Fiction.

With Fiction., her first feature film, Mouly Surya has won the Best Film at the Citra Awards (the Indonesian Oscars), as well as the award for Best Director in the national competition at the Jakarta International Film Festival.
Written by the director, in collaboration with Joko Anwar, Fiction. reflects on the dangerously fine line between reality and fiction in literature and the fascination that crossing this line holds for the young and disturbed female protagonist.

Alisha (Ladya Cheryl) is the daughter of a very rich, but often absent, businessman who probably accumulated his wealth during the years of Soharto’s dictatorship, when he was an officer in the army. She has just finished her studies and is looking for work in the creative industries, but is refusing to accept a leg up from her over-protective father. Every night in her dreams, Alisha relives the tragic death of her mother, who committed suicide when she was pregnant with her second child. When a good-looking young man, played by Donny Alamsyah, replaces an elderly man as the swimming pool cleaner for a couple of days at the family villa, and decides to steal a pair of ceramic rabbit statuettes while he’s at it, the girl decides to follow him... and she even moves into the apartment next to his to do so. It turns out that Bari, this young man, is an aspiring writer who lives with his girlfriend Renta, and is writing a collection of short stories inspired by the true stories of the other inhabitants of the building, but he finds himself suffering from writer’s block. He doesn’t know how to end his stories, since in real life, there isn’t an “end”. Alisha, therefore, decides to help him by providing him with endings…

Fiction. is a film which subtly plays with the narrative tones of a psychological thriller. From the very first unsettling frame, which shows Alisha’s doll collection, the film introduces the audience into a realm of boundaries, between childhood and adulthood, sleep and wakefulness, and imagination and action. Alisha’s character, affected by the trauma she suffered as a child and the fact that she grew up in a protective bubble which kept the dangers of “real” world at a safe distance, represents with paradigm the unsettling divide between these polarities. Her inexperience brings her to cross these frightening boundaries with an almost childlike innocence, as though her intrusion into other people’s lives were nothing more than the words of a story that she is writing. With a deft and refined mise-en-scene, Surya builds up an atmosphere of suspense and ambiguity which appears to represent the idea of fiction in a programmatic way. The controlled, persuasive camera movements means that there is great fluidity in the narrative, while the impressive soundtrack - the sound engineering is of a quality (in both the technical aspect and in terms of expressiveness) previously unseen in Indonesian cinema - create an appreciated shift of sense between sequences, despite several intriguing dissonances.

It is probably also possible to find a metaphorical socio-political dimension in this remarkably refined debut film: Alisha is the daughter of a man of the old regime, one of those who made his money through corruption and nepotism, that dominated the country for decades. The reason for her trauma and her sense of alienation are twofold: moral corruption and the distance between the real world and the upper middle class, who has never forgotten its previous crimes. Even though she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she discovers her fascination for the lower classes of society, the one in which Bari lives and from which he draws his artistic inspiration. Her attitude is much like that of the dictatorship: both treat people like mere pawns which can be destroyed at will, without feeling any regret.
Although Fiction. only had limited success, it is nonetheless a debut film which shows signs of the director’s talent and confirms an important fact regarding Indonesian cinema, that the genre film has provided the most stimulating productions in the recent years.