REVIEWS


Reviews edited by Mark Adams mark.adams@screendaily.com


Postcards From The Zoo REVIEWED BY LEE MARSHALL


A Jakarta zoo is the setting for a slow and dreamy magical realist romance in Indonesian film-maker Edwin’s follow-up to his well-received 2008 debut Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly. Sweet and playful as a baby monkey, but with


the lumbering pace of a hippo, the film has shades of both Thai auteur Pen-ek Ratanaruang (particu- larly Monrak Transistor) and Japanese manga guru Hayao Miyazaki (particularly Spirited Away). In fact, it feels a little as if the former had adapted and directed a script by the latter. Edwin is just beginning to make a name for


himself among international cineastes, but this second feature should broaden his appeal. Though still highly allusive, Postcards From The Zoo (Kebun Binatang) has a more linear storyline than Blind Pig, and tones down the shock factor that made parts of that film difficult to watch for some. Edwin belongs to Indonesia’s small Chinese


ethnic minority, whose uneasy, tension-fraught position in this majority-Muslim country was explored in the fragmented, multi-strand narra- tive of Blind Pig. It would not be much of a stretch to see the zoo, where central character Lana grows up protected from the city outside, as a metaphor — perhaps for the security of a family and com- munity that feels separate from the rest of society, visited by it, stared at, sometimes fed by it, but not a part of it.


n 4 Screen International at the Berlinale February 16, 2012 COMPETITION


Indo-Ger-HK-Chi. 2012. 96mins Director Edwin Production company Babibutafilm Co-producers Pallas Film, Lorna Tee International sales The Match Factory, www. the-match-factory.com Producer Meiske Taurisia Screenplay Edwin, Daud Sumolang, Titien Wattimena Cinematography Sadi Saleh Editor Herman Kumala Panca Production designer Eros Eflin Music Dave Lumenta Main cast Ladya Cheryl, Nicholas Saputra


And it is true the director encourages symbolic


readings by using a series of informative intertitles to divide the story into chapters — some of them culled from Wikipedia, the credits reveal. These intertitles provide definitions of terms relating to zoo science: from ‘ex situ conservation’ (protecting an endangered species by removing it from its natural habitat) to the ‘re-introduction’ of a spe- cies to the wild. We are clearly supposed to apply these to the story of the fey and other-worldly Lana (Cheryl), but whether or not she is a symbol for something, or someone, is left open. Less interested in traditional narrative than


atmosphere and the poetry of sound and vision, the film is so sparing with its explanations that we are never even sure the little girl we see wandering around the zoo calling for her daddy in the haunting opening scenes is the grown-up Lana we first meet after 15 minutes. But we assume she must be, because disappearing and coming back — a sort of existential hide and seek — distilled in a lovely sequence where Lana plays peek-a-boo with a giraffe — is one of the film’s main themes. Lana walks around the zoo, where she seems to


have become a fixture, equally at ease with the zookeepers, the tent-dwelling vagrants and drift- ers who live in remote areas of the park, and the animals themselves. One day she notices a cool young guy in a cowboy hat (he is never given a name) who does magic tricks — making lights


disappear and re-appear, levitating paper tissues and setting them on fire. He persuades Lana to leave the zoo by climbing


the wall; in the outside world, she follows her man around, dressed as a squaw, helping him sell bottles of eternal-youth potion and acting as his assistant in magic tricks. When cowboy man him- self disappears in the course of one of his num- bers, Lana finds refuge in a massage parlour where the male customers looking for sexy rub- downs seem like so many animals at the zoo. Though violence exists in this gangster-run brothel, the overall tone, as channelled through Lana, is tender and wondering. Sometimes shot from a respectful, hesitant dis-


tance, with several high crane shots, at other times exploring the world and its animals with hand- held close-ups, the film seems to share Lana’s unschooled wonder. It evokes also a sense of unre- solved longing that is present in the central love story, but not exclusive to it. Cinematic poetry of this nature is often a slow-


build affair, and for much of its running time Post- cards From The Zoo is one of those odd viewing experiences that bores and fascinates at the same time. The patient viewer, though, will be rewarded by what is in the end an unclassifiable work of striking originality.


SCREEN SCORE ★★★


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