Off with his head
Marlina The Murderer In Four Acts is a brilliant film that tells the story of a woman who beheads her rapist.
DIRECTOR Mouly Surya confessed that she was initially reluctant to take on the movie Marlina The Murderer In Four Acts.
Mouly wasn’t interested to direct a film that was originally conceptualised by another person. The other person happens to be award-winning director Garin Nugroho who came up with the story idea of a woman named Marlina who beheads her rapist and then reports her rape at a police station using the man’s head as evidence.
When Garin approached Mouly with the story idea, she could not refuse.
“Garin said he’d rather have a female perspective for the film. He also said he can’t imagine what I would do with his idea. I took that as a compliment, I guess,” the 36-year-old Indonesian filmmaker explained in an interview in Kuala Lumpur recently.
Mouly made her directorial debut in 2008 with the thriller
Fiksi which received the Indonesia Film Festival award for Best Film and Best Director.
Her second film What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love received the Netpac award at the 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam in Netherlands in 2013.
She was in the midst of developing her third movie when Garin presented her with the Marlina idea.
“When I showed the five-page treatment that Garin had done for
Marlina to my producer Rama, he agreed to do it too. We both just fell in love with the story,” Mouly shared.
Marlina marks the first time Mouly is making a movie based on another person’s idea.
“I was actually quite reluctant because it was an unfamiliar process to me,” Mouly explained. “At that time, I was looking for ways to make the story mine and deliver it in the way I can relate to.”
In the end, she came up with the idea to interpret Marlina as a Western-style story set on the island of Sumba in Indonesia.
“I found the idea of a feminist Indonesian Western-style movie intriguing. Though, it doesn’t make sense to call it a Western because the movie is set in the East,” she said laughing.
Marlina was selected for screening under the Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.
It has earned rave reviews from various international film festival screenings and the term “Satay Western” was coined by a Variety critic to describe the movie’s unique narrative.
Mouly said she loved the term Satay Western and found it moving that her take on Marlina’s story is widely accepted by audiences around the world.
More importantly, Mouly also wanted to tell a powerful story about women helping each other to overcome their odds.
Apart from Marlina, played by Marsha Timothy, the movie also stars Dea Panendra as a pregnant woman by the name of Novi.
Marlina meets Novi while waiting for a bus to get to the police station. On their way, the bus is attacked by Marlina’s rapist’s henchmen. While Marlina manages to escape, Novi is stuck on the bus. The story then shifts to how Novi survives her ordeal.
For Mouly, one of her favourite scenes in Marlina is when Novi and Marlina go to pee together in the bushes during their journey on a bus to a different town on the island.
“I’ve never seen girls pee together in a movie! I’ve been on road trips where I’d complain about how nice it is for boys because they can basically pee anywhere.
“Marlina was a movie for me to convey some nuances on what it’s really like to be a girl.”