A small Indonesian film can't claim the spotlight at the star-studded Toronto International Film Festival, but maybe it's something audiences in our region should look forward to. A Copy Of My Mind, the new film by director Joko Anwar, is probably the highest-profile movie from Indonesia this year after its premiere at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival earlier this month and now a run at Toronto, the biggest film event in North America that runs until Sunday.
Set in the sweaty, congested Jakarta, A Copy Of My Mind features a love story from the street level that Southeast Asian viewers should easily identify. Sari (the magnetic Tara Basro) is a young woman working in a nondescript salon specialising in facial massage for middle-aged women. Her pastime is to shop for pirated DVDs -- again, something very Southeast Asian -- and soon she strikes it up with Alek (Chicco Jerikho), a man who does subtitles (through Google translate!) and makes copies for the pirate dealers.
Surprisingly, there are a couple of sex scenes that, while nothing explicit, are quite intimate and steamy -- director Anwar surely makes the most of his attractive performers. And the romance between the two working-class lovers, set amid their crowded tenant houses and humid rooms, is almost satisfying in itself, but A Copy Of My Mind pulls another trick out after the first hour. Sari is sent to do a facial massage for a VIP convict in a special prison, and there she accidentally gets involved in a seedy scandal that sends waves through the upcoming presidential election.
In short, the love story becomes a political story (the narrative of the film takes place before the last election, with footage of actual political campaigns), and although the social commentary is one-dimensional and rather banal -- kickbacks, corruption, reptilian MPs and their harridan fixer -- the film never loses sight of their two characters and finds a way to show that their destinies are part of something bigger and beyond their control.
Basro, who plays Sari, has a screen presence that is at once girlish, defiant and challenging -- in jest, she asks Alek to play his porn DVD while they're about to have sex, and the way she says it isn't dirty or provocative, though the gesture certainly is. Sari's is a face of everywoman on this corner of the globe, someone who goes out every day knowing that it's always a fight.
A Copy Of My Mind hasn't been released in Indonesia, and it's interesting to see how the authorities will handle some sensitive scenes in the film that has put Indonesia on the global movie map of 2015. Bangkok audiences may have to hope that some of our film festivals will show it here, because the resonances from the streets of Jakarta aren't that unfamiliar to the inhabitants of our own humid city.