After the Curfew (1954)

Not rated, but the movie deals with the aftermath of war, including the trauma of war crimes.  There's murder and implied prostitution.  Nothing is too graphic on screen, but the content of the movie is pretty bleak.  I don't remember too much cursing or anything like that, but it's not like this is a fun, lighthearted romp.

DIRECTOR: Usmar Ismali

Maybe, just maybe, if I write really late, I might have an easy time writing.  These are all possibilities and I can only hope that it is true.  But I also don't like writing assignments over my head, especially considering I'm going to have a houseful of bored children asking me to entertain them.  Just realize that I could be playing Assassin's Creed: Valhalla right now and I chose this.  I'm a modern day writing saint.  

I'm kind of amazed that this movie exists.  By all intentions, I shouldn't be that shocked. Instead, I just need to recontextualize my cultural scope.  For some reason, I thought modern American cinema invented the PTSD film.  I'm talking about the films that may not necessarily call it PTSD (which is probably less than accurate, if I'm looking at the DSM-V), but the idea of the soldier coming home from war being unable to adapt to the mundaneness of civilization.  There's a lot of DNA shared between After the Curfew and films like The Hurt Locker and Born on the Fourth of July.  I'd also like to point out that this is the first time in the World Cinema Project that I didn't watch the Martin Scorsese introduction, so if I say anything smart, it is entirely original.  Mind you, if I contradict Marty, I'm probably just being an idiot, which is pretty par for the course. 

After the Curfew has the distinction of being a movie that has such fundamental cultural themes while simultaneously being universal.  After watching  Lucia, which also dealt with the notion of revolution, it's weird to think how the notion of the modern revolution drastically differs from the narrative of a government-organized military.  The story of Iskandar isn't one that makes him inaccessable.  But it is something where the revolution is such a different beast than the notion of a soldier away at war.  When Iskandar gets back from his time in the army, he's constantly confronted by other soldiers that he knew.  It's either that Indonesia is really tiny (which it might be, now that I'm writing this in real time) and everyone knows each other or the concept of fighting for your country borderline domestically creates a different balance between war and normality.  I should probably research this before writing about it, but I think I've already done enough by watching a movie that few --if any --of my peers have heard of, let alone writing about it.  

I could watch this movie thinking that Iskandar is coming back from this distant war and he doesn't know how to adapt.  Again, The Hurt Locker.  But I'd like to think that he never really left the war and the veil has been lifted from his eyes.  Iskandar's entire personality has been rewritten based on his service to the revolution.  That's pretty standard faire for this trope, so that's not what's crazy.  But it also feels that Iskandar is viewing the world through a new life.  Much of the early movie reminds audiences that Iskandar was actually quite innocent before his time away from the revolution.  The film stresses that he was interested in being an engineer and was still a student when all of this went down.  But he's this guy who feels the need to throw himself into normality.  Appropriately --or inappropriately --it's this very action that ultimately unravels what trauma that he has left unresolved. The day he gets back from the front, he's automatically tries finding a job.  There's this sense of responsibility to him that is almost a manic trait.  

He says that he is getting this job for his fiancee, and there's an element of truth to that.  I believe that Iskandar believes that.  But there's this job that almost exists so he doesn't have to sit alone with himself.  The first gig is one that is meant to be telling about how the veterans are treated upon returning home.  This is the most telegraphing section of the film, stressing that of course the world isn't the same and that civilization is filled with terrible people.  Iskandar is given what seems and impossible task and we see him crumble under the scrutiny and criticism of lesser men.  Listen, I am a pacifist on an annoying level, but even I'm like, "These guys are really mean to veterans.  Probably because everyone but these guys are veterans and they feel marginalized."  But the point of this scene beyond acting as a mirror to civilization is to give Iskandar unwelcomed quiet.  By having Iskandar fail at a test (we don't know how hard this test actually is, but it gives "rigged" vibes), he's forced to deal with the complexity of what should be a simple situation.

The simple situation is that finding one's place in life is actually quite challenging.  But he's also probably having the realization that the old Iskandar is dead.  We don't quite understand Iskandar's neuroses at this point.  We find out later that he was the man who pulled the trigger on some war crime stuff that he had nothing to really profit from.  But it's in this moment that the naturally curious student version of Iskandar can't awaken.  He just sits, staring at this piece of paper and taking the punishment for what ultimately is inaction on his part.  Now, I'm assuming that his boss is being painted out to be a monster. I mean, that dude is harsh and the group bullying is absurd.  But then we get the notion that Iskandar is a broken individual from the ground up.  He hits his boss.  That's a choice.  Because there's the moment that we think that Iskandar is going to have his "take this job and shove it" that ends in real assault.

But this is where I kind of fall off the movie.  Everything I've written up to this point is analysis and good on me for staying there.  But the part of the movie that I don't really dig is probably the same thing that I actually disliked about Born on the Fourth of July or The Deer Hunter.  I actually might not like the PTSD film, despite that I do want to analyze the horrors of war and what combat does to the mind.  (This is all echo-chambering my own naive pacifism and I'm wholly aware of that.) Iskandar goes quickly into the spiral.  The entire movie is about Iskandar's spiral into something that is telling us about the horrors of war.  He seems like a dude at the beginning.  He chases chickens and loves his fiancee.  But the rest of the film is him having a bad day and Falling Down.  Okay, that's a weird PTSD movie that I kind of like. That's more of a mental break movie, but they're cousins. It's at this point that there's nothing to really root for.  Iskandar makes weird choice after weird choice and it's all written up to the fact that he's having a mental break at odds with normal, non-military civilization.

I mean, it has a great climax to that mental break: the murder of his CO that was the root of his mental trauma.  That's pretty cool.  But there are so many moments where he always takes the dramatic way out of things.  As the movie stresses, there's a curfew in Indonesia duing the revolution.  The movie really Chekhov's guns the crap out of the curfew too.  In a bold sign of foreshadowing, the movie stresses that that curfew is going to come into play later.  But Iskandar almost wants to get gunned down by the police.  The whole movie, we are teased with the notion that Iskandar needs to get home before the curfew or bad stuff is going to happen.  He does, just in the nick of time.  He has the opportunity to just chill out and enjoy the party that is all for him and he runs out into the night.  He's still picked up (in a moment that doesn't make total sense to me because I don't like in a revolution-era Indonesia) for it almost being curfew and still, he runs out into the night.  It's just that he has these dramatic moments that could have been had at home.

Becuase I'll tell you what I thought that this movie was going to be.  I honestly thought that it was going to be Iskandar dealing with dramatic moments and being unable to leave.  Maybe those moments would have built up and then he would be forced to leave.  But Iskandar is the kind of guy who will do anything to get out during a curfew.  No news is too small for him to flee out into a curfew controlled Indonesia.  I get it.  I make smart decisions because my trauma is far more managable than Iskandar's.  But still, I kept thinking that he is just making his life harder for himself the entire time.

Did I like the movie?  I'm not really sure.  I think I did.  I know that I didn't love it.  There's something so lovably simple about the movie as a whole.  Maybe it's too simple, but I'm not going to say that.  It's a movie where we know what it's about for most of the film. Sure, the murder was a little bit of a curveball for me.  But this is a story that reminds you that war is hell. That's very me.  I want movies to not glorify war.  Maybe it has that really fine-line message of supporting the solder, but not the war.  Because that end, by the way, is over-the-top in support of the troops.  Iskandar, even though he was gunned down by his friend for --let's see --not being inside during a curfew, he has this very sympathetic speech said about him with text that reminds us of the cost of freedom.  Maybe that's not exactly the button I'm all about all of the time, but I think it works.