“A bad hair day...”

           There are days when you feel you would do better to stay in bed... and I guess today was one of those...

         I even thought that, after the torrential rains that came pouring down in Nantes yesterday – leaving me and my fellow festival-goers soaked to the skin – things could not get worse... How wrong was I! Unfortunately for me I still had to watch Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly...

         On a drizzly Sunday morning, curiosity led me to attend the screening of this Indonesian film in competition at the Festival. As a young girl, my parents kept repeating to me that “curiosity killed the cat” – Edwin’s movie just went to show how right they were... So listen kids: you MUST really do as your parents tell you!

         In all seriousness, Babi buta yang ingin terbang – Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly in Indonesian – is not that bad... It is even a sassy film in which the young film-director tries his best to convey the inner turmoil in which the Chinese population finds itself in Indonesia. But taking a bunch of apparently disparate characters and slowly (far too slowly!) connecting them together over the course of the story (if there is a story...) is, in my opinion, not the best way to reach an audience which is probably not well aware of the racial discrimination against Chinese throughout the country.

         Indeed, one needs to mention here that, although the Chinese population has been settled on the continent for more than 400 years, it nowadays still counts for less than a percent of the total population in Indonesia and is thus the victim of a real ethnic “scapegoating” – hence the metaphor of the pig used both in the title and in the movie (people of direct Chinese descent are wickedly nicknamed “pigs” by Indonesians).

         Filmed as a series of vignettes jumping back and forth in time, this debut feature film unfolds through repeated clichés, jokes or even symbols: Linda, the young ethnic Chinese woman finds fame in eating firecrackers (a Chinese invention ironically enough!) or yet again the dentist’s wife – a retired badminton player who used to be part of a Chinese team – spends her day assembling fritters which seem to be filled with... pork! But what to say of Stevie Wonder's song I Just Called To Say I Love You which the characters sing (or rather slaughter!) throughout the film? Sometimes it seems that a word says as much as a thousand pictures...

Marie-Agnès Lachèze