Ten years ago, on May 19th 1998, a tragedy happened in Jakarta. It was later known as Tragedy of May 1998. Its tenth year commemoration, which is this year, is marked by the release of a movie “May” directed by Viva West. Last Wednesday, I got the chance to watch the movie along with some friends of mine.
The movie depicts the story of an Indonesian Chinese girl struggling with her efforts to forget at first but then reconcile with her experience around the tragedy. Because of the tragedy, she has to be separated from her mother, boyfriend and her hometown, Jakarta. It has been ten years that she tries to repress all feelings and memories related to the tragedy. She is almost there to establish a new life by becoming a café singer in Malaysia. However, one by one, persons around her past life appear and remind her of the tragedy. First, appears the one who helped her after the tragedy and brought her to Malaysia. He is raising her son, whom she feels suspicious at that the boy is the result of the tragedy (raping?). Follows the appearance of Antares, his former boyfriend, whom she blamed for her experiencing the tragedy. He was late to fetch her on the day of the tragedy, for he had to make a documentary about the situation then. In other scenes, May’s mother, forced to leave her house and town and now settled in Malaysia being a waitress in a food vendor, meet again with Gandang, to whom she had sold the certificates of her house and other belongings. Later on, he pay back the house and give it back to her in the same condition as she left it. The flashback to the past begins. It becomes clearer how those fragments come together to make up the whole story.
As May comes to be involved once again with her past, she finds out some new things about the tragedy. It turned out that the boy she gave birth is actually her son with Antares. Antares himself comes to her to confess all his faults and asks her once again to live with him. It is his LOVE to her that smoothens her heart and helps her to get reconciled with her past to accept what have happened and start a new life with a new hope for the future. In the end, May’s mother and May live happily with Antares and their son in their old house.
Despite this “so sweet” ending, which I think far from the reality, this movie is so worth watching. Many won’t agree that the stories of the victims of the tragedy end as sweet and happy as this movie does for it is not that easy to deal with such a painful and sorrowful past. For some, it might be a trauma. This movie can help, however, to see the tragedy from the victim’s point of view and get more clear pictures about it. They won’t be complete, but upon watching it, we will be triggered to find out more information and data so that we get more and more comprehensive view about the tragedy.
