A Toast to the Adverts
by Caleb Chandra
We were sold a lie by Yasmin Ahmad. The late Malaysian filmmaker’s works include sappy interracial and interreligious love stories such as Sepet (2004) with the appropriate melancholic ending, a quintessentially Malaysian film called Gubra (2006), which escalates the story of Sepet into the realm of soap operas, with its love/religion/race issues constantly disrupting an unspoken national fear of integration. Yasmin, God forbid, made Malaysians dream. Dream of the possibility of peace among ethnicities, of laughter that cuts across religion, of love that transcends tradition. She made us all Orked and Jason (the protagonists of these films), desperate to love someone who cannot love you back. A nation so steeped in divisions that the mere mention of love between the “haves” and the “nons” conjures cries of haram!
And we would have forgiven her if she had stuck to these arthouse films those young-uns spend their time on, with their heads in the clouds dreaming of a future so vastly different from those in power that they can only express their verbiage in a foreign tongue. If only she had refrained from making us believe, a nation that stopped during those three minutes and 20 seconds of an advert to dream of a better tomorrow.
Yasmin’s career as a filmmaker has slowly faded from national consciousness, at least judging from the five friends I have who know anything about her. But her work for the national petroleum conglomerate, Petronas, remains the standard for all subsequent commercials in Malaysia. Just ask my parents, who lament that the new Petronas commercials lack warmth compared to Yasmin’s Tan Hong Ming, in which a young primary school-aged Chinese boy shares his crush on a Malay girl.
On camera. In English. Shown during the Merdeka 2008 period. Unscripted.
Yasmin made us believe that love can be color blind despite mounting racially charged rhetoric from various groups in the country. For one minute and 31 seconds, we watched on national TV an advertisement that explored questions of race through the unscripted actualities of childlike infatuation. Tan Hong Min was so influential as a Petronas advertisement that ten years later, many in the country clamored for updates about their favorite child couple, which culminated in a light-hearted interview with the two “stars” of the advert in a national newspaper.
Yasmin sold us the idea of Malaysianness. Of a country filled with multiracial (don’t forget the “lain-lain[s]”), multi-religious (“four places of worship on one street? Can lah.”), multifaceted (love, hate, empathy, apathy), multi-conglomerate (“Genting, Setia, Sunway, the list goes on”), and multi-everything (food, football teams, car choices). Through all these vexing differences that seem incredibly alien, she made us believe that our homeland made us, us. Not just kamu and saya (you and me), not just hitam or putih (black or white), but all within the blessed land kita, an inclusive us that transcends all extremes. She sold us the idea that these interactions could and should happen, and have already happened, in our daily lives. And every year, when the major festivals draw near, millions of Malaysians watch her heart-wrenching commercials that celebrate the common Malaysians who band together. Yasmin has managed to blend the commercial requirements of a Petronas advert with a touch of gentle humanity. In Yasmin’s advertisement world, Malaysians live joyously with one another regardless of our differences.
When Yasmin passed, many mourned her because of her role in these advertisements. These vignettes that some may view as token gestures to smooth over race relations were nevertheless consumed wholesale by the masses. We wanted to believe. We believed and are still believing. Yasmin sold us a lie, that life could be like it was depicted in an advert. And we were fools for having consumed it hook, line, and sinker and then jumping onto the boat asking the fisherman for more. We wanted more adverts, more stories, more heartfelt dream worlds promised by our Pendidikan Moral (Moral Studies) and history lessons, brought to life through the moving image. Yasmin’s work is the word becoming celluloid flesh.
It’s been ten years since that fateful July 25 at KPJ Damansara when Yasmin passed away. Ten years since we’ve drunk from Yasmin’s cup of dreams. Ten years on, and maybe nostalgia is but deep pain savored like fine wine—bitter to the amateur, brilliant for the auteur.
A toast to the adverts, and to Yasmin Ahmad.
Caleb Chandra is a recent master’s graduate of the NUS Literary Studies Programme, Singapore. He specializes in Malaysian indie films and has researched notions of the body in Japanese animation vis-à-vis Hollywood remakes.