My Beautiful Rambutan Tree in Tanjung Rambutan
The film starts off with a girl playing with dolls and girlie things whereas in another part of the house, we see a boy, the girl’s brother, playing with soldiers and army tanks. It quickly uses stereotypes to easily differentiate its characters. The brother even sneaks into his sister’s room and sees the pile of girlie things. He thrashes them like any naughty “I’m a boyish” type of boy.
The film is mostly silent during family meals and even when the children are playing about. Even for a snack of rambutans, only the children participate in eating. The mother pulls the fruit apart and shares it with both of them. The share does look equal until the brother tries to snatch one from his sister when told that the rest of the fruit must be saved for later. There is no conversation between them. Only actions and body language. It’s as if they have some kind of grudge against each other.
The real action starts when the sky turns dark. The parents leave the care of the house under the brother, even though his sister is obviously older than him. The father states that the brother is now the man of the house and he must take care of his sister. The situation seemed a little male chauvinistic at this point of time.
Even so, the brother’s curiosity forces him to participate in some games with his sister and her dolls. After some blusher, mascara and eye shadow, she giggles to herself and teases her brother’s gender. “You look like a girl” does not seem to make her brother pleased as he rebuts with “I’m a man!”
For some strange reason, the children suddenly snacked on their rambutans. With a series of jump cuts, we see the finished pile of rambutans. All empty but one and it belongs to the sister. The brother tries to snatch it again and he fails once more as his sister claws it back from him. She runs off to stash it away.
Her brother follows her, only to find her standing on a stool. Being furious with the teasing of his gender and then not being able to prove otherwise as he failed to grab onto the last piece of fruit, he pushes her over. Yes. He pushes her over.
To be perfectly honest, the film had been rather slow up to that point. It seems that this was the shocking climax of it all. The upcoming scene does indeed arouse a sense of shock within you as you observe the young boy, thinking that his sister is dead when she’s only knocked out cold, pulls her “dead” body down the stairs. Oh but the scariest of all is yet to come.
Suddenly, they’re outside near the sandbox. This should be the pay off of viewing this area earlier. But guess what the little boy is doing. It’s entirely flabbergasting to know that such a young boy, most probably due to the influence of the television, buries his own sister alive! As much as we the audience do not know she’s alive, we’re also not entirely sure whether she’s dead!
Well the usual procedures follow. The brother weeps over her. The parents come home and become hysterical when they realize their daughter is missing and their son a dazed mad man.
Day breaks and we see the boy out in the sun, patting the ground and then pouring a glass of water over his sister’s grave. It seems so entirely peculiar at first. Then he takes a nap beside her and soon enough as he awakens, a shoot (small tree) is born!
The boy continues this weird ritual daily until the shoot grows and blossoms into a huge tree. Seeing this, the boy is overjoyed by I don’t know what circumstances. Perhaps he thought that more rambutans would bloom from the tree.
With a simple dissolve, we see the huge leafy tree under the evening glow and the boy all grown up, staring into the tree all in a daze. It seems that his wicked deeds will stay locked within him as long as the tree lives.
Raves and Rants About the Film
If you had a simple mind and were to look out at the show simply for entertainment value, I would find this a morbid comic type of film. In my opinion, I found it trying, like a piece of Tim Burton’s work, “The Melancholy Tale of Oyster Boy and Other Stories.” However, it did not seem to work very well.
It’s all too funny to see the myth that we once knew of, after eating seeds, they’ll grow in your stomach but come to think of it, one doesn’t even swallow the rambutan seed when devouring it right? Then how in the bloody world did a tree grow in the sister’s spot in the first place?
To be honest, this is a terrible film. There is no logic in the growth of the tree. The thought of a boy burying his sister alive is too bizarre to be true. I personally don’t see a message in the film. Unlike Crazy’s opening where the dropping of the baby was not meant to shock you, I feel that the burial of the sister alive was meant for shock value only. I find no sense that such a thing would happen. Maybe I believe too much in the significance of a child’s innocence. Other than that, there is no meaning in the whole idea of the sister’s mishap.
Of course, the film has its somewhat good points. The film provides stereotypes and the culture of a Malay family where the man is domineering like in the Arab film, “Kiss me not on the Eyes”. Sadly, other than that, I could not find other good points in its narrative. It’s like a script going off tangent. It started fairly still and quiet until the brother pushed his sister over. It’s like mischief going way out of hand.
I personally liked the opening scene where we saw the two children playing with the extreme types of toys: army tanks and soldiers for the boy and dolls and tea sets for the girl. That scene was pretty in the sense where the mise en scene was well thought of. Again, I cannot refrain myself from saying that the sister’s burial and the growth of the tree feels like rubbish to me.
In a way this film feels more like a moderate year one location production project with a very bad nonsensical ending. What is up with the tree? I simply cannot understand and I’m sure that after some thought, you won’t be able to either
Written by: Bryan Ho |
