Yudho Aditya | Pria (Man) / 2017

 the english teacher

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Cigarroa, Yudho Aditya, and Dea Kulumbegashvili (screenplay), Yudho Aditya (director) Pria (Man) / 2017 [22 minutes]

 

The central character of US-Indonesian born director Yudho Aditya’s 2017 short film Pria (Man), is a Muslim teenager, Aris (Chicco Kurniawan) living in a highly agricultural region of Indonesia. He attends a school where his English language teacher is a gay American, Peter (Jacob McCarthy), who teaches the language, in part, by distributing US pictures and postcards to the students and asking them to describe the images along with synonyms for their choices of English words.

      Aris is handed a picture of New York skyscrapers, and seeing the photo on the postcard it is hard to know whether he has more quickly fallen in love with the vision of New York or the teacher himself. What is clear is that both Peter and Aris have already formed an unspoken admiration for one another. After class, Aris asks if he might keep the postcard, a request which Peter immediately grants. But as soon as the boy has left the classroom, the teacher runs after him to tell him that it too is one of his favorites and that he hopes he will take special care of it, obviously a ploy just to be able to form a bit closer relationship with the obviously troubled young man.

      The boy has reason to be troubled since his doting mother is so attentive to her son that he can hardly finish his homework as she quite literally pets him as she speaks. Worse, she has determined he has reached the age of marriage and has arranged with a local man for Aris to wed his daughter, whose pudgy face is all we see underneath her dress and head coverings.

      Even with the wedding looming in the near future, Aris attempts to focus his imagination on school, his increasingly attachment to his teacher, and for all things Western. At one moment, alone in his room, we see Aris with headphones listening obviously to a Western song. He slowly begins to dance, a self-created dance that reveals his simple joy in being young, somewhat in love, and able to imagine a world into which he might someday be transformed. As critic Serafima Serafimova writes about that scene:

 

“…one of my favourite moments in the film, is the scene where Aris dances in his room, without any inhibition, his pure joy almost palpable. This is abruptly brought to an end by the following scene, where we see him getting his hair cut and along with it his freedom and only chance of true happiness.”

 

    Describing the same scene, critic Upasana Dandona observes in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal: “His facial expression in this scene shows that he is in great affliction; he is helpless in a society where he is not permitted to preserve what he values deeply—he is forced to forgo a part of himself and his identity.”

     The wedding preparatory ceremonies are highly alienating as the girl’s father takes out a horsetail, forcing the hair into a circular position and sticking his finger through the hole in order to demonstrate to the boy how to fuck a woman. Later, the girl herself declares that the boy, who has been forced to walk through muddy paddy fields to visit her, smells disgusting.

     Increasingly terrorized by the forced marriage, he confesses his fears to his mother. Soon after the we see the boy knocking one evening on his English teacher’s door.

     Peter invites him in, as the boy expresses his horrors in the best English that he can muster up.  Finally, the boy leans over and kisses Peter, who readily returns the kiss, the two embracing deeply kissing several times before Peter finally pulls the frightened Aris away, holding him tightly to comfort him with both of them realizing that there is nothing to be done. As an outsider to a culture that is hostile to homosexuality and which has increasingly come to argue that LGBTQ behavior is entirely a foreign intrusion upon their world—this despite the many documents revealing a long tradition of gay and lesbian behavior in Indonesian culture from ancient times—there is nothing Peter can do, and the boy, already signed and sealed through legal documents that require the ceremony proceed, has no choice but to go along with the parental arrangement.

      Director Aditya, accordingly, offers no solution to the dilemma the film has raised. But his gentle and beautiful depiction of Aris and his hidden desires makes it apparent just how awful it is that children such as Aris and the child bride equally are forced to become man and wife against their personal desires. We can only hope that those fearfully loving moments with Peter and the picture postcard might continue to serve as solace that carries him through with the life imposed upon him; one day he may be able to escape as an adult. But there are still also many men in the Western world who, unable to accept their homosexuality, willingly enter into marital relationships which end disastrously or at the least unhappily, and we fear the same for Aris and his new bride.

     Aditya’s is a brave film at a time in which Indonesia has witnessed increasing hostility and violence against its LGBTQ citizens.

 

Los Angeles, October 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).