Gubra

April 7th, 2006

Gubra, the sequel to Sepet opened in cinemas today.

(spoilers ahead, proceed only if you a) have watched the show, b) do not plan to ever watch this show but are interested in what i have to say about it, c) plan to watch this show but would not mind spoilers and hence will not throttle me upon reading my Gubra review, or d) have a spoiler fetish. sorry ah, nowadays must be very pedantic when it comes to disclaimers.)

psst! people who havent watched yet, stay back for after the credits. you will so kiss me for telling you this. REALLY.

Gubra is set a few years after Orked’s encounter with Jason. she is now married to an older man, Arif (played by Adlin Aman Ramlee), who is the dependable and financially-stable yuppie sort of husband. in the minds of the audience, he is of course the wretched one who cannot replace the lovable Jason (Ng Choo Seong), but after watching a couple of scenes you start to warm up towards this guy cos he’s actually quite nice, and seems to care a LOT for Orked (Sharifah Amani).

the movie opens with a close up on a very simple, ordinary task - spreading butter and kaya on bread. throughout the whole process the camera does not once shift - and for what seems like an eternity, the audience watches the woman with soft fingers prepare roti with the most meticulous attention. one wonders why the woman takes soooo long to prepare a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and why she puts such detail into it this one time if she does this every morning .. but later we find out that it is in fact her husband’s breakfast. ah. it all makes sense now.

this woman, the woman who made sandwich-making seem so sublime, is the wife of a religious man (i’m sorry i have no idea what the proper term is, aira isnt here to tell me!!) and they live together in a wooden house in the more rural areas. both man and wife make a living teaching the kampung folk about Islam and how to read the Quran. despite being a deeply religious and spiritual woman (tudung and all), we see that she has a minxy side to her in the way she communicates with her husband.

the thing with this couple is that they’re both good friends of two Malay prostitutes. but oddly enough, they do not rebuke both women for their unholy lifestyles or urge them to switch occupations like most staunch Muslims would, but in fact seem to be very understanding about it. so supportive that it’s kind. and VERY unheard of. the first prostitute is a sweet-faced plump woman called Temah who loves her fatherless son in a way i cannot possibly articulate. the second prostitute is a very young girl who is naive and shy, and the unfortunate thing about her is that she has customers who beat her up during sex, and she willingly allows them because they give her rm200 more than the usual customers.

this plotline of the rural, religious folk does not at all coincide with the urban and English-speaking plotline of Orked and family. strange, yes? but not really. they are two different storylines, they never meet, but they exude parallel messages. throughout the whole movie i was just waiting and waiting for both stories to tie in and somehow interconnect with each other a la Love Actually, but it never happened. doesnt matter. i got the message in the end.

at the end of Gubra’s predecessor, Sepet, us poor audience were left with a cliffhanger and a thousand different possibilities. did Jason die? Gubra does not actually tell us the answer. all we know is that Jason’s brother Alan (Alan Yun) bumps into the now-married Orked, recognises her from the photographs, and they both seem to have a chemistry that is very similiar to the one between Orked and Jason.

Orked and Alan both seem to share an understanding Jason’s fate, whether or not he’s alive, but they leave us no clue. all discussion about Jason was very neutral and could have been centred around someone who had left for another country, or even someone who refused to see either of them.

(dammit. need closure. DID HE DIE OR NOT?!)

we later find out that Orked’s husband Arif is cheating on her with a woman who is very much smitten with him, though prima facie he does not seem to reflect the same gobsmackedness. Orked takes it all very calmly (here we ask, does she even love him in the first place??) and she only starts to cry after Arif, pleading for forgiveness, calls his new girl ‘only a stupid piece of meat who cant carry a decent conversation’. Orked wants to leave Arif, but after a very poignant argument, she numbly says she will stay if he, in Orked’s presence, tells the other woman to her face what he said about her.

and he actually agrees! Orked watches the whole spectacle groomed and dressed exquisitely (she has never been presented as such in both movies) in an expensive baju kebaya and a chignon, and looking very out of place. but her odd choice of apparel is befitting, because that day she was a willing spectator of her husband’s redemption, audience in a reknowned play that has come to town, an outsider who hears only script - rather than a jealous wife whose heart is still tied to the whole melodrama. herein she subtly bows out of their marriage, and because of this, we know that she is not going to keep her promise to stay, even though her husband kept to his part of the bargain.

nothing ever actually happens between Alan and Orked. the last encounter of theirs that we see is when he brings her to his very spartan room, and gives her the box of things that Jason left behind. in the box, is his wallet that still contains their picture, several photos of them together (we remember these from Sepet), THE mobile phone, and many letters that he wrote to her but never sent. here, Orked cries with more pain than she did when her husband cheated on her.

nowwwww we know who her heart really belongs to.

what happened to the religious couple and the two prostitutes? Temah (the motherly prostitute) finds out she is HIV positive. the scene in which she does is very brilliantly done. she goes into the clinic, asks her son to wait outside, and she comes out half smiling half crying. no words are exchanged, the audience are never given concrete proof that she is in fact HIV positive, but we know, just from the way she looks. just like we also know who the father of her son is, even though she never gives a vocal answer to the question, “who is this man?”

‘that man’, btw, killed the 2nd prostitute. yeah, the young girl who would always get beaten up in her work. it was a really harrowing turn in the plot because this girl had been working for so long at this job cos she needed to collect the money for a reason she would not say.. and the night that she finally collected enough and could quit her job to return back to her hometown, this guy attacked her cos he needed the money but failed earlier to get it from Temah. we dont actually know if he murdered her, all the audience can hear is her screaming behind a closed door, but it doesnt matter, cos either way she ‘dies’. she had to work so hard for that money, and sacrifice SO MUCH to obtain that amount, including her nearness with God and her self-worth. and he just took it away from her, robbing her of everything she had put her whole life into.

Gubra’s tagline is, Why do we hurt the most the ones we love the most? At first glance we think this is centred around Arif cheating on Orked, but i think almost every character in Gubra personifies that tagline. why did Temah put her son at risk of HIV? why did Alan’s mother have to push her husband down the stairs? why did Pak Atan (unknowingly) put his family through the pain of the possibility that he may die? why did Jason leave Orked and put her through so much loss?

why ah?

if i have to compare Gubra with Sepet, i’d have to say that Gubra didnt make me sit down and just think, like how Sepet did. Sepet just completely jilted me. but that doesnt make Gubra a lesser movie, cos i think they’re both in two very different categories. if you exclude the art direction and the filming techniques and the obvious Yasmin Ahmad element, Gubra wasnt like Sepet at all.

Gubra was filmed fantastically. i especially love how there was so much play with doors. it made me feel like i was an intangible observer, like a ghost, but yet *there* at the same time, in the heart of what was taking place before my eyes. like being in two places at once - both on the inside and outside.

the powerful and jarring scenes from Sepet were succeeded in Gubra - the scene where Temah held her son from behind while he was sleeping, the scene where Arif enveloped Orked while she cried, the scene where the car was being washed after Orked walked out on Arif, the scene where the religious man walked past the prostitutes .. i loved them all. Gubra was good cos of scenes like those. cinematography and screenplay at its best.

Gubra was a feel-good, soft film. beautiful like black calligraphy on yellowed parchment, intimate like pressing warm hands softly on tired eyes. i give it a 4/5.

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