The reorganization of order in Mengejar Matahari

THE MOVIE Mengejar Matahari (Chasing the Sun, 2004) was Rudi Soedjarwo’s first movie which he created outside Miles Films. Since his success with the phenomenal Ada Apa dengan Cinta?,[1] Rudi Soedjarwo has directed only one movie that had the theme of love, Rumah Ketujuh (The Seventh House, 2002).[2] We can say that Mengejar Matahari is an important landmark in his career, as it was in this movie that Rudi started to use his own story. The movie also serves as an introductory note for his subsequent films; all of which present strong urban thematic undercurrents.

In the world of contemporary Indonesian cinema, no other director uses the theme of urban lives as intensely as Rudi. In his latest movies—such as 9 Naga (9 Dragons, 2005), Mendadak Dangdut (Suddenly Dangdut, 2006),[3] and even his horror movie Pocong 2 (2006)[4]—urban lives and background play an important role. Rudi himself, although he was born in Bogor, grew up in Jakarta.

We can safely say that as one of the most prominent young directors, Rudi has consistent cinematic characteristics. One of them is their emphasis on urban lives. In this essay, I shall proceed to analyze this particular characteristic using the movie Mengejar Matahari. The film tells of four best mates—Ardi, Nino, Apin, and Damar—who reside in an apartment project in Jakarta. These four boys had witnessed a murder conducted by Obet, a local thug.

The story begins when the four friends are already in high school. Situating the mise en scéne in an apartment project,[5] the movie presents the conflict among the four best friends. The arrival of Rara, Nino’s orphaned (female) cousin, triggers a conflict between Ardi and Damar. Meanwhile, Damar has to deal with the re-appearance of Obet, who has served his term in prison and wants revenge. During a fight Apin is killed, and Damar, who becomes emotional, shoots Obet. The movie ends with a scene in which Damar is arrested by the police, witnessed by the residents of the apartment project.


The apartment as the mise en scéne
The movie Mengejar Matahari essentially talks of friendship. Here, Rudi wishes to portray the friendship among four teenage boys who all come from the lower-to-middle class families. Besides depicting the apartment project as full of thugs—which means crime—the movie also tries to present beautiful images of the place. Understandably, therefore, the film received the Citra award at the Indonesian Film Festival in 2004.

The film uses Ardi’s point of view, the only son of an authoritarian, low-rank police officer. The small family lives in the apartment project, in a crowded unit with gloomy paint, naked wires—electrical, telephone, or otherwise— and windows facing the bluish sky.

In the beginning of the movie, the camera presents an established image of a grey apartment building with small windows. An air-conditioning machine is installed in one of the apartment units, and the rooftop is a riot of television antennae. The succeeding frames present images of clothes hanging on the drying lines—a typical sight in an apartment. These images are presented using a high camera angle and bird-eye view, so that a comprehensive horizontal section of the building can be clearly seen.

This opening scene is accompanied by a popular song—not dangdut—composed by Andi Rianto. The places that would then become the four protagonists’ rendezvous are the lanes among the buildings and in the kampong. In a zoomed-in picture of a silent lane with a lone vegetables (or meatballs) cart at the corner of an intersection, we hear Ardi’s narration, “This is an apartment project. Entering the area, it’ll be like we’re crossing the boundary into a whole different world. This place certainly holds thousands of different stories in store.”

Ardi’s narration serves as the entrance to the grand story of friendship that Rudi wishes to convey. Ardi, one of the protagonists in the movie, is seventeen when the story starts. He tells us that he has lived in the apartment project all his life. This means he has been a resident there since 1987.

The government of Indonesia has built a number of low-cost apartment projects in order to manage the problem of insufficient dwelling places for the urbanites. Some sources mentioned that apartment projects have been built since 1982, starting with the construction of Pulomas apartment project.[6] Meanwhile, Darrundono viewed the construction of apartment projects as a government policy that began in 1969, when the government of the special capital territory of Jakarta launched the kampong improvement program, or the Muhammad Husni Thamrin Project.[7] The project was a government’s initiative to anticipate the burgeoning number of Jakarta residents; in 1969, 60% of whom (or around three millions out of the total 4.8 millions people) lived in the slums. The project, which incidentally had been similar to the ethical-policy initiative of the Dutch colonial government in the 1930s, was modified in 1983 as the regional government of the special capital territory of Jakarta started to build apartment projects by demolishing slums.

In her famous book, The Wheel of Fortune, Lea Jellinek says that in 1981 the regional government of the special capital territory of Jakarta started to “rejuvenate” the area of Kebon Kacang (which serves as the setting of the movie Mengejar Matahari).[9] The construction of the apartment project in this area was rife with corrupt processes of measurements, compensation-giving, and demolition, involving a sum of millions of rupiah—which was huge at the time. This was followed by the “rejuvenation” of other urban areas, especially in the district of Tambora and then Karang Anyar in 1985, after this area was rampaged by a fire. These housing projects are (invariably) aimed at the eradication of poverty and slums.

As an Indonesian city with the highest growth-rate in terms of population, Jakarta is under a heavy pressure. The arrivals of people from the villages since the colonial period up to the present era have sharply increased housing needs. Since the New Order came to power, Jakarta witnessed the growth of informal dwelling areas (or kampong), that are crowded, grubby, filthy, do not follow formal regulations, and whose residents are mostly poor.

It was indeed for such residents that the New Order built the apartment projects. Understandably, therefore, people had always understood such apartment projects as places for the poor (lower class). Such understanding is not only common among academics and policy makers,[10] but also among filmmakers such as Rudi Soedjarwo.

By trying to present an atmosphere of chaos, filth, and crime (by means of the fights that serve as the subject matter of the film), Rudi wishes to depict the friendship among ‘the lower class’. Through the character developments that he has orchestrated, we are made to believe that these protagonists were indeed born and grew up in an apartment project—which many think as representing the lower class. Thugs such as Obet can certainly not be present in a movie set in Pondok Indah or any other elite housing area in Jakarta.

The characters depicted in this movie are presented as people with problems that are typical for urbanites—and which, unfortunately, are not exclusive to the lower class. Ardi’s father is an ex-cop who has retired (or has been fired?) and has an acute post-power syndrome. Damar’s father has run away, heavens know where, leaving Damar with his mother who is always busy doing God-knows-what. Nino, the best-off among them, dreams of taking a business course in the United States. Meanwhile, Rara, the source of conflict between Damar and Ardi, is an orphaned girl who suffers and leads a sorrowful life, inciting pity and sympathy, but is able to go to Malaysia—certainly not as a domestic worker.

These characters can be viewed as oddities among the chaos and filth of the apartment project in Mengejar Matahari. Is there anyone in the apartment project—which according to the government is the place for those in the lower class—who can dream of studying in the United States? Is there anyone living in the apartment project and meeting thugs on a daily basis, who finds video cameras commonplace? Is there anyone residing in the apartment project who is a poor orphan but also able to appear fresh and beautiful, and go abroad easily?

Such oddities are parallel with the presence of air-conditioning units and video cameras in the apartment project. As mentioned before, vertical housing constructions (i.e. apartment projects) are mainly aimed at those in the low income bracket. As they demolished the urban kampongs, the government expects to organize the former kampong residents within the apartment projects. For the government, the presence of the urban kampong is a nuisance and must therefore be wiped out.

Since the New Order embarked on this effort during the 1980s, right when the regime became established economically, the relocation of the kampong dwellers into the apartment projects has seen many failures. As many experts have shown, the construction of the apartment projects precisely presented new problems, such as wrong targets, corruption, and cultural shocks. In many cases, the apartment projects became home not for the poor who have lived in the urban villages, but the middle class people who are able to pay the rent and service-fees for the building. According to Darrundono, more than 90% of the people who reside in the apartment projects come from the middle class.[11]

What Darrundono has stated can empirically be seen in the mise en scéne of Mengejar Matahari. Not only are televisions, video cameras, and air-conditioning units commonly seen in the apartment project, but the residents also have the mentality of the Indonesian middle class who take the United States as a patron, listen to Arie Lasso’s pop song, and use guns as their weapon of choice.[12]

The shift in the representation of the apartment project’s residents will be obvious if we compare this film with another movie entitled Cintaku di Rumah Susun (Love in the Apartment Project, 1987), which was made at the time when the apartment project was still the place for the common workers, a crook’s lover, and a widow who could not pay the rent.

Cintaku di Rumah Susun takes a rather different point of view compared to that of Mengejar Matahari. Since the beginning, Cintaku di Rumah Susun presents a rather unique point of view. Its opening image is a board near the railway, saying “Welcome to the Capital City of Jakarta”. The train is one of the vehicles that transport people from the villages to the city. The low-angle take of the board suggests that the board is seen by the people who just come to the city.

It seems that the whole series of events and characters in this film are seen using the point of view of the newly-arrived. The initial images of the film are dominated by established shots of the apartment project near the railway, with the depictions of people peeing on the street, women in traditional clothes, and the residents of the apartment project who still talk using their different local dialects.

The characters appearing in Cintaku di Rumah Susun provide a sketch of life in the cacophonous apartment project.[13] There is Somad’s grandfather who forbids his grandson, a worker in a beer factory, to have a girlfriend. Badrun, a neighbor, teaches Somad about how to get a girlfriend. Somad’s sister, a feisty young woman, is eternally in conflict with Zuleha, a crook’s mistress. In this apartment project one also meets the flirtatious chairman of the neighborhood association, as well as Mastun, a middle-age woman who is always in arrears.

Besides those characters, Nya Abbas Akup—who wrote the script himself—also presents a myriad of caricatural characters; from an annoying old woman to gossipy and snoopy neighbors. People living in the apartment project face many problems—from leaking walls, meddling neighbors, up to graver problems such as economic problems and problems of discrimination by the riches who live in Kebayoran or Menteng.[14]

These problems serve as the pivotal element of Cintaku di Rumah Susun. On the other hand, it will be difficult to encounter such problems among the characters in Mengejar Matahari. In the latter movie, characters with economic problems are rare. There are no residents in arrears, no one is forcibly displaced—something which actually happened some time ago in Pulomas apartment project. No one uses local dialects. No heated arguments about adultery. No problem.


The sterile generation of the New Order regime
Many people will not consider Mengejar Matahari as a movie that realistically depicts the living condition in an apartment project. The movie, albeit employing extraordinarily-good camera angles, presents “reality” in the apartment project in fragmented ways, as visual signs devoid of atmosphere. Throughout the film, all the characters never interact socially with the other residents. Aside from the four protagonists, the residents in the apartment project are depicted as the unknown, excluded from the frame, out of shot, and under-represented. Such figure as Obet, for example, does not even have a history. As the source of malady, Obet is portrayed as evil and nothing else. His “evilness” is a given. He exists in the periphery, like all other residents in the apartment project.

Rudi chose four male teenagers to depict the whole social dynamics in the mise en scéne. These four juveniles are portrayed amid a sterile mise en scéne, free from the social and the snags. Such a tendency, of course, is not one that is exclusive to Mengejar Matahari. Movies made after 1998 generally have a strong tendency to eliminate the social from the mise en scéne. Like many other post-1998 films, Mengejar Matahari exists almost without any criticism about the visual expressions of space that the New Order regime had generated.

If the mise en scéne is a filmmaker’s means of expressions, then I find that Mengejar Matahari precisely presents an authority that is very much unlike that found in such critical movies as Cintaku di Rumah Susun. The “sterilism” of Mengejar Matahari is not a “sterilism” that truly eliminates the social and the problem of power from the movie. Rather, it precisely presents these matters in a subtle manner that is highly typical of the New Order. Space in the movie is presented as something static, something that does not move along with the subject in the film (24 frames per second). The movie precisely freezes the space, turning it into something that Ackbar Abbas calls the “tourist gaze”, in which space (or in this case the apartment project) becomes very stable, monumental, and touristic.[16] In such a discourse, cultural memories on the apartment project have been reduced as something that exists there, but devoid of any identity or history. While the early narrative of the film, as represented by Ardi’s narration, promised a distinct story from the apartment project, this story then disappears. Probably the story had once existed, but there isn’t any character who can still convey it.

Another narrative aspect worth noting is that Ardi, the main character in the movie, is a boy who is always under the dominating influence of his militaristic father, while Damar has no father. The problem of the patriarch culminates in the figure of Rara, the female teenager who has no mother and father—and it is the absence of the latter figure of the father that makes her look especially pitiful.

The problem of the patriarch is again seen in the closing scenes of the movie. After Damar kills Obet, the police come to arrest him. The arrival of the police is not something automatic and cinematically necessary. Further than that, the police re-present the militaristic figure of Ardi’s father. We can probably say that this scene is the only one in the movie that presents the social in its real form. The scene depicts people—probably the residents of the apartment project—who gather around Damar and watch as he is caught by the police.

The presence of the social in the scene—and the only time in which the social is significant—is not something that is meaningless. Here, the unknown social—the ones out of shot, a floating mass, under-represented—becomes the witness of an ordering in which the police is the apparatus. Therefore, the statement of the film is in line and in harmony with the mise en scéne of the movie; i.e. the use of the apartment project to organize and manage the disorder, and as an effort of spatial reorganization by the New Order.

An apartment project, like a mall, is a realm in which all things are in control, under surveillance, and selective. The apartment project is a place in which the disorder of the urban villages, as well as their radical nature and their unknown niches, are conquered. While in Cintaku di Rumah Susun (1987) we are able to perceive and feel the biography of each character as well as all the attending problems, in Mengejar Matahari all the characters exist without history. They seem to be placed absent-mindedly into the mise en scéne without any spatial link between each character and the mise en scéne (i.e. the apartment project).

It is not a coincidence that in the 1980s the construction of the apartment project—which becomes the location of the movie—took place at the same time when mysterious killings of the infamous Petrus project was conducted, exterminating thugs who were thought of as hindering “the stability of the New Order development”. Thugs like Obet—just like the thousands of thugs and tattooed men hunted down by the police and the military in the 1980s—have been wiped off, forgotten, represented as a disturbance to be discarded for the sake of the economic stability of the regime.[17]

On some levels, the movie serves as the clearest representation of the detachment of the character (in this case the Indonesian urbanite) from his or her spatial surrounding (the apartment project). The generation represented by the movie Mengejar Matahari is a generation born out of the “sterile” space of the New Order’s apartment project. Furthermore, if we apply the term used by Abidin Kusno,[18] the movie Mengejar Matahari serves as the articulation of the visual order of the New Order regime. Like the apartment project that tries to organize the urban disorder and radicalism in controlled narrow spaces, the movie also tells of the return of order, from the hands of the thugs (the urban criminals) to the patriarchal order of the state (the police).

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the movie ends with a “happy” scene, in which Ardi makes peace with his father and becomes a police officer, while Nino succeeds in turning his dream of studying in the US into reality. If we consider a movie as the miniature of reality, then Mengejar Matahari is the most sophisticated representation of New Order’s authority. It exists as a form of spatial imagination that defines its subjects, its human beings.




Jakarta, November 2007
Translated by Rani Elsanti




VERONICA KUSUMA was born in Yogyakarta, May 17, 1980. Today she is a student in the Media Studies, Department of Film, Faculty of Film and Television, at the Jakarta Art Institute. She also works part-time as a programmer for the European Film Festival in Indonesia and produces several independent documentary works.