One of the best reasons to take the occasional Around the world with Netflix trip is getting the pulse of another culture through its cinema.
It’s a great way recognize one’s own biases and Western ideas of “cultural progress” and see how the rest of the world lives, and how those lives are evolving, perhaps in part due to exposure to “foreign” ideas that much of the world takes as “modern.”
“Promised Hearts” is another tame, chaste romantic melodrama from Muslim Indonesia. It’s practically a faith-based film as characters counsel one another with suggestions of “prayer” and constant vocalized “by God’s grace,” “Did you tell God your problems” and mentions of the teachings/traditions of “The Prophet” in lives of varying degrees of religious piety.
A little of that counts as cultural seasoning in a movie. A lot of it turns the picture, its characters and its plots puerile.
But what this film, based on a novel by Habiburrahman El Shirazy, is getting at ever-so-cautiously is the notion that romantic love pays a price in a patriarchal world of arranged Islamic marriages, where dowries are openly discussed in the ceremony and where some men are still comfortable saying “Women, they’re nothing but commodities.”
Maybe arranged marriages aren’t the best way for college educated young people to pair-up for life counts as a pretty bold statement for an Indonesian film.
We meet Niyala and her closest friend Faiq as schoolchildren, with him protecting her from Roger, the school bully and middle schooler Niyala treating Faiq’s scrapes with first aid, a role she’s taken on at school.
Yes, she’s heading for a career in medicine, something the abrupt death of her mother underscores. Yes, her father sends her off with Faiq’s family to school in Jakarta, where they grow up as “almost siblings.” And yes, this screenplay (by Oka Aurora) is that contrived.
Years later, Niyala is working through med school in Jakarta as she says her good-byes to Faiq, who is going to Cairo to study whatever he’s going to need to know for his career. That’s practically the same moment doctor-to-be-Niyala learns that dad and her brother took on loads of debt to keep her in school, that setbacks have put them “millions” in the hole.
Embittered Herman (Imran Ismail) is the one who spits the news to her (in Indonesian, with subtitles, or dubbed).
Their debtor, the predatory entrepreneur Cosmos (Kiki Narendra) has given them one way out of this “debt or prison” trap.
“He wants you to marry his son.”
As that son is the same Roger (Dito Darmawan) who used to bully her as a child, Niyala is shocked. Her would-be husband’s assurances that “The Roger you knew has changed” notwithstanding, this wasn’t her plan. Not that she’d ever said anything to anyone about a “plan.”
And when Faiq at last comes home with a beautiful, sophisticated and worldly fiance, Diah (Caitlin Halderman), it really does seem Niyala has “no choice” or say in her future.
Perhaps The Prophet’s seventh century words about “learning to love” that arranged spouse will comfort Niyala her and the Iman’s explaining to Faiq (and the audience) how “dating,” which is about physical love and is thus forbidden, is inferior to Islam’s emphasis on “Kafa’ah” (compatibility), which is not just “traditional,” but the better way of coupling up for life will win him over.
Director Anggy Umbarara has made a fairly conservative movie that takes pains not to offend sensibilities within the Islamic world. But it’s a slow, ponderous and obvious affair, with even the ugly twists taking on an “Of COURSE that’s what happens” inevitability. And “inoffensive” is a pretty low bar to set for your movie.
If you’re unfamiliar with Islamic cinema, you might not know about”milk kinship” (riḍāʿa) as a melodramatic device sometimes used in such films for deciding who is actually related to whom. Breastfeeding/wet nursing matters.
The acting is reserved almost to the point of drab, although subtle moments peek through, and there’s something to be said for the stylish Asian version of the hijab, a tudong, for beautifully framing an actress’s face and allowing that subtlety, despite the “Handmaid’s Tale” look and implications of it.
“Promised Hearts” never for an instant lets us lose hope that true love will find a way, which is a universal message every romance hews to. But the film requires too much patience and relies on too many hoary plot devices to have a prayer of coming off, at least in much of the rest of the world.
Rating: TV-14, violence, crime
Cast: Beby Tsabina, Deva Mehanra, Caitlin Halderman, Imran Ismail, Kiki Narendra and Dito Darmawan.
Credits: Directed by Anggy Umbarara, scripted by Oka Aurora, based on a novel by Habiburrahman El Shirazy. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:54
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