the ass. Impetigore, like Dead Time and Gundala before it, has a lore--an interesting one, I might add. However, Anwar made it unnecessarily convoluted. Well, I guess not unnecessarily if one knows what this movie is actually trying to be. The problem is, I don't, and I don't think it's a problem only I possess.

You see, when one is trying to determine whether something has succeeded or not, one must know first of what it's trying to accomplish. No movie is ever going to flat out tell you what it wants to be, but when you watch something, you will always have that gut feeling of what it's about, even the so-called art house movies, right? And, you follow the movie, you follow the journey of watching it to arrive at that goal that it set because otherwise, what's the point? Yes, none of us will ever definitively know what Anwar wants Impetigore to be about except Anwar himself. But, isn't there a saying that once you put your art out there, it no longer belongs to you, but the public? In short, what I'm saying is that we could make our best guess of what Impetigore wants to be, and that's fair.

All right, when we try to put something inside of a box, we first must know what box it can be put in. I mean, that's why people often say things like, "It's Indonesia's (insert famous Hollywood movie here)," when they try to define a movie. Case in point, many people have said that Impetigore is Indonesia's Midsommar or The Wailing. Comparison is just about the easiest way for us to judge something. There are many types of horror movies. There are hundreds of sub genres out there from "slasher" to something weirdly specific like... "men-hunting incubus" or "Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls". I feel, for some reason, and this is very much arguable, that the kind of effects that Impetigore wants its audience to feel is similar to what people also feel when they watch Tobe Hooper's 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

I couldn't help but notice a lot of similarities, and feel free to tell me that it's a stretch. This, after all, is still an opinion purely formed by the uninformed knowledge of my puny little brain. In Texas, Sally Hardesty and a group of friends is coming back to her hometown just like Maya and Dini do, except instead of money, they are looking to investigate the vandalism and grave-robbing that was happening to her family's grave. Sally and the gang stumble upon Sally's childhood home and spend some time there, Maya and Dini stumble upon Maya's childhood home and spend some time there. Sally is eventually trapped by the secluded cannibalistic family hell-bent on killing her, Maya is eventually trapped by the secluded villagers hell-bent on killing her. These similarities come from something more fundamental rather than trivial, which is why I feel that Impetigore wants to accomplish what Texas has accomplished. I couldn't help but be reminded of the sequence where Sally is running away from Leatherface with his chainsaw when I saw Maya running away from the villagers with their torch. And of course, there's that famous last shot of Texas that Anwar gleefully paid homage to, with Maya hitchhiking the back of a pick-up truck and laughing maniacally as she survives the horrifying ordeal--and also the fact that skin is a big theme in both movies.

When one compares Impetigore with Texas, it's easy to see where Impetigore fails in. Texas is a very simple, straight-forward movie, focusing more on the increasing dread through its absurd but realistic terror that never lets up. It's a nightmare all the way through, which is why it is extremely effective. Impetigore actually emulates Texas' mood quite successfully in the first quarter, but then it has another thing, lots of other thing that it wants to shine its light on. I'm not saying that you can't have the effect that Texas has with an abundance of backstory and mythology, I'm saying you just gotta know how to present it. Withholding information is one of the ways to build intrigue and dread, yes, but releasing it is also something that you gotta do eventually, and it is as important as that practice of withholding. Anwar's way to do that is nothing short of uninspired, and he did it twice. First, by having a single character exposite a whole backstory to our protagonist and second, by having our protagonist supernaturally flashback-ing to what actually happened in the first backstory.

Look, let me just try to tell you what happened in the movie, and you tell me if it's convoluted. Just like KKN di Desa Penari back then, this story has two versions, the myth one told by Asmara Abigail's Ratih and the actual truth told by the aforementioned supernatural flashback. So, Maya is actually Rahayu, the daughter of the richest family in the village. Her father is a very famous dalang, and her mother is the singer that he worked and fell in love with. For years, they had been trying to have a child with no luck until one day, her mother actually got pregnant with her. When Maya was born, rumor has it that she had no skin and that's why the villagers never got to see her for the first five years. When she eventually went out of her house, skin intact and everything, three other girls from her village went missing, drawing suspicion that her father practiced black magic to them to help Maya's condition. Furthermore, he also went mad and slaughtered his entire team of performers. After this, the entire village is cursed. Every baby after will be born without skin and only by killing the first baby who had this curse, Maya, will the curse be stopped.

The second version, which Maya retains from the ghost of the three children that her father killed, reveals that Ki Saptadi (Ario Bayu), the head of the village who used to work for her family, actually slept with her mother and is her true father. Ki Saptadi's mother, Nyi Misni (incredibly portrayed by Christine Hakim) is upset for reasons unknown thus far in the story and made Ki Saptadi forget the whole affair. She also tried to kill Maya, her granddaughter, when she was still in her mother's womb, but she failed, and that's why Maya was born with no skin. Look, to be quite honest, I had already forgotten some of the things during this whole explanation because like I said, it is just too convoluted for my stupid brain, but we also did find out that Ki Saptadi eventually knew that Maya's father killed those three missing children, so he killed him and was actually the one who slaughtered his entire team of performers, including Maya's mother as some sort of... revenge? I think? During this whole spiel, the ghost of the three children also tell Maya the way to beat the village's curse just like that. And after that, there are a lot of other stuff, too, including Nyi Misni's reasons for why she hates Maya so much and why she did what she did.

These two backstories and their presentations are what bothered me and, I'm pretty sure, other people the most. The thing is, if what I assume is correct and that Impetigore wants to recreate the same effect that Texas has created, it does not need to be this complicated. And, if I'm wrong, and I most likely am, and that this movie is another type of movie with another goal--I mean, of course it is more than Texas, maybe Anwar is trying to make a point by having this story, maybe he's trying to say that everything starts with family, that the one that hurts us most is our family, and some other stuff, too. Well, IF SO, even so, the way he constructed the plot is still, in my opinion, very messy and dare I say, quite lazy. I really want to watch it again to dig deeper into it, to truly break down the "essence" of this movie--as pretentious as that sounds, and if I'm lucky, maybe I'll find out why he presented Impetigore the way he did, but truth to be told, there's a little fear that I am going to get frustrated again.

Look, I obviously don't know movies better than Joko Anwar or any other critics out there, but I can't help but think that you will say, "Then, how would you do it, you smart-ass?" I don't really know. Maybe instead of having the information dumped on our protagonist, maybe Anwar can have her actively find those information out herself a la Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs or Rachel Keller in The Ring, or maybe he could reconstruct the whole thing from scratch, eliminating parts of the plot that aren't necessary without losing what he's trying to say? I don't know. I am, after all, just an average moviegoer who isn't smarter than your average Joe. What I am or was is a fan of Joko Anwar, and I truly care about this and all of his other movies, and I want it, and in turns, our collective film industry that puts him as our compass to be better as well.