G

arin Nugroho'€™s latest foray into romantic drama weighs on the artistic side with poor delivery of a story.

The veteran director with 24 years in the industry has made a commendable effort in bringing something new to the table, a style than can be easily distinguished as his and his only.

In his 15th production since1992'€™s Cinta dalam Sepotong Roti (Love in a Slice of Bread), Garin has for the first time shown his lighter side in a movie full of his childhood memories.

Sitting through the 85 minutes of Aach ... Aku Jatuh Cinta, literally meaning Aargh ... I'€™ve fallen in Love, we could find ourselves falling hopelessly in love with the beautiful scenes of a sugar factory, sugarcane plantations, an old railway station and a vast stone temple.

In a retro style that revives the golden eras of the 70s, 80s and 90s, cinematographer Batara Goempar, artistic director Allan Sebastian and music director Charlie Meliala have done a good job of creating seamless transitions into each period.

We begin at where the story is supposed to end, listening to the poetic narration of a journal kept by our heroine Yulia (Pevita Pearce) about how everything around her changed throughout the years but not Rumi (Chicco Jerikho), the neighbor kid who always ended up in trouble.

With economic, social and political upheavals as a backdrop that affects their families, households and relationships, Yulia and Rumi learn the hard way their feelings for each other by coping from crisis to crisis.

The rise of industries and factories affects the kampung neighborhood, with the electrician who repairs broken appliances seeing his customer numbers decline as they are able to replace their broken items with affordable new electronics imported from Japan.

Rumi'€™s father has to close down the family fruit drink business because the product loses out to the wide distribution of branded carbonated soft drinks.

The family house is repossessed to pay off debts and Rumi leaves the kampung without a word to Yulia.

They meet again years later at the theater where Yulia practices her lines in a dress rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet and Rumi turns out to be the prompter hiding under the prop bed.

The scene of the two talking behind the curtain while animated trees and bushes pop out to form a frame around their shadows is fantastic and the idea of giving a Javanese theatrical style to Shakespeare'€™ s immortal love story should have been made the core of the film.

But, lo and behold, Rumi is not a Romeo as he awkwardly explains in his soliloquy while standing on a rocky hill that he is actually named after the great Islamic scholar and poet from the 13th century.

The reunion is brief as Rumi is fired by the director and he goes missing again after being arrested for making Molotov cocktails during a student protest.

Years later, Yulia decides to stop looking for Rumi and to marry her colleague from work. She goes to their hiding place in the old neighborhood only to find a wedding invitation left there by Rumi.

While writing her journal, Yulia collects mementoes related to Rumi, her hardworking seamstress mother (Annisa Hertami) among other things, while Rumi keeps one thing he had stolen from Yulia '€” a raucous humor that somehow ties the two together.

Their secret pact of exchanging love notes in a bottle with a rusty cap reminds one of Nicholas Sparks'€™ tearjerker Message in a Bottle adapted into a film by Luis Mandoki in 1999, but this is without such emotional intensity.

Yulia and Rumi confer in verse, similar to Baz Luhrmann'€™s 1996 William Shakespeare'€™s Romeo + Juliet but not with the unforced graceful deliveries of the Elizabethan verse as done by Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.

As expected from Garin, the film, which has been screened at the Busan and Rotterdam film festivals under the title of Chaotic Love Poem, is truly a work of art.

But as the one who came up with the story idea, scenario and the script, we might wish Garin would whet up things to a point and give the story the novelty and the kick it deserves.

The story background is superficially explored and there is a shortage of insight into our two main characters.

The chemistry between Chicco and Pevita is not heartfelt, even the kiss is something that results from a spur of the moment as revealed in the press release.

At theaters starting Thursday, Aach ... Aku Jatuh Cinta is one option for how you'€™re going to spend Valentine'€™s Day with your loved one, a reminder to the small, often overlooked things in life arrayed in a chaotic, but artistic, montage.