Tersanjung: The Movie (2021)
Review of Tersanjung: The Movie (2021), directed by Hanung Bramantyo and Pandhu Adjisurya
I had never seen an Indonesian movie or television show until now. The reason I stumbled across this one of all things was the fact that I recently signed up for an Indonesian class with the Indonesian Embassy in the US, as they run free language, dance, and singing courses in regards to Bahasa Indonesia and the culture of the islands. I had no interest in Indonesia before this, but thought hey might as well and I’m now extremely curious about Indonesian culture, language, and entertainment. So I looked up Indonesian movies on Netflix and this actually was the first one to pop up on my screen.
Context-wise, what might be important to know is that Tersanjung originally was an Indonesian soap opera during the late nineties/early 2000s, so the movie is approaching nostalgia territory for an entire generation. I have never seen the original, so this is not the case for me, but from my research online, this closely follows plotlines from the original. Key word here is “plotlines”; this show ran for seven years, from 1998-2005, so clearly there was a lot of juicy content in the original that can’t be matched in the length of a single movie.
Let us begin the review!
Content
Our film begins a very dramatic fashion during 1998: our main female lead, Yura, is almost raped by her fiancé, who happens to be a rich guy with a lot of influence over her family. Her stepmother (I assume she’s her stepmother, or Yura’s father’s girlfriend) happened to take a massive loan from the fiancé’s mother with the intent of helping finance her father’s music career. We see how a bunch of thugs come and try to seize the house, but they manage to bargain another week or two from the rich woman and they all leave.
We then transition to Yura who lives in a student boarding house and has now dropped out of college in order to help finance her family’s woes. With her two best friends Christian and Oka, they start a food truck business that makes a ton of money, making this a wholesome experience before we have a massive strangle love triangle between the three. And, if not to make it worse, the original family plot line is dropped completely, unless I somehow missed something very important. We do hear about their bills being completely paid off by a mysterious benefactor, who reveals himself to be Christian and apparently he’s in love with Yura.
Yura begins a relationship with Christian, who is revealed to be extremely rich. Extremely rich as in his brother owns a company and is living in America, the family has a shady bitchy maid, and the mother has a dinnertime rule of you can’t speak unless you’re spoken to first. I don’t think how Oka and Yura managed to miss the fact that this guy was wealthy (I don’t know much about Indonesian culture, but I imagine that the English name would be a giveaway to some kind of status symbol here), but I’m going to chill with that fact.
Now, if you’re not an Indonesian viewer or have no previous knowledge of Indonesian history, this is where things tend to get a bit murky. We get hints of a protest and potentially armed conflict with youths, and then Christian’s family just disappears. This guy has essentially ditched the girl he has left pregnant, after proposing to her, which is a real classy move. Good job Ian. You suck. From some quick Google searches, it seems that the May 1998 protests are the culprit here, which over a thousand people died during.
Pregnant and alone, Yura then falls in love with the sweet and charming Oka. He seems to be everything that Christian wasn’t, as he’s even in the room as Yura gives birth to her child. Fast forward, they get married, and the ending shot is that of a disfigured Christian crashing the party, thus giving me the sense of an upcoming sequel because it looks like this guy has had a rough time in America or wherever the hell he’s been.
Someone described this as a lukewarm melodrama, and, quite frankly, I have to agree. It plays up the soap drama tropes—we have a rich guy option, who seems to check out after a certain point, then the second male lead who’s poor and sweet coming in to save the day—, the girl happens to get pregnant, and one thing after another occurs. But I just couldn’t care much for the characters because we don’t personify them as anything but outside their given stereotype or trope. They exist in this world to fulfill one half-hearted purpose, which disappoints me as a viewer because they lack dimension. I also have many questions about Oka casually being half-white, but I’m not going to go there right now.
Overall Thoughts
Not worth it. Maybe if you’re a dedicated fan of the original show, or are very into Asian dramas to the point where you’re forgiving about what is depicted on the screen, then you might be able to tolerate this movie. I, for one, found this to be an incredible waste of two hours. Will I probably watch the sequel to figure out what happened to Christian? Probably. I’m too nosy and apparently like inflicting a special form of torture upon myself. But all in all, the plot isn’t very fresh, the characters are flat, and it’s not worth it at the end of the day.
