If This is My Story

Indonesia-Singapore, 75 min., 2561, Indonesian with English Subtitles

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Here’s the perfect date movie with gripping performances to get you Talking Deep: 2 engrossing sides of a marriage break-up, his and hers, that end the same way with the narrator screaming. Life is so difficult and full of nothing to fight about until the you-don’t-know-me point of no return is reached. There’s a happy ending, though not for them, in one virtuoso long take on the beach where the drifting husband tentatively begins a new life out of the cage with his lover. The take is approximately 5 cigarettes-long—the lover chain-smokes through the scene in real time; the camera static on them as they drink beer and talk and look at the sea. Eventually she rises, “I need a pee” and walks out of the frame into the sea behind us and back again beside him in wet clothes. The camera doesn’t pan with her; we just see him gazing at her freedom. Indeed, we don’t see the sea at all until, needing to pee himself, he loses all inhibitions and walks fully-clothed into the sea with the same simplicity of a child. (Needless to say, she walks into the frame to join him in the sunset sea of their love & mingled pee.) But in our mind, the image lingers of the distraught, abandoned wife in her prison-like house of splendor, turning on the water jets in the swimming pool at will, now that he’s no longer there to whine about the electric bill. (Alice Skinhead)

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Writer-Director: Djenar Mesa Ayu, Kan Lume

Photographer and Art Designer : Deny  Joe

Editor : Kan Lume

Sound Designer : Khikmawan Santosa/ OST. ‘The Swan’: BUMI

Producer: Djenar Mesa Ayu, Kan Lume

Cast : Sha Ine Febriyanti, Conelio  Sunny, Reza  Rahadian