Punggok Rindukan Bulan

excerpted from OFF THE EDGE Oct 08
Biting Cinema: Viewing the country's liminal zones by Benjamin McKay

Azharr Rudin's Punggok Rindukan Bulan (This Longing) is many worlds away from the glamorous horror of Susuk. This languidly paced rumination on space and place is, on the surface, a tale about a young boy Sidi (Saeful Nazhif Satria) and his father Adman (Sahronizam Noor) who are both emotionally dealing with the absence of Umi (Maya Karin), their mother and wife. Shot in Johor Bahru and largely set in the recently demolished Bukit Chagar housing development, this modest but astonishing film is proof that the promise of Azharr's The Amber Sexalogy was indeed justified. In making a thematic link to my musings on liminality, I can think of no more profoundly liminal a place than JB, and this film captures it with a quiet, poetic intensity rarely found on Malaysian screens.

This movie will have a decidedly niche audience, but for those with patience and imagination I thoroughly recommend taking this journey. The marvelous sense of being struck on a threshold and weighed down by a strangely palpable sense of inertia captures for me the essence of the city this film brilliantly evokes. The sense that the spaces we inhibit might shape and define us is a theme rarely explored on screen. This is a movie that is largely about a built environment and the manner in which that environment is inhabited; and yet, there is nothing routinely prosaic about this film. We are woven into the narrative in unusually oblique ways and therefore this seemingly simple tale has layers of complexity that linger long after the film ends.

The title is literally translated as 'like the owl misses the moon' and supposedly alludes to unrequited and unconsummated longing. It is no mean feat to successfully and simply portray that sort of action-less longing on screen, but Azharr Rudin has done it. I also cannot think of any other Malaysian film that so evocatively captures this sense of liminality, which for me finds true home in frontier towns like JB. This young filmmaker needs to be congratulated for giving this city a starring role.

The links between these two films may have been tenuous but tenuous link are always worth exploring. The liminal thread is in both works for very different reasons