by Wong Soak Koon
Aliran Monthly Vol 25 (2005): Issue 3

	One of the most interesting aspects of "Sepet" is its inversion or blurring of stereotypes. Wong Soak Koon

Once in a long while, a film by a Malaysian film director comes to our commercial theatres which leaves us saying, ‘Hey, we have to talk about it. Let’s adjourn to some teh tarik place, okay?” This was how a few friends and I felt after watching the movie "Sepet" directed by Yasmin Ahmad — only we had to go to a café as not a teh tarik stall was in sight in the vicinity of Mid-Valley Megamall. Over dressed-up glasses of tau chooi (soya bean milk) and expensive cakes we all waxed vocal (if not exactly eloquent) about many aspects of the film.

As some reviewers have put it, we agreed that there was an endearing charm to the simple story line. The use of near unknowns in the key roles of Orked and Jason a.k.a. Ah Loong added to the naturalness of the tale. But is Yasmin again using rose-tinted camera lenses and giving us yet another example of those sometimes sentimental advertorial narratives she is famous for in her television commercials? Only in traces. In her brief commercials the stereotypes of Malaysian life sometimes loom large. In fact in one or two instances, while watching her commercials, I had been driven to ejaculate “get real”.

Blurring stereotypes

A movie allows Yasmin much more time and space to deliver a more nuanced narrative. She remains primarily a story-teller but with sharp eyes for the tragi-comedy and ironies of Malaysian society. She has admitted in an interview that it is the human stories of daily life and not your analyses of the NEP, NDP or other socio-economic-political policies that motivate her to make films. Thank goodness for this (we have had films that are a jumble of postmodern images decon-structing everything all looking as if they leapt out of an academic treatise on Fellini according to Lyotard!). Nonetheless, I hope Yasmin won’t mind if, after watching her film, we do the usual job of linking human stories to issues of ethnicity, class, etc.

One of the most interesting aspects of "Sepet" is its inversion or blurring of stereotypes. Malaysians, in their daily lives, clearly traverse cultural and ethnic boundaries. We don’t live by the tight ethnic categories politicians use to box us in at certain stages of their own ambitious careers. Orked and her mother as well as the queenly house-help, Mak Yam, love to watch Chinese dramas and soap operas. One of Orked’s heroes is an actor of Japanese-Chinese parentage. In fact it is her hunt for the VCD of “Chungking Express” that destines her to meet with Loong (Jason). And Thai songs and music are shown to have a potent libidinous hold on her parents. Incidently, my friend later told me that a Malay lady sitting near her uttered tak sopan (not decent) during the scene where the parents danced to Thai music, the mother wearing a sarong tied across her breasts showing bare shoulders and arms (we rarely see this in Malay movies nowadays although spaghetti straps and other revealing western-style dressing do not bother directors or censors).

Loong’s mother is depicted as a Peranakan ie a person who comes from a heritage where Malay dress, food, language are used even if Islam is not practised. Yasmin refuses to romanticise this figure. She does not make the mother an easy bridge between Loong and Orked. When Loong prematurely and confidently tells Keong (his good friend) that surely his mother, being Peranakan, would not object to a Malay girlfriend, Keong’s brief question: “You think so?” makes us think too. Too many developments – political, economic, constitutional – have taken place between the time of legends, for example, the legend of Princess Hang Li Po (sent by the Emperor of China to marry a Malacca Sultan and therefore seen as initiating a mixed racial lineage) and the present day. Policies have defined and categorized people according to ethnicity and religion, like it or not. Narrow-minded Islamicists have not helped; neither have chauvinists from on all sides. Loong’s mother does accept Orked but not initially.

Some feel that Yasmin has glossed over the protest that Malay-Muslim parents would feel towards a non-Muslim, non-Malay VCD seller romancing their teenage daughter. The mild reluctance Orked’s father displays and the acceptance of the mother appear unreal. But would Yasmin’s critics themselves be perpetuating stereotypes by setting up the “eternal” barriers of class, ethnicity and religion? No ethnic group is homogeneous nor are any group’s borders always impenetrable. Orked’s parents are, quite simply, not your hadith-mouthing fundamentalists. There is a domestic scene where the father reminds his wife (Orked’s mother) and the house-help to do their evening prayers. Glued to the television set, absorbed in yet another Chinese soap opera, both women show reluctance. A holier-than-thou person in the cinema would be very offended by this scene but it is so refreshingly human. Haven’t we all made excuses like those used by the two women at some time in our lives? The parents are also portrayed as not class-conscious. They treat the house-help as part of the family. The director chose to present them as not the entrepreneurial, wealthy, upper-middle-class Malays of the post NEP era. Orked tells Loong that her family could not afford a piano.

A gentler approach

It is true that there is more than a trace of nostalgia in Yasmin’s making the father drive an old car (a model much outdated and not your Proton Saga or Proton Wira ); the house they live in is not the suburban terrace house many a teacher can and does buy today (on government loans?). There is, undeniably, something of the Yasmin-type romantic yearning for the past in these details. The parents seem as if they are from an era when the identity markers of race and religion do not have such an intense hold on people. Does it therefore seem as if the parents are caught in a time-warp? They appear to emerge from a time before Islamic revivalism and before the bumiputra and non-bumiputra categories divided Malays and non-Malays in so many aspects of life. But then should we conclude that, post- May 13 and post-Islamic revivalism, figures like Orked’s parents have all disappeared from Malaysian society? I should hope not.

The author, Henry James, once said that “ a writer cannot be dictated to”. This dictum may apply to artists in other media too, including film-makers. Yasmin has simply chosen more tolerant, more humane human beings as Orked’s parents – never mind if those more critical of state policies think this is a cop-out because Yasmin fears more confrontational scenes; or, if those who support the Islamic opposition feel she should have made the parents strict and pious Muslims. The tone of this film differs greatly from the tonal quality in the films by the American director, Spike Lee, where racial confrontation, state violence and manipulations are presented starkly. Those who enjoy this kind of frontal expose may find Yasmin’s film too tame. For myself, I am glad she chose a gentler approach. I also feel that it would be inaccurate to say that there is no critique of policies or the state.

Turning to the male protagonist Ah Loong’s dilemma (so very well acted out by Ng Choo Seong) I shall illustrate what I see as Yasmin’s quiet uncovering of injustice and discrimination. The last segment of the film records a critique of the arbitrary way scholarships are given. In the fifth-form exams which both Loong and Orked sit for, she only manages 5As whereas Loong, in spite of the brutalizing circumstances surrounding his life, manages to achieve 7As. Yet it is Orked who gets the scholarship to go to England. Her own mother notes the anomaly in this line of dialogue: “5As pun boleh dapat scholarship” (5As still can get a scholarship). And Loong himself is given some important lines to speak when he tells his friend, Keong, that he will somehow get to England too, then support himself working part-time. He will persuade Orked to do the same so that some poorer and more deserving youth can have her scholarship. Youthful idealism perhaps but these references must make us rethink certain public policies that divide, segmentalize and create estrangement. Loong does repeatedly ask himself if he is stupid to be so hopeful but I think so-called naïve young people can often force us to reassess our own jaded views.

Code of honour

“Sepet” shows some of our Malaysian youths struggling to keep themselves afloat in a society with so many written and unwitten rules and with so much inequity. The Chinese youths, like Loong, earn a living to support families through after school activities by selling VCDs. We see that oppression, even violence, need not be inter-ethnic but can often be intra-ethnic. Here Yasmin seems to have borrowed some bits from certain Hong Kong movies (perhaps by the director Ann Hui?). The Chinese gang “lord”, Jimmie, terrorizes the youths and extorts part of their earnings. These young people are depicted as not simply no-good lepak gangsters. Some are driven by economic constraints to earn money in this way. There is a code of honour among them which makes Keong willing to take a severe beating rather than betray Ah Loong. That such brutalizing circumstances exist and that they force people to have their own code of honour and their own group protection outside of our comfortable bourgeois mores, reveal our society’s inequitable distribution of wealth whatever the GNP and GDP may be cranked up to be.

There is a witty exchange of dialogue between Loong and his loyal friend, Keong, when Loong visits the injured Keong in the hospital. Keong mentions that legendary band of faithful friends (the epitome of brotherhood) in The Malay Annals (Hang Tuah, Hang Jebat, Hang Lekiu, etc) and says: “Hey, they could be Chinese-lah, all Hangs.” Did I hear a gasp of disgust and disapproval in the darkened cinema? If I did, it must have been from some purist nationalist who can’t take any humour directed at what he deems legends that are sacrosanct.

Ng Choo Seong does a marvelous job of capturing Ah Loong’s toughness as well as his tender side (this is a poetry-writing toughie with spiky dyed blonde hair who is quite endearing). The bond between him and his long- suffering mother may seem like a cliché out of Chinese soap operas but it is acted out so naturally by Choo Seong, we all had to take out our tissues and handkerchiefs. Ah Loong simply has to survive by all available means in a world where one slip can mean death. Weaving in and out of dangerous traffic on his motor-cycle or contorting his pliant body to dance to the rhythms of a traditional Malay tune, Loong epitomizes the struggle to live in a society where there is inequality and violence.And he tries to smile too because, as Yasmin says, “ I find that people who suffer also look for a reason to laugh” (The Star, 21 March 2005).

The Malay middle-class youths who are Orked’s friends are similarly caught in a maze of choices. Her girlfriend reads a book on anti-colonialism but likes boys with Caucasian features (her hero is Leonardo Dicarprio, star of the hit film “Titanic”). Orked is almost raped by her friend whom her mother had thought was a decent boy from a good Malay-Muslim family. We therefore learn not to pigeon-hole people. Those Malay youths wearing modern, urban youth gear (jeans,T-shirts etc.) turn out to be feudal and narrow-mindedly conservative in many areas of life. Orked’s girlfriend, for example, is surprised that Orked’s mother treats the house-help as an equal. Orked wears the traditional baju kurung in almost every scene but her openness, individuality and independent spirit are clear. This film shows that our young people are fascinatingly multi-faceted.

I shall not take away from anyone’s desire to see this movie by disclosing the plot movement or the ending of this tale of a mixed-race romance. Although the film has traces of romantic sentimentality and I am a cynic-romantic, I decided to err on the romantic rather than the cynical side after watching "Sepet" or perhaps the soya bean and cakes sweetened my mood. Go see "Sepet" for yourself and decide what you like and what you don’t like about it.

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