Female Trouble: Watching Three Asian Films About Women
by Alfonse Chiu
The woman stands alone, stark against the ceaseless waves crashing against the shore, the anchors of society, of family, weighing her down into the surf; against the unwavering badlands and plateaus of a home turned sour by invaders and plunderers; against a rebellion of one’s own flesh, who turns to one’s worst enemy for comfort in a time of immediate crisis. These are three women, who lead three different lives in three different films. They may not know of each other, they may never know of me, but from across the screen—across the meter’s gap between their lives, represented, lived, and mine—I know that if we shall know of each other, we will all be sisters.
The first of the lot that I watched, Eddie Cahyono’s moving character study Siti (2014), was also coincidentally the first piece of Southeast Asian arthouse cinema I have ever watched; it was 2014, and the Singapore International Film Festival had just made its triumphant re-emergence into the regional film scene after years of inactivity and internal turmoil. I was there because a kindly teacher had recommended me to apply for the Festival’s inaugural Youth Jury and Critic Program, and I did and was accepted. Following a lifetime of Hollywood, and a general knowledge of the European arthouse circuit—Cannes, Berlin, Venice, if one had been more conscientious, maybe Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, Locarno—knowing that independent Southeast Asian cinema exists was both simultaneously surprising and unsurprising: Apichatpong Weerasethakul must have come from somewhere, right?
Watching Siti was intense, not just because it was, in a sense, a breaking up of some prior notions of cinema, and also not because I have just gotten to know Sekar Sari, the Indonesian dancer and personality who played the anxious woman flitting between different masks that Siti was, personally, but because it was a somber story about woman trying to be there for her family—the wayward son, who roughhouses and is not yet cognizant of his family’s delicate state; the resigned mother-in-law, who joins Siti in shilling homemade crackers by the beach; and the sullen husband, crippled by a boating accident and powerless but still self-righteous at the perceived indignity of what Siti has to do for the family to survive.
The film was a love story—lesser people would have bailed and shacked up with the handsome policeman who has a soft spot for the cracker-seller-who-moonlights-as-a-KTV-hostess—about family, but it was also a searing inculpation for what many societies insist on foisting upon their women. Shot in soft, intimate grayscale, the taut, naturalistic angles that follow Siti are reminiscent of social documentaries and poignant reminders of just how helpless we all are, as audience, as neighbors—of the mundane struggles around us, many that we choose to ignore on a daily basis. How ironic then, is that twinge in our collective hearts when we watch Siti, exhausted beyond all means, wander out into the shallows, the ocean ready to swallow her whole.
In some sense, the enervated compliance of Siti was also a good spiritual lead up to the next of the three: Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Mouly Surya, 2017). Arguably Surya’s most stylish and tonally ambitious work to date, Marlina’s (the titular protagonist) uncompromising conviction and reaction to the violence of her violations is both enthralling for the energy it summons, a deep primal indignation that speaks to an injustice which remains festering beneath the thick skin of society, and the threat it confidently poses to the discursive hegemony that those in power cling stubbornly to. Here is a woman making a film about women who are wronged and will not stand for it; she will take off your head if you need to, because you deserve it, and you need to bear witness to justice.
Throughout the film though, we witness justice fail Marlina—here Marsha Timothy’s acrid, brittle performance is singularly outstanding—but also its failure to break her. Confronted by an old friend’s abuse from her husband and the return of a vindictive accomplice to her assailants, Marlina reaches the end of her tether, and in a stunning reversal, the inevitable, depressing, imbalanced power dynamic is supplanted, and the two women triumph. While somewhat pyrrhic perhaps, the message here is clear: one can only do so much and win. Sooner or later, it ends; and if it ends with one’s head spilling to the floor like leftovers, so be it.
The last of the three I had the fortune of watching at its world premiere—I was at Udine for the famed Campus program for young film journalists, and Dear Ex (Mag Hsu and Hsu Chih-yen, 2018) was making the very first stop of its global tour. A story of a family’s complex entanglement with the dead father’s lover, it was a dark, brutal dramedy about society and how little room it leaves for love—which also clinched the leading lady, Hsieh Ying-hsuan who plays the mother, San Lian, a Golden Horse in 2018.
How would one respond to the knowledge that one’s now deceased husband has decided to leave a significant sum of insurance money to a former lover? How would one further respond upon finding that the lover in question is in fact a man? And just to take one more for the road, how would one respond if one’s own son fled the house to shack up with said lover? For as much as San Lian went through, it is fortunate that a thread of whimsical absurdity runs through the film; if not, it would just be plain mean. Luckily for all of us, Hsieh’s powerhouse performance as a really, really desperate woman imbues the formulaic with much humanity and moxie, which keeps it firmly grounded on this side of Ellen Ripley rather than Mommie Dearest—an especially moving moment is when she moves over to clean her sworn enemy’s apartment just so that both he and her son can inhabit a less biologically hazardous space.
While performing, and assuming, identities have always been a thorny topic, it goes without saying that the fundamental issue of the subject is respect, and how the subject can maintain integrity and dignity on a very basic level even if what they do is deemed unsavory by certain arbitrary moral standards. These three characters—performed, assumed, lived—and these three films—produced, written, presented—were sincere representations that went far and beyond to show that womanhood is not merely prescriptive, but rather inexhaustibly descriptive too: you live as you live and you do as you do. Watching them on screen, their faces animated, their mouths open, I swore I could hear beneath all the exquisite sound design, the voices of all the women in the world, telling their own stories at their own pace, in their own time.
Alfonse Chiu is the creative director and editor-at-large of independent Southeast Asian film platform, SINdie, and an independent culture journalist. He is currently a Research Assistant with the National University of Singapore Department of Architecture, and his writings have appeared in publications such as Kinema: a journal for film and audiovisual media, the National Museum of Singapore’s Cinematheque Quarterly, and Hyperallergic.