Our final dive into the Malaysian Film Festival brought us Banyak Ayam Banyak Rejeki (Many Chickens Lots of Luck).

This is an exploration of polygamy, focusing on the way the practice is justified, and the effects it has on women's lives. It has an unusual genesis, beginning life, apparently, as the attempt to tell the story of a real person  -- one with three wives and a successful fried-chicken business in Yogyakarta. Requests for an interview were ignored, and the project was put to one side for a while. When it was resurrected, it told the fictional story of a man named Arjun.

"Banyak Ayam," we are told, "creatively deploys and combines fictionalized elements with non-fiction ones. The result is a critical, polyphonic engagement with the local practices of Islam, business and polygamy, allowing for levels of intimacy, 'truth' and satire that are difficult, and potentially problematic, to capture through more traditional documentary techniques."

To a degree, this works. The point is powerfully made, and the movie fairly drips with sarcasm. Arjun is a guy who seems to get only one answer from the spiritual adviser he consults and the rituals he performs: Boost your business by marrying again... His justification for his polygamy is that he wants to "rescue poor women", but he ultimately ends up exploiting them in his chicken business, or being supported by their other professional skills.

But the medium also complicates the message. Critic Hikmat Darmawan has reportedly described it as "the weirdest Indonesian film of 2020", while acknowledging that it has an "anthropological truth" to expose about real-world issues in Indonesian society.

I pretty much agree with Rasyid Harry that the zaniness goes a little too far: while the wacky elements serve a useful distancing purpose, they levy a high price in terms of viewer confusion.

It was, however, wonderful to see bits of Yogya again... (Apart from the last one, the photos in this post were taken during our visits to the city and its environs in 2010 and 2012.)













Also taking the cinematographic road less travelled, but in a very different way, is Certain Women. I enjoyed this. Nigel didn't.

It features three stories, with three pairs of protagonists, and some viewers seem to find it frustrating that the three stories are only tangentially linked. But each carries similar themes, which come across not as replications of each other, but rather as variations.

One theme is not listening. In the first vignette, it's mutual inattention. The frustrated guy won't listen to the female lawyer, but listens to her male colleague. But she doesn't really listen to her client either -- or at least not with sufficient engagement to forestall his turn to violence. The Samoan security guard he takes hostage, on the other hand, hears his story, and immediately diagnoses: "You've been had." He gets it. The lawyers know the law, but never really empathize with his predicament. In the second scenario, again a woman isn't listened to. The forgetful guy with the pile of sandstone blocks that once constituted a frontier schoolhouse acts as though she's not there, and talks straight past her to her husband. But then there is something wheedling about her... Her husband is more honest. Maybe the forgetful guy knows that. And in the third scenario, the law teacher talks and talks and talks about herself and her problems, but never really asks her young Native American fan what HER life is all about.

The other theme is loneliness. The lawyer is in the midst of some kind of affair (involving the husband of the sandstone-buyer), but doesn't seem particularly fulfilled by it. The sandstone-buyer seems alienated from her daughter as well as her husband. (In fact, we're not at all sure quite what she is all about: "Is this cheated-on wife simmering with suppressed rage? Or is she a selfish yuppie pushing others aside in pursuit of her 'authentic' Montana home? Or perhaps both at once.") The law teacher has her four-hour lonely drives to contend with; the ranch hand has no-one but her horses and her dog.

Underlining this loneliness is the palpable cold, the vast space, and the mournful hoot of trains. The scenery is almost another character: "Against the landscape of Montana's spreading plains and big skies, the traditional Western backdrop for the solitary trails of many a lonesome cowboy, these certain women are also lonely souls in motion. They are independent and unaligned, in contact but not in communion with those at hand. What better way to reveal their state than in three linked stories that refuse to make a pretty whole?"


Not Montana, rather Nevada (2004) -- but the sense of cold and space is similar