It is more than four hours long. There is a fair amount of crying too, usually done by women, but the main character, Abdullah Khairul Azzam, also sheds tears. It is all about Islam and love. The first half of the movie is set in Cairo. Khairul in fact walks along the Nile in the evening right on the margin near the Italian embassy where I stayed at Huda's former apartment in Garden City (just across from the hospital). I know the place quite well as I loved the evening walks along the Nile. Now the whole city is in turmoil, and the media shows that the places where I used to roam just a couple of months ago - for instance, Meidan a-Tahrir, where Darul Shuruk is (that is my favourite bookshop) as well as Groppi, a café - are now places of public gathering and protest.
Opera Bridge Source: برگل
I watched Ketika Cinta Bertasbih - both dvds that I had bought previously at Tanjung Plaza, the largest shopping centre in Surabaya - in the Pusat Budaya Jawa Timur. Except that, as I discovered, this is actually more about budaya Jawa Tengah, or Central Javanese culture. The first half of the movie - in fact, a movie on its own (corresponding to the first volume of the book by Habiburrahman El Shirazy) - is entirely set and filmed in Egypt, mostly in Cairo (but also in Alexandria). Egyptians come into the story as crooks and generally as people who are not to be trusted, police included (or especially the police). It is all about Indonenians, however. People from Aceh are featured - in a folcloric dance, in fact - and Palembang is mentioned but the heart of the story seems to be Javanese. It is a mix between a romantic movie and a Brazilian soap except that it is so sugary most of the time that it would be unacceptable for a Brazilian audience. As the beads of the chapelet are counted, Khairul's love for a woman with an unbelievable name even for Indonesia (or perhaps particularly for Indonesia), namely, Anna Althafunissa, is de-routed several times as in any good soap. Both Anna and Khairul are Al-Azhar students, though Anna is already a master's student and the daughter of a famous kyai or religious figure in Central Jawa. In fact, it turns out that the writer of the novel on which the screenplay seems to be closely based, Habiburrahman El Shirazy, is in fact an Al-Azhar graduate. The counterpart to Anna is the very worldly Eliana Alam - alam is both Arabic and Indonesian for world, by the way. She is a tv actress - namely, she features in soaps.
I should be used to soaps but in fact I am not used to Indonesian ones. I find the acting in them so incredibly bad that it would be unacceptable in major soaps in Brasil. The acting in the film is accordingly bad too, though Khairul's acting is even worse than both Anna's and Eliana's. The Indonesians speak Arabic in the movie, but only in fairly short dialogues. You can see they are in fact exerting themselves to pronounce all the difficult sounds in Arabic as well as they can. It is an Indonesian world of young people, except that it is set in Cairo, not in Central Jawa. Eliana is an ambassador's daughter, and she doesn't wear veil (until the end of the movie, that is); one of Khairul's friend, the son of a tycoon in Jawa, is set up by an Israeli woman swindler (sic) who then extorts money from him after threatening to put his nude photographs on the internet (she actually does it and Furqan, the offender, is accordingly spanked by a friend of his for his immorality). Anna Althafunissa is engaged to marry Furqan, but...
Differently from Eliana, who is a woman of the world (but also has family connections to Solo, in Central Jawa), Anna is properly wrapped up in a veil - and much more - throughout the movie. In fact, the women in her village are all wrapped up. Khairul is a good, good-looking, and a good learned man, but he only sells meatballs and then enters the delivery business by renting a ramshackle truck - namely, deliveries between Egypt and Jawa Tengah and Jawa Timur. He also sells bakso made of meatballs shaped in the form of hearts. It is a bit too much cinta for my taste.
It does not get better, but in fact it gets worse. At least life was eventful in Egypt, what with Israeli blackmailers, corrupt police, bag snatchers (Khairul meets Anna when she has just been robbed by a thief on a bus and is crying hopelessly in a bus stop). There is also the drama of graduating and of having one's thesis proposal accepted by a professor (Anna accordingly bursts out in tears in gratitude to her professor as her proposal is accepted, from what I remember; whereas Khairul cries when he learns he has finally graduated after nine years of selling meat balls to survive - and on top of it sending money home to his family in Jawa Tengah as well as occasionally helping friends in need in Cairo. I had no idea the Egyptian economy was so bouyant. He meets Eliana as he cooks Javanese food for embassy and cultural events in Egypt). In Jawa Tengah, it is all about reciting Al-Hakim at the pesantren - or whatever the place actually is - and trying to find a proper bride for Khairul. The mother is against worldy Eliana, of course, though she receives her in her home, and is in favour of pious Anna.
It is all so charmingly predictable. Khairul rejects Eliana's proposal of a mouth kiss because it is not Islamic. He even mentions the word halal, I think.
In Ayat Ayat Cinta - Verses of Love - the story is also set in Egypt, though this time there is no Jawa. The actor is a bit better than his counterpart who plays Khairul (in a fact, a later film). There is the occasional camel in the streets of Cairo (I remember so many of them...), as well as the taxi driving the hero home right through the pyramids. The hero is also a student at Al-Azhar. This however is a much more complex - or less simplistic - movie. Jawa is just a distant homeland where parents inhabit. Egypt however is not only the land of crooks though of course Egyptian crooks are also present in this movie. In fact, a couple of them manage to frame the hero who finds himself in jail and in a very difficult predicament as he is accused of rape. The accusation is of course false. It is in fact all fitna, or slander.
Meidan El-Tahrir Source: برگل
Fortunately, he has married a woman who suffers a good deal throughout but eventually succeeds in keeping her family together. She is also rich. Therefore, here too a not wealthy man marries a rich woman (Eliana Alam is rich in Ketika Cinta Bertasbih and Anna Althafunissa - I cannot help repeating her name - is also moderately wealthy as the daughter of a famous kyai). The rich woman here however is German. She is in fact German of Turkish origin. And she is fully veiled (namely, only her eyes can be seen). In a coy move on the part of the director, the viewer of the movie can only see her face after she is married to the hero (this however could see her face in a family meeting before marrying her - but not the viewers). There is another woman who is in love with her husband however: she is Copt. She lives in the same building where there is an apartment with Indonesian students (all of them studying at Al-Azhar of course. No other Egyptian university is ever mentioned). After a lot of suffering, also due to an attempt on her life, she will eventually convert and marry him too, at the behest of his first wife. This last will ask her husband to marry her so that the Copt woman will testify in his favour. In fact, his accuser turns out to be yet another woman who is in love with him.
There are very short dialogues in Arabic but in this movie, differently to the other one, all Egyptians - whether or not they are Muslim or Copt - speak Indonesian quite well. So does the German-Turkish woman (I wonder how many German-Turkish women actually completely veil themselves - and then move to Egypt). Non-Turkish Germans speak English. Incredibly, this helps the story - for Egyptians and other foreigners introduce an unexpected liveliness in the narrative that is almost foreign to a good deal of Ketika Cinta Bertasbih.
The husband is finally acquitted after a good deal of drama. An interesting situation then develops as he goes to live with his two wives - one of them, the Turkish woman, is pregnant. There is a good deal of tension of course. That is shown fairly skilfully and realistically, without undue drama. Everybody is in fact incredibly lucid about the situation. This seems very promising as well as quite intriguing: a man actually living under the same roof with two women on a more or less equal basis. But naturally enough all this is too complex for the romantic plot, so the converted Copt woman eventually dies of a weak heart.
Both films have been quite popular here. As a matter of fact, the president himself has watched at least one of them. People I meet at the angkringan by the Tugu station tell me they have both watched the three movies and - in the case of Ayat Ayat Cinta - also read the novel. They are young men from Madiun, a small town in Jawa Tengah not far from here. None of them claims to have liked either the movies or the novel. However, I am all the same impressed that all three have all the same watched the movies and read the novel. Of course, as young men they are not supposed to say openly that they like anything with 'cinta' in the title.
Margana tells me that the movies have been enormously popular especially among a segment of the population in Jawa, namely, that centred around the pesantren - religious schools of a traditional kind in Jawa - and their communities. Also, it is apparently the first time that Al-Azhar students are featured in a movie partly set in Egypt on top of it (and also in Semarang posing as Cairo from what I heard). That is a very large segment of the population. As the films themselves indicate, that segment is seen as kampungan or country-bumpkin-like by other sectors of urban Indonesia. The films are also interesting because they clearly show the growing cosmopolitanism of that segment. Margana says the films based on El Shirazy's works (now there is also a fourth movie directed by himself) have set a model for young women from pesantren-centred communities to follow. If the president himself has claimed he has watched the movies - and perhaps liked them - then it is because there is more than a little political capital to be had from those movies. Besides, Bambang has confirmed the strength of the link to the Middle East - and not only to Egypt as in El Shirazy's movies - in this kind of local cultures, and therefore also in the movie culture that has recently emerged with direct links to those cultures. El Shirazy's novels and the movies based on them have therefore established a new discursive space for a population that is traditionally centred in the various Javanese heartlands but which has also had traditionally very strong links to the Middle East. We can also venture that population is acquiring a new assertiveness.
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