Kampong Bras Basah in the Malay language movie La Luna might be several thousand miles away from Soorajmukhi in the interiors of North India in the Hindi film Laapataa Ladies, but the two quaint fictional villages share quite a lot in common even as both the films have themselves been among the 85 vying in the Best International Feature category at the Oscars. La Luna, a Singapore-Malaysia co-production, Singapore’s entry to the Oscars this year, has also played at the Tokyo International Film Festival, Jakarta Film Week and Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival in Indonesia and is available on Netflix in Southeast Asia.
Like Laapataa Ladies, La Luna is populated with a bunch of goofy, oddball characters. The bitter pill of messaging in the film comes sugar-coated with an irreverent, playful tone and earthy humour as it earnestly underscores woman power and female solidarity.
Things start off promisingly. Even as the posters warning “God is Watching” are strewn across the devout village, warning its residents against any possible deviance, Yazid (Wafiy Ilhan), a quiet and timid young man, with an artistic bent of mind seems to be doing exactly that. Local cop Salihin (Shaheizy Sam) warns him that his “obscene” works of art are bound to attract the wrath of the village chief Tok Hassan (Wan Hanafi Su) little realising that his own daughter Azura (Syumaila Salihin) is engaged in a battle of wits with him over the confiscation of her petition, featuring the defiled face of the chief.
There’s something extremely likeable about Azura’s cheekiness as she protests against “fascism”, calling the confiscation “unconstitutional” and an “invasion of her privacy”. When the chief tauntingly asks her what she’d be up to after having strayed into art films and hip-hop music, she is quick to come up with a cocky response: pole dancing. It’s good fun to see her berate her well-meaning father and other assorted “middle-aged Malay men” and then go on to rattle him by jokingly demanding a pregnancy kit when he disallows a movie date with her boyfriend.
Unfortunately, this smart and sassy touch and the homespun humour aren’t spread consistently through the film, even though the story seems to progress promisingly. There are stirrings of liberalism with the young Ustaz Fauzi (Iedil Dzuhrie Alaudin) trying to make his religious sermons “entertaining” but the real challenge to the incipient status quo and orthodoxy comes with businesswoman Hanie Binte Abdullah (Sharifah Amani) when she returns to the kampong to renovate her grandfather’s house into a lingerie shop called 'La Luna'. What the chief refers to as Satan, “leading us astray with the promise of a brighter but uncertain future”, a threat of “contamination of the pure minds”.
The shop, where men are not allowed, becomes a safe space for the kampong women and stokes the desires and lifts the spirits of the village folk at large, something that the Ustaz also approves of. However, the narrative gradually begins to lapse into broad brushstrokes and stereotyping. The conservative chief wanting to control his people like a caged bird is a typical, irritating, cardboard villain.
Some comic incidents, a romantic subplot and another involving domestic violence lead up to the coming together of the village for a good cause. And it’s this empathetic portrayal of the community—the many feisty women and a few good men of the village—which is noteworthy and sticks on in the mind long after the film gets over, especially the group of endearing women, cutting across age groups, building friendships and sororities among themselves to help each other and also to usher in a much-needed change for all.
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Film: La Luna
Streaming on: Netflix