Death – A Leitmotif in Four Films by Rahim Razali
Bumi di bawah menolak ke atas.
Mati aku, kekasihku, mati aku!’
– ‘Hanyut Aku’, Amir Hamzah
What is there about death? The end of life? Or the beginning of something? Looking at the films of Rahim Razali, questions about both can be detected playing and lingering, shaping his authorship. Besides the nouveau riche, the urban-rural divide and vengeance, death is one of the leitmotifs in this director’s films. There is death that serves as the starting point of a story, death as a direction, and also death as an internal tension – rebellion.
The death of Haji Shahban (played by Mustapha Maarof) in Matinya Seorang Patriot (1984), for example, ignited a small flame within his sons, which later blazed. Revenge and rage dragged them into bloodshed. Fortunately, the fire of vengeance was cooled by the tenderness of Yohanis’s love (played by Noorkumalasari), making Saiful (played by Eman Manan) realise that the person he intended to kill was innocent. As the title suggests, death becomes a recurring motif in this film, beginning with the funeral ceremony of the patriot Haji Shahban, and we are presented with a series of killings and deaths throughout the film.
Matinya Seorang Patriot depicts the ‘death’ of a family institution. Uniquely in this film, Haji Shahban threatens to expose the misdeeds of the board of directors of Melati Holdings who are embezzling funds, but Haji Shahban instead dies of a heart attack due to his wife’s secret being revealed. Nude photographs of the woman from her time working with British colonial officers during the occupation came to light. Haji Shahban ‘departs’, but those who remain alive – Haji Shahban’s children – cannot forgive their mother, except for Saiful. For them, their mother is one of the causes of their father’s death.
Consumed by blazing vengeance, the five siblings forgot everything their late father had fought for – the party’s struggle, Melati Holdings – and forgot the straight path their father had always championed. They sought revenge by killing. Perhaps this is Rahim Razali’s statement about Malaysian politics at the time (and even until now?) – that the struggle for justice and the straight path in politics is impossible, and there is only one word: rage!
This is also simultaneously depicted in a scene where Safuan (played by Zulkifli Zain) throws a file towards a poster bearing the slogan ‘Clean, Efficient, Trustworthy’ which was introduced during the era of the Fourth Prime Minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. This subtle, voiceless protest becomes a loud echo that Safuan, the son of the patriot, has become ‘numb’ to politics and the hypocrisy masked by order.
Nevertheless, approaching the end of the film, the confrontation between Saiful and his brother, Safuan, marks the fragmentation of Haji Shahban’s family after his death. The fight between Safuan and Saiful (which also reminds us of the Tuah-Jebat imagery) stops when Safuan catches sight of his father’s portrait and realises that he has made a grave mistake and dismantled the family institution. The final death in the film is then ‘cancelled’, when the plan to kill Yohanis fails; instead, Yohanis is entrusted to take care of Saiful while his brothers surrender to the police.
Pemburu (1982) highlights the death of a child and the boundless love of a father, manifested through the ‘hunting’ actions of Pemburu Khamis (played by Ahmad Yatim). The blazing fire of vengeance makes him ferocious in hunting down the scoundrels who treated his daughter like ‘prey’. Khamis’s daughter was raped and brutally murdered. The ‘Hunter – Prey’ dichotomy becomes the symbol in the opening montage sequence of the film – when Khamis and his friends shoot a deer (perhaps), and successfully shoot their prey, there is an intercut of his daughter collapsing at the hands of predatory males. Similarly, towards the end of the film, Khamis successfully shoots his ‘prey’ – the rapist and murderer of his daughter – accompanied by a juxtaposition of shootout scenes in a bar and in the wilderness.
Puteri (1987) also carries a similar spirit. Iskandar (played by Eman Manan) faces the death of his friend, which drives him to seek retribution, and this occurs in the middle of the story. Death in Puteri seems intended to lead to the ‘death’ of the gap between two social classes or ranks. Although the way this film ends is somewhat unsatisfying, in the end, Iskandar, who comes from the lower class, is able to unite with his lover, Puteri (played by Fauziah Ahmad Daud), a girl born into royalty. Two different classes are finally brought together after a death.
Death in the film Abang (1981) is approached from a different angle, with death occurring at the end of the story. The elder brother, named Fuad (played by Rahim Razali), is apparently living his final days. He is like a convict in a prison, working hard to settle his debts of apology and past sins before finally meeting the executioner.
However, beneath the visible deaths depicted in the films mentioned, there are ‘implied deaths’. For instance, the death of Abang is the ‘death’ of a responsible man, coming from the middle-class society, who could be relied upon to transform the Malay corporate world – the ‘New Malay hope’ – which had previously sunk in the mud of corruption, greed and various other forms of deceit. Fuad’s death is the death of a corporate figure who has repented – returning to hold fast to principles.
Although throughout this film we see Fuad successfully change his family members one by one for the better (morally), without Fuad, their family might return to the valley of disgrace. As Faizal (played by Ahmad Yatim) puts it, the elder brother who fled to England for ten years caused their family to be like ‘a ship without a captain’ – ‘floundering helplessly’.
Even though this film criticises the New Malay class through the moral decay of each of its characters, the film can still be seen as an effort to sanitise the New Malay class through the character of Abang, who strives to restore the morality of the middle class without carrying out any revolution that could destroy that class. Moreover, throughout the film, its criticism touches on individual problems, not class or ideological issues.
The ‘implied’ matter in Pemburu is somewhat different compared to Abang and Matinya Seorang Patriot. Khamis’s daughter, after studying at a university in Kuala Lumpur, began to distance herself from him and her hometown. As the hunter Khamis says, there is no excitement in the village, no nightclubs. All that exists are forests, animals, birds and insects. Khamis’s strong desire to hunt down the rapist and murderer of his daughter is actually an excuse to alleviate his guilt because he did nothing when his daughter no longer remembered her hometown and forgot him as a father. Even though when she was small, he and his daughter were so close – so intimate.
Nora had actually been ‘dead’ for a long time when she no longer wanted to return to her hometown, no longer wanted to return to her father’s embrace, and that death was a cornerstone for Khamis to go out and, in fact, ‘take revenge on himself’. Pemburu ends with the death of the hunter, Khamis, who is shot dead by police. But before that, he succeeds in avenging the rapist and murderer of his daughter at a bar. Thus, the film begins with the death of his daughter as a victim and ends with the killing of the rapist and murderers of his daughter – his prey. Khamis’s death is also important because only through death can he perhaps meet his daughter again – a new beginning in the eternal realm.
Death may be seen as something terrifying – horrific and fearsome – for the majority of humans. However, what makes it truly terrifying is not the fate of the deceased in the hereafter – that is no longer the concern of the living. The more terrifying thing is those who remain alive – those who are chased by the shadows of their own past, haunted by sins and burdened by unforgiven regrets. Like the family of Fuad Din on a certain night, anxious and restless, waiting for the elder brother who will return and might disturb the family’s ‘stability’, leading to the tagline from the film Abang that remains deeply embedded in memory: ‘Is he a jembalang, or a ghost, or a devil, or…?’ Or, he is your past. The past that never truly dies; that continues to manifest as a nightmare.
Media Selangor