This writer only catches the rare movie, but made it a point to watch the much-acclaimed and talked-about local production, Ola Bola at home recently — to try to discover what exactly all the buzz was about with this movie.
The thing that strikes those of us of a certain age group about the film must be the nostalgia it engenders of an era gone by, wonderfully captured with scenes of simple everyday lives lived by ordinary Malaysians of various races and reminding us of how open-air trade fairs of yore had been an integral part of the social and entertainment scene in many a Malaysian urban centre back then.
The film ought to stir the sense of patriotism in each and every Malaysian and it is with great sadness that I note, particularly in this Merdeka month, that it has instead caused rather needless and ultimately divisive controversy about what it really should take to qualify as an award-winning Malaysian film production.
Sure, the film is not your “typical” Malaysian production with Bahasa Malaysia dialogue throughout. It, therefore, perhaps did not live up to the “ideal” to placate the more nationalistic purist in some of us.
But, sad as it may be, how truly representative of Malaysian society as a whole can a film be, if the dialogue is exclusively in the national language throughout, even after well over half a century of vigorous nation-building?
The reality is that our local film industry today remains a mishmash of different genres catering almost exclusively to a Malay, Chinese or Tamil audience. It will be a stretch to categorise any of such films as truly “national”, assuming for one moment that such a categorisation carries any real meaning other than the strictly political.
Be that as it may, films such as Ola Bola, with dialogues alternating between Bahasa Malaysia and the vernacular to reflect the reality in each of the scenes depicting Malaysian families in all their rich diversity, may in fact be better qualified as a “national” film. It has the additional, invaluable redeeming quality of coming across as wholly authentic in portraying vignettes of Malaysian life as it is lived, not as it somehow should be lived.
There is surely no better medium to drive home the point of Malaysian national unity than a film showing different Malaysian families united in their obsession with the success of their national football team, sharing the sorrows when it was down and enthusiastically coming together in joyful celebrations when it ultimately triumphed.
The scenes of Malaysians in their sometimes ethnically-tinged idiosyncrasies were rather hilariously captured with great effect. None was probably more powerful than the concluding scene showing the young Chinese Malaysian lady who had expressed the desire to emigrate in the beginning of the film ending up unfurling a giant Jalur Gemilang out of a train window.
That very convincingly encapsulated the essence of what the film set out to portray. That diverse individual Malaysians may harbour differing aspirations, even fears and doubts depending on their individual circumstances, and even on their ethnic backgrounds but that they also share common hopes for the one nation they call home and can ultimately come together with renewed faith in nation, warts and all.
Too often, it seems, in the eagerness of some Malaysians to forge a common national identity and purpose, they end up doing the exact opposite when they fail to foster the perhaps even more powerful imperative to be inclusive.
When some in the nation today show — like a vocal minority in Sarawak brandishing banners of “Sarawak for Sarawakians” — we, as a nation, need to work a lot harder to keep the message of inclusiveness front and centre.
More than that, we need to be convincing in ensuring that we infuse that message with meaning in real and concrete ways.
We need to accept that we will never be like Japan where there is never any question as to what it means to be Japanese. What it means to be Malaysian may forever be rather fluid and continuously evolving, and may even land where we altogether unintended. Resisting will be ultimately futile and going with the flow may be the order of the day, with perhaps gentle tinkering around some edges to make the flow go more in accordance with what we deem desirable.
But, some things will never change: a burning desire in every Malaysian to make good by our nation, the better to make us all proud.
John Teo is a Kuching-based journalist