I am very proud to say that is the first film from Indonesia to be accepted into the Sundance Film Festival and that I was there to enjoy its world premiere. I am going to state now, as I know that every other critic who will watch this is going to write the same, that this film places a new meaning to the trite phrase "love is blind". I think this is an exceptionally charming film about the pangs of young love, set in the most unlikely of places: a school for the blind in Jakarta.
Mouly Surya (pronounced "Molly", she tells us) has given us a fictional glimpse into a very real world, in order to help break down some of the stigmas that we hold against the visually impaired. I was reminded as I watched her movie of a day when I came across a blind-deaf man crossing the road with his dog and an aide. I stared at him and spent the rest of the day thinking about his life and the world that he experience. Everyone knows Hellen Keller and that is a sad story, but to be brought face to face with their world was something a bit disconcerting to me.
What "What They Don't Talk About" deals with is the story of two pairs of young lovers, kids probably no more than fifteen, who live their lives as ordinarily as they can. They go to school, they smoke cigarettes and get into trouble, they put on makeup and listen to trashy radio programs, they have sex. We watch them do these things, finding ways to overcome the obvious obstacles of not being able to see, and I hate myself for realizing that I, like everyone in the theater, pitied them even though we were meant to see them as "normal". They are not normal, and although we feel proud of ourselves for watching this film and pretending to sympathize with them, it is impossible to see them as normal teenagers. Everything they do must be a challenge that needs overcoming, and we feel that much prouder for them when they share that first kiss because of this.
The two love stories are tender and emotional, and I loved them both very much. The first is about a girl who is not entirely blind, but can only see with the help of what look like opera glasses fixed onto regular bifocals. We see what she sees, a blurry image of a young boy in sunglasses, not terrible handsome but perfect in her eyes. Theirs is a happy story and a funny one, as she must overcome the competition of girl who always shares her cake with Sunglasses Boy. Her weapon is a bottle of perfume called Fantasy.
The second is a far more complex and very moving story about a beautiful young blind girl who is sought after by a deaf boy named Edo. He is a chain-smoking rebel who wears his British punk shirts and has his ears pierced. I don't want to spoil how they are able to create a relationship with one another, but it is almost impossibly romantic and certainly brought out the pubescent girl in me. I think the film as a whole would have been much stronger had they cut the first story, or at least made it a subplot, keeping this one as the main narrative. It was far more richly layered with more developed characters.
The film goes through some peculiar shifts in tone by the beginning of the last third of the movie, including a fantastical sequence in which we get to see the lives of these people were they not impaired. It seems to make an odd statement that these kids were that much better for not being normal, as the complications in their lives made the results that much more important. I don't necessarily agree with this, but it wasn't heavy-handed enough to be irritating.
As a final thought I want to mention something that I found both interesting and infuriating, though it has little to do with the film itself. At the end of the film, Surya answered some questions about the process that she took in making this film. It was inspired by a family member of hers who is impaired and goes to a school for the deaf and blind. There were some unusual additions to her movie, including a scene where the deaf students put on a play in sign language, an idea she got from a YouTube video. She also talked about her use of long, uninterrupted shots, which she said was inspired by her love of Stanley Kubrick. Once I left the theater I went on a shuttle taking me back home, and I unwillingly overheard the conversation of some people behind me who had just finished the movie. They trashed her film--destroyed it. What made me angry was that their complaints about the film were not based on what they saw, but on Surya's reasoning for why she did the things she did. They were angry that she seemed to arbitrarily include scenes like the play or the fantastical sequence or that she chose her filming method because she admired the work of another filmmaker.
Firstly, some of the comments these people made reflected that they were not intellectually capable enough to understand what it was that they were watching. If the case were different they would have been able to appreciate that some of the choices the director made were used to give a fuller picture of the kids' lives. Secondly, these people are ignorant to the creative process. Inspiration is not something that you can always divine from the air; it occasionally needs that spark, and if that spark comes from a YouTube video, who are we to judge? Film making is about taking something that creates an emotional reaction within us, and sharing that with the rest of the world through our own lens. Surya obviously thought that a play told in sign language was unusual and interesting and wanted her audience to take away the same thoughts and feelings that she did when watching it online. I for one am glad that she did, for I don't know if that little sliver of the world would have made it into my life otherwise.
There is one thing lacking in this world, and that is inspiration. A world becomes stagnant if it isn't inspired to change, so we shouldn't try to tear it down, no matter where it comes from. Embrace our filmmakers and their inspirations, for that is how we get tiny glimpses into our big, big earth. I have never seen the inside of school for the blind, let alone in Indonesia, but her inspiration made me happy with my life and the world I get to see and experience every day.
3.5/4
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