One of the most commercially successful Indonesian directors of his generation, Harung Bramatyo arrives at the International Film Festival Rotterdam with something that’s epic in every sense. Spanning five decades and featuring virginal romance, malicious love spells, deadly shoot-outs and inter-clan powerplays, Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra is a lushly mounted period drama of the old-school, big-screen variety.
Loud and lucid on nearly all counts (though despite its title, its depiction of sex takes the subtle route), the film is destined to generate commercial acclaim and awards for Harung in Indonesia. Its bow at Rotterdam, meanwhile, will expose international festival audiences to an aspect of Indonesian cinema that might be new to them.
Throughout his career, Harung has been a magnet for controversy. Progressives have lamented the normative religious messages in some of his films, while Muslim clerics have condemned his advocacy of religious pluralism in others. He even once crossed swords with the daughter of Indonesia’s “founding father” Sukarno over a biopic of the statesman. On face value, Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra seems certain to rub Harung’s conservative detractors the wrong way. But the film is perhaps one of the director’s most accommodating blockbusters in recent years.
That’s not exactly a bad thing: given his protagonist’s profession as someone tasked to initiate virginal bridegrooms-to-be into the world of carnal pleasures, Harung could have done worse by playing up the sexual titillation to the point of exploitation. Tasteful to a tee, the film’s main sensation lies mostly in the visuals. Bolstered by Satria Kurniato’s camerawork and Edy Wibowo’s opulent production design, Gowok is a beautiful and brilliant spectacle.
Led by Raihanuun’s nuanced turn as a spurned lover seeking revenge on her prodigal paramour, the cast evokes the joys and pains of their entangled relationships to wrenching and teary effect. While the film may be too mainstream to emerge as the winner of the Big Screen Competition at Rotterdam, Harung is certainly onto a winner at home.
After a prologue anchored by a gruesome crime of passion, the story proper begins in 1950 with the arrival of Karmajaya (Devano Danendra) in a small town on the island of Java. An idealistic young man aspiring to help establish a new world in a freshly independent Indonesia, he scoffs at his parents’ constant nagging about marriage and their plans to make him a “bigger man” by learning all about sex from Santi (Lola Amaria).
Karmajaya’s scepticism dissipates when he meets Santi’s young disciple Ratri (Alika Jantinia). Falling heads over heels in love, the young man soon puts what he learnt into practice, in slow-motion scenes of love-making with stirring music rising to a crescendo, and the couple pledges themselves to each other. Their union is also an epiphany for Ratri. Encouraged by her learned lover, the young woman goes to town and joins a left-leaning organization set up to enhance literacy among women and help further their possibilities in life.
Ratri’s new life is shattered when she hears of Karmajaya’s betrothal to a princess. (A handful of royal families were allowed to keep their titles despite the establishment of a republican Indonesia in 1945). The distraught Ratri abandons her plans of a new life and dives headlong into her work of sexual initiation as a “Gowok”. This path will have tragic consequences as the story skips forward another 15 years, when the adult, aristocratic Karmajaya (Reza Rahadian) discovers his own son is to undergo intimacy-learning rituals with his former lover (now played by Raihaanun). Multiple reveals of unspeakable trysts and long-suppressed grievances eventually lead to a final half-hour of supernatural happenings and mortal bloodshed, with the sole survivor eventually returning to keep the story alive in an epilogue set in 1985.
Harung has chosen two specific years of social turmoil as the backdrops for the two main sections of his story. In 1950, various women’s rights collectives – including Rupindo (“Association of Young Women in Indonesia”), which the young Ratri volunteers for in the film – merged to become Gerwis (“Conscious Wives Movement”). Then in 1965, the freshly minted military regime unleashed a murderous crackdown on progressive political activists across the country – something the film also briefly alludes to – and the budding women’s rights movement ground to a halt.
While Harung and his co-screenwriter Aci should be credited for bringing the legacy of the budding Indonesian women’s rights movement to view, it’s too much of a stretch to interpret the film as a political allegory. Those who want to draw parallels between the sex-initiation rituals, which call for a woman to swear off marriage and sacrifice her own emotional well-being to make young men whole, and the history of female emancipation in Indonesian society, will probably be disappointed. Then again, Gowok does what it says on the package, as it shapes up to be an explosive exhibition of tainted love and its discontents.
Director: Hanung Bramatyo
Screenwriters: Aci, Hanung Bramatyo
Producers: Raam Punjabi
Executive producers: Jimmy Lalwani, Anita Whora
Cast: Raihanuun, Alika Jantinia, Devano Danendra, Reza Rahadian, Lola Amaria
Director of photography: Satria Kurnianto
Editor: Haris F Syah
Production designer: Edy Wibowo
Costume designer: Hagai Pakan
Music composer: Krisna Purna
Sound designer: Hadrianus Eko
Production companies: MVP Pictures, Dapur Films
World Sales: PT Triper Multivision Plus Tbk
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Big Screen Competition)
In Indonesian
130 minutes
