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Mouly Surya (director), Something Old, New, Borrowed and Blue, 2019. 4 min.

Mouly Surya’s short film Something Old, New, Borrowed and Blue joins a slate of films that seek to reappraise the presentation of gender dynamics in Asian cinema against traditional or conservative contexts. Such films include South Korea’s The Handmaiden (2016), directed by Park Chan-wook, and Vietnam’s The Third Wife (2018), directed by Ash Mayfair. The setting of each in specific historical periods—the early 20^th century for the former and the 19^th century in the latter—places these juxtapositions at the onset of modernity, the arrival of differing social mores from America and Europe. Something Old, New, Borrowed and Blue, by contrast, subtly postures toward its contemporary setting, with references to the bride Putri Annisa Sari’s (Ayushita Nugraha) vocational desires and her higher salary than her husband-to-be. The absence of a similar historical distance diminishes a sense of sociocultural difference, but also the feeling of viewing the film as pure historical spectacle.

That Surya’s film centres on a contrast between public and private, and between spectacular and intimate, creates space for the dramatic tension surrounding the transition in gender roles accompanied by marriage. The film’s opening scene of a ceremonial procession is presented in a warm colour palette, with the edges of the frame blurred to heighten focus on the procession itself, with a prayer being broadcast over a speaker. The long shots of the procession through narrow bridges and alleys give way to medium shots of mother (Christine Hakim) and daughter, firmly establishing this contrast between public spectacle and private tenderness. The intimacy of the conversation between mother and daughter, juxtaposed with the bride’s ornate attire and the officiousness of the procession, lays out marital expectations for their conversation takes place away from the scrutiny of the wedding’s guests, strengthening a sense of dramatic irony—that concerns and reassurances are absent from the transactional vows exchanged by the fathers of bride and groom. The camera pans out to reveal that their backs are turned to this betrothal, further foregrounding this sense of ceremonial elision.

The conversation between bride and mother also presents the clearest articulation of the gender dynamics at stake in marriage. Her mother’s assertion is clear: a wife’s role is to be “a queen in the living room”, “a maid in the kitchen” and in “the bedroom… a whore”. These permutations of female distinctiveness and power are predicated on three sites of domesticity, with her injunction for her daughter asserting that she is to be domineering and authoritative in matters of hospitality, meticulous and subservient in matters of tidiness and hygiene, and rambunctious and lascivious in her sexuality. In explaining that Joko is expected to grow in his capacity as a husband to be “dominant and headstrong”, the film underscores the expectation that the bride’s domestic duties will pivot on the desires of a domineering patriarch. Where the film demonstrates a sense of the bride’s feminine modernity lies in her assertion of her previous desire to be a flight attendant, itself a role that entails remunerated emotional and social labour. Her mother’s rejection of this possibility seems to suggest the expectation of her being a full-time homemaker. However, the revelation that she earns more money than her husband further subverts the expectation of traditional and restrictive gender roles, accentuated by her mother’s assertion that this must be made known to her husband.

That the film concludes with the ritual of the husband stepping on a chicken egg with his right foot—inducing a return to the public nature of the wedding ceremony—with his newly betrothed wife washing his foot in water mixed with flower petals. In accordance with Islamic-Javanese custom, the ritual symbolises the groom’s readiness to become the responsible head of the family and for the couple to have good children, highlighting the primarily domestic function of marriage. The conspicuous absence of the headshots of any of the film’s husbands again lays bare the overlooked centrality of women in marriage, especially in all matters pertaining to biological and social reproduction. That the film concludes with the bride’s mother’s glowing smile, as well as her own assumption of her public role as bride through the ritual, perhaps emphasises the sacrifices demanded of women in Islamic marriage. Rather than pontificating about the Islamic notions of mawaddah, rahmah, and sakinah (love, mercy, and tranquillity), the film allows the symbolic strength of the ritual to resonate in the film’s final shot, with the audience fully cognisant of the private conversation that preceded it. Surya presents not a blistering or subversive critique of Islamic marriage in Indonesia, but presents it with a rich complexity, drawing attention to the fears, expectations, and affections of women that its rituals do not always reflect. 

August 2020

How to cite: Chan, Jonathan. “Rich Complexity: Mouly Surya’s Something Old, New, Borrowed and Blue.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 30 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/30/something-old.

Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor of poetry and essays. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated at Cambridge and Yale. He is the author of the poetry collection going home (Landmark, 2022), which was named a 2022 Book of the Year by SUSPECT. Previously a participant in the Singapore International Film Festival’s Youth Jury & Critics Programme, his writing on film has appeared in Stories Journal, Film Criticism, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. More of his writing can be found at here. [All contributions by Jonathan Chan.]

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