TIFF 51: “Four Seasons in Java” is Kamila Andini’s most ambitious film to date

by Cláudio Alves

Over the last decade and change, Kamila Andini has become one of Indonesia's most acclaimed and internationally recognized filmmakers. Her debut, 2011’s The Mirror Never Lies, carried the pressure of paternal legacy, for Andini is the daughter of renowned director Garin Nugroho. Yet, the film’s promise of excellence was enough to supersede the legacy of blood and quiet any errant accusations of nepotism. More successes followed, including 2021’s Yuni, which represented Indonesia at the 94th Academy Awards, and 2022’s Before, Now and Then, which competed at the Berlinale and won Laura Basuki a deserved Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance. This year, her Four Seasons in Java had its world premiere at TIFF as a Centerpiece selection. 

Part revenge Western and part ghostly horror, part foray into magical realism and a piece of landscape poetry, a reflection on sexual violence against women and the insufficiencies of superficial progress, the film is hard to describe, much less categorize. There’s one thing about Four Seasons in Java of which there is no doubt, however. It is Andini’s most ambitious project yet…

Two decades have passed since Pertiwi has been to her hometown in the Indonesian countryside. Something terrible happened twenty years ago, and the erstwhile young woman was imprisoned, justice denied, womb removed. To add insult to injury, those most to blame for her suffering have gained power, becoming leaders in a community whose misery seems set in stone. At the time of her arrest, she witnessed the coming of electrical power to the village, but the system is still faulty nowadays. At night, the town flickers, erratic, street lamps like the heartbeat of a horror movie victim. The score pounds in the soundtrack and mixes with effects, instruments discombobulating into an electric buzz, readying itself to roar. 

As she stands in front of her parents’ house at the witch’s hour, it’s hard to discern if Pertiwi is to be that aforementioned victim or if she’s the monster, summoned from hell to claim her pound of flesh in vengeance. Inside, safe in their beds, the older couple panics and asks why she’s come home, fearing their daughter as one might fear a ghoul. But the surrounding forest seems to have threats of its own. Threats that gaze upon our heroine and contemplate her. The POV shot where this manifests is strange, a hyper-stylized aesthetic rupture. It’s a sight bathed in red, bright and unreal, like that shade of fake blood used in 70s giallos whose violence was spectacular but hardly ever felt real.

Other elements will contribute to this eeriness that crawls under your skin, burrows there, and bites down hard and merciless. It starts with an old friend, caged for the crime of his supposed strangeness, vitiligo painting his face white. She frees him, but there’s more. An older ally has been all but pushed out of the community, exiled to the shore where she can give Pertiwi much-needed motherly love and shout “fuck them all” to the smoking volcano in the background, watching like some natural deity who’s grown angry at the mortals’ doings. In an abandoned place, malfunctioning electronics come to life late at night and speak voices from the past. Sometimes, they show images, too. 

In a move that begs for a Twin Peaks comparison, Andini has her protagonist watch VHS recordings of two girls, including her younger self. The other might be the ex-best friend who is now married to Perwiti’s ex-boyfriend, though she might not be. Their fate is similarly unclear at that point in the two-hour-plus movie. Whatever the case, the audience can surely and correctly assume it’s something tragic. The sadness that softens Perwiti’s expression certainly suggests so. Putri Marino comes to Four Seasons in Java with a face that seems far too young for her old eyes, soft flesh hardened by ancient outrage. It’s a face that tells a story on its own while remaining somewhat closed. It keeps its secrets. 

Before a screen singing the siren song of painful memory, that secretive visage breaks open. What comes out is sorrow too deep to instantly understand. It’s inarticulate, powerful. It’s also too intimate to share, privy to the ghosts that keep her company and the film’s audience alone. After all, we might as well be ghosts to Perwiti who, herself, is received like an angry spirit by her unwelcoming hometown. Or perchance, we are her dream. Four Seasons in Java opens with the sounds of slow breathing and an image of Marino asleep in a meadow, grassland remade as a bed. She might be dreaming of someone who understands her in a world full of people who don’t. She might be dreaming of us who learn to know her through Andini’s camera. 

The film breathes, the film dreams. Cinema is a living organism, just like Perwiti is her corrupted town’s guilt made flesh, their living nightmare. Indeed, a certain kind of dream logic is present throughout Four Seasons in Java, and that’s obvious even before monster claws come out behind a tree during oneiric reveries. Because another girl and her sister have been hurt, just like Perwiti once was. She’s the survivor’s dream of herself, a painful reflection and reminder, like a memory twisted by time, made deaf and mute to better underline the isolation she shares with the woman returned. It’s a powerful commentary on the cycles of violence that go on, eternally, in places like these where bad men can do what they want and go unpunished, untouched, never held accountable for their misdeeds. 

One cannot fault the justified outrage fueling this fire that burns deep within Four Seasons in Java. Still, some aspects deserve harsher scrutiny. While the point about cyclical violence against women is important, it sometimes seems as if Andini has created characters that function merely as receptacles of pain or dream-reflections to help us better see Perwiti. The withholding of information, so that you slowly build the puzzle of what happened twenty years ago, is another device that gives one pause, appearing purposeless in its slow trickle of truths. The pace feels dictated according to storytelling conventions rather than this particular story’s demands. And when it’s all out in the open, the violence of a flashback comes too close to exploitation. 

Yet, one of the film’s best passages is precisely that sort of narrative “fat” that those most prone to complain about overlong movies would have trimmed away. It happens when Perwiti leaves for the big city, where she’s been living with a found family of sorts while absent from her hometown. There, Four Season in Java gets to breathe after feeling stifled, near suffocating, for so long. The same could be said of Marino’s performance, finally able to move away from the monotonal torments of her return and express itself through different strategies. There’s even a musical break, a chance to be raw and real in public rather than swallow it down, hide it all in a privacy that only the camera transgresses. It’s time to scream it out.

Sure, overall, these many choices and detours contribute to the feeling of a tale stretched out too thin, jeopardizing the audience’s engagement along its protracted way. But there’s value in this excess. If Four Seasons in Java is a bit of mess, it’s also a fascinating one, made of big swings and artistic boldness, risks only a confident auteur at the height of their powers could take. And I, for one, find no interest in curtailing Kamila Andini’s growing ambition, her mélange of genre references and borrowed codes, all in service of a tale of female rage with a bombastic climax that opens the heavens up in a gesture that lives between realities and promises a salvation our own world can’t so easily provide.

After its world premiere, Four Seasons in Java will screen again on September 15 and September 20, the last day of this year’s TIFF.