Educational Media Reviews Online

In the twelve years since her debut feature The Mirror Never Lies screened at the Berlin Film Festival, director Kamila Andini has established an international reputation as a perceptive and sensitive chronicler of the challenges facing Indonesian women. Her latest movie Before, Now & Then deepens her oeuvre by once again focusing on a female protagonist, but also broadens it by directly (if perhaps somewhat tentatively) engaging with her country’s troubled past.

The Seen and Unseen, Andini’s follow-up to The Mirror Never Lies, is likewise about a young child. Her last film Yuni featured a teenager in the lead role. Before, Now & Then continues this progression by starring Happy Salma as a middle-aged woman named Nana. The title refers to the story’s tripartite structure: it begins (following a dedication to “our mothers and ancestors in the land of Sunda”) during Indonesia’s post-World War II struggle for independence from the Netherlands with Nana fleeing her village with her infant son and sister to avoid being kidnapped by the men who abducted and presumably murdered her husband and ends with a coda set approximately 10 years after the main action, which takes place while Suharto is seizing power in the late 1960s. The middle “Now” section accounts for the bulk of the movie’s 103 minutes and portrays Nana as a woman deeply scarred on the inside. She has been remarried for fifteen years, but her husband Mr. Darga (Arswendy Bening Swara) politely ignores her suggestions about how to run their plantation and is openly having an affair. They have wealth and status, but Nana’s in-laws clearly don’t approve of her. She and Darga have three children together, but Nana is distant from them, and we learn by the bye that the boy from the beginning of the movie died. Meanwhile, she can’t sleep through the night without being woken up by nightmares.

Things begin to change when Nana befriends Darga’s mistress, a free spirit named Ino played by Laura Basuki, who was awarded a Silver Bear for her performance at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival. They jump into a pool of water fully clothed and share cigarettes and before long Darga is observing that Nana seems younger. When a figure from her past reappears after a great deal of foreshadowing, she is forced to choose between the comfortable but not entirely happy life she has and an uncertain but more honest future.

Before, Now & Then is recognizably “a film by Kamila Andini” from its unabashedly feminist perspective and relatively straightforward narrative embellished with artistic flourishes that blur the lines between dreaming and waking life. She is also a skillful director of child actors and coaxes a strong performance out of Chempa Puteri as Nana’s younger daughter Dais. What distinguishes it from Andini’s previous work is its use of pop songs and Ricky Lionardi’s original score as an emotional force multiplier in a manner unmistakably reminiscent of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, especially in the movie’s romantic final third, and its historical sweep. The latter is undeniable but also something of a puzzle to viewers like me who owe most of their knowledge of this period of Indonesian history to director Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. Ino, for instance, is identified as a suspected “communist.’ This would seem to make her a target of the purges alluded to in two scenes, but nothing ever appears to come of it, which could be a sign of subtlety, hesitation, or both.

Time may tell, and it will be interesting to see where Andini goes next in her career. She has already released one new work after this one, a five-part Netflix mini-series called Cigarette Girl which is also set largely in the 60s, although it features many scenes set in the present day as well. Neither work is overtly political, but both corroborate the sense one gets from Oppenhiemer’s films that Indonesia, like Nana, still has a lot to process. Will Andini continue to approach these issues through the lens of the personal, start to confront them head-on, or move in a new direction entirely? Her relationship with the major streamers also bears watching, especially for educators. Cigarette Girl would have benefitted from a shorter runtime in my opinion, but more importantly for us, we can’t license it and it will probably never be available on DVD. Whatever the future may hold for its director, Before, Now & Then is an accomplished treatment of a universal theme from a part of the world likely underrepresented in most library media collections and thus merits consideration.

Awards:
Silver Bear, Best Supporting Performance - Berlin Film Festival; Best Film - Asia-Pacific Screen Awards; Jury Award - Brussels International Film Festival; Best Film, Cinematography, Editing, Original Score, and Art Direction - Indonesian Film Festival; Best Actress - Indonesian Movie Actor Awards; Best Film - Bengaluru International Film Festival; Best Art Direction, Cinematography, and Actress in a Supporting Role - Maya Awards; Best Director, Supporting Actress, and Special Award - Bandung Film Festival

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