Mouly Surya made her directorial debut with Fiski in 2008, which earned her four awards at the Indonesian Film Festival that same year including best director and best screenplay.

Her second film, titled What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love, followed five years later and her latest film Marlina The Murderer in Four Acts has already been lauded at the Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight and hailed as the first ‘satay Western’ within the film community. The films tells the story of the young widow Marlina (Marsha Timothy) who having received an unwelcome guest embarks on an adventure that unfolds in four acts, bringing her into contact with unhelpful ping-pong playing policemen, an elderly woman determined to marry her off to her nephew and – of course – the headless ghost of one of Marlina’s victims.

I sat down with the writer-director to tell me more about her motivation behind directing this film, her cinematic approach and how she succeeded in bringing together genre and gender and make space for new stories told from a female point of view.

How was Marlina first conceived and how did you approach the story?

Marlina was actually not originally my idea but of another director, Garin Nugroho (Opera Jawa, 2006), one of the most important directors in Indonesia and also my senior.

I first met him by chance in 2014 when we were on a jury together at the Citra Awards (the Indonesian Oscars) and he randomly told me about an idea of a story that he couldn’t direct himself. The film is based on Sumba island and he had already done three or four projects there.

It was then that he thought that perhaps I should do it. The next day he sent me an e-mail with a long synopsis, some kind of treatment of the story. I gave it to my producer, who has been producing my films since the very first, and he fell in love with it.

To tell you the truth, I was quite hesitant back then because it was going to be my first time directing and writing. It was also a film that was not originally my idea, which was quite disconcerting at first.

Scenes from Marlina The Murderer in Four Acts.

It took me a while to develop the story and film. But I started by doing some research, visiting the island for the first time, and looking for my own way to relate with/to the story.

The story itself is actually very simple, which is what I love about it. It’s a survival story about a woman in an extreme situation. Even though it’s simple, the perspective plays a very big part of it, and actually it wouldn’t work with a complicated story.

Marlina has been described as an alternative Western. What was the reason behind using/re-using this genre? 

The story itself tells of ‘village violence’ – a kind of violence that happens in villages, so not really a western. But, as I researched more and heard about these kind of stories and this island, the setting, I found myself more attracted to the film when I imagined it as a Western.

A survival story about a woman in an extreme situation

Perhaps it’s because I was born and raised in a big city, in Chicago. I studied in Australia, and this is a very localised context which I thought was universal enough to ingest, in a way, as sometimes Westerns can be very beautiful but feel very distant.

Marlina is a story is about a woman and is also uniquely an Indonesian film, so how could it be a Western? What should I call it? The whole idea became intriguing to me and I started to look for references, like Jim Jarmuch’s Dead Man and other alternative ‘westerny’ films. But, first and foremost I wanted the film to be authentically Asian.

So in a way you took the aesthetic of the Western along with the masculinity and misogyny one associates with this genre and turned them on their head…

Yes, I play a lot with it aesthetically. But then, the story itself is totally flipping the world around. That’s how the story itself originally is, but the Western puts this story into a different point of view and I think that’s what makes it different and really interesting.

What was the reason behind the four act narrative? What does this add to the ‘telling’ of story?

When Garim originally gave me the story it was already divided into acts, simply titled ‘Woman’. All the characters were titled ‘man1’, ‘man2’, etc. Then I found the name ‘Marlina’ and added the word ‘murderer’ as an irony of itself.

But, this title alone didn’t really portray the other different layers to the film. Putting in the four acts, gave it some more elegance in a way; it’s not just a popcorn movie about someone who murders someone else. I also really like ballet and, when I read Gatrim’s story, I had this sort of stage feeling.

It was very much setting the space like in a ballet, and so I wanted to recreate that feeling.

Would you like to see your film adapted for the stage then?

Yes, I would love to see Marlina turned into a ballet!

Your film deals with a particular, localised context. Yet, it tells a universal story. Thinking about the recent Harvey Weinstein scandal, there is clearly a strong culture of this form of threat and abuse on women, but also a culture of silence and maintaining this silence across the borders. Do you have any thoughts on this?

It’s everywhere – it shouldn’t be so universal but it happens everywhere. However, the universality of Marlina is not just in this fact, but also because it is a survival story. Even a man can understand a survival story, it is human instinct. There are also gender roles in the film, which are universal too. In a way, I don’t want that part of Marlina to be so universal, but sadly it is. I actually looked at a couple of sexual assault cases as I have to put it down in a very simple scene in the third act of the film.

It is a scene that could only take five to 10 minutes to get the sense of what usually happens, especially in a very rural area and localised context. But you get the sense of how it can happen in a wider context. I wanted to convey that everyone has a part to play.

Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts screens on Wednesday at 7.30pm and on April 13 and 27 at 8.30pm as part of Spazju Kreattiv’s Cinema Programme.

www.kreattivita.org