neal wrote:...the neighbor who tells the story of his step-father, gets politely rebuked and then must sit and listen to the killers admit that they were horrible but that they might want to continue to hide that from the public.
I think this is one of the most important scenes in the film. The man telling this story is Anwar's next-door neighbor. And it's never clear why he agreed to participate in the project, whether it's out of deference to Anwar, genuine friendship with him, some of the more subtle types of coercion neal mentions or perhaps even an unconscious feeling that he'd have a moment like this one to speak up. But, man, what a scene! Right in the middle of the killers sitting around the set "pitching" ideas for what they as former death squad members might re-enact, this neighbor of Anwar's -- taking a break from his role as one of their victims -- interjects: "Hey, I got a story for you..." And he proceeds to tell them all of the time that a death squad came in the middle of the night and dragged his stepfather away. How they were all terrified. How the family found his body the next day in a street, covered by two halves of an oil drum. How, because nobody else would help them, he at age 12 and his uncle buried the stinking corpse of his stepfather by the side of the road in a shallow grave, "like a goat."
The reaction of the killers is chilling but also absurdly funny. Because it's more or less what happens when somebody that nobody wants to offend suggests a bad idea in a Hollywood writers' room. The killers' objections to why they can't film this range from bullshit budget/schedule excuses ("Too complicated, too many locations and company moves") to the vaguely dismissive ("We can't film
every story") to the originalists ("That's not really the kind of thing we talked about doing before") and finally end in a weird face-saving gesture from Anwar himself who suggests "Well, maybe we could work that into the actors' motivations." So this eyewitness account will at least be part of the backstory!
A few more points:
--To clarify three of the most important characters for discussion purposes:
protagonist/head killer = Anwar
mustache guy with "apathetic" T-shirt and wife/daughter mall shopping = Adi
fat sidekick, hapless would-be politico and dragqueen comic relief = Herman
--That Democracy Now interview linked to above is long but well worth looking at. I learned, among other things, that Anwar was about the 40th killer Oppenheimer interviewed. He didn't settle upon him lightly. And Anwar was apparently so much of an egotist that he wouldn't give Oppenheimer Adi's contact info until he was assured that he was and would remain the focus/star of the documentary.
--I'm fascinated by the relationship between organized street criminals, higher level political corruption and the genocide. Am I wrong in feeling that, in this respect -- gangsters running death squads -- the mass killings in Indonesia are unique? It would be like Tony Soprano running the SS or something. Has anything like that ever happened anywhere else? Also on that note, I love the scenes where sidekick Herman runs for office so pathetically, not understanding that you're supposed to bribe voters
beforethey vote for you. The way he tells it, there's not even the pretense of public service behind his ambition. It's simply a more efficient way to shake people down for protection money.
--I agree with zedz in part that, even in the shortened cut, a few of the recreations could use a little trimming, especially the ones that are more like rehearsals that we see early on -- one in the street and one in Anwar's living room. But as to the amateurishness of the scenes in general? One component of this is surely that a number of Oppenheimer's many collaborators are local volunteers (if you stay through the credits you'll see how many Anonymous names there are). So the coverage is inconsistent in quality because at times the camera people were. Not everybody shooting every scene is as integrated into the film's whole production team or as talented as the ones who shot most of it. Then there's the question of the content of the fictionalized scenes and their staging, which I'm not sure would have been improved by more professional or polished collaborators or writing/direction. The whole point of those re-enactments -- above and beyond anything that comes out in the process of making them -- was to capture what Oppenheimer refers to as "the dream life" of Anwar and the other killers. He also refers to his film as a "documentary of the imagination," a film about how they see themselves and how they wish to be seen by others. So I guess I feel like -- at least around the question of this particular intention -- it'd almost be like faulting the technique or representational naiveté of children's drawings, mistaking the ways in which they express unguarded truths by getting hung up on their sloppiness.
--Dusan Makavejev is another influence worth mentioning, as he mentored Oppenheimer at Harvard and is a fan of this film. It's not just about the freeform mixture of documentary and fiction or his feeling for the absurdity, comedy and violence of political systems, but it's also the kind of rough around the edges Id-like quality of the dreams/fantasies/fiction sequences in his films. "High school improvs from hell" wouldn't be a bad description of some of the scenes in
Sweet Movie.
