Review for JAGAT in THEYOUNGFOLKS.com – NYAFF
JAGAT
Shot on a measly budget of RM300,000 (around $73,300), Shanjhey Kumar Peruma’s Jagat has the look and feel of a considerably larger production. To watch it, one might be surprised that 90% of the main characters were played by first time actors, many of whom pulled double duty behind the scenes as technicians. Equally surprising is the revelation that this jagged gem of Malaysian cinema originated as a comedy. But within the eleven years it took for Peruma to secure financing and actually shoot it, the film evolved from a cheery comedy about his childhood in Parit Buntar to a devastating drama equal parts gangster film and coming-of-age story. Much of the advertising focuses on Appoy (Harvind Raj), a twelve-year old boy with a head full of dreams and a thirst for creative expression. When asked to write an essay at school, he writes a short story about a pen that can fly. When instructed to make paintings using vegetables as tools, he creates a lavish collage of swirling colors while his fellow students use bits and pieces of their greens as oversized stamps. When told to make an outfit for a school costume party, he cobbles together a shockingly convincing Michael Jackson get-up out of scraps and trash. But his artistic impulses are figuratively beaten out of him by his tyrannical teachers who only care about facts and literally beaten out of him by his domineering father. While the film begins with Appoy as the protagonist, it gradually branches out to explore several other members of his family until he is practically a supporting character. His father Maniam (Kuben Mahadevan), is an exhausted laborer who fears his son might be doomed for a lifetime of delinquency if he pursues his dreams of becoming an artist. There is his uncle Bala (Senthil Kumaran Muniandy), a reclusive drug addict who becomes a surrogate father figure to Appoy when he has to flee from his home. Then Dorai (Jibrail Rajhula), a local gangster who goes by the nickname “Mexico.” All of them paint a tragic portrait of the lives of Indian Malaysians in the early 1990s, forced into urban squalor in the wake of massive unemployment. In a sense the film can be read as a giant metaphor—certainly this is partly what Peruma intended. But it can also be viewed as a simple story of lost hopes and squandered potential in the face of economic inequality and plain human cruelty. These myriad interpretations help propel Jagat into the spheres of great art.
Rating: 8/10
