Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash
Released OUT NOW
ANTICIPATION.
We enjoyed Indonesian director Edwin’s 2012 film, Postcards from the Zoo. 4
ENJOYMENT.
Energising and original, even if it is hard to pin down tonally. 3
IN RETROSPECT.
The late Suharto period as violent romance. 4
nly a man, just after we have seen the film’s young hero Ajo Kawir (Marthino Lio) win a dangerous game of chicken on his moped. A long way, both chronologically and geographically, from the amped-up hyperreality of the films, this tournament takes place on a backroad of the Bojongsoang district in West Java, Indonesia, in 1989, and is presented with a dusty naturalism. Yet those opening words are delivered by the (impossibly animated) figure of a boy painted on the rear of a truck, introducing an element of magical realism that will never quite go away again. For though Edwin’s film, which he adapted with Eka Kurniawan from Kurnjawan’s best-selling 2014 novel of the same name, charts a rocky relationship in the final decade of Suharto’s dictatorial presidency, it also features martial arts sequences, and even a ghost (Ratu Felisha).
