Love triangle: Edy (Anthony Xie) and Lucy (Iriana Chiu) face a relationship crisis even during their wedding.

Grabbing the moment of the Chinese New Year, Pai Kau, is the debut feature film from award-winning director Sidi Saleh.

Sidi Saleh’s debut feature film Pai Kau tries to offer a love story in the genre of suspense drama with a nuance of Chinese-Indonesian tradition. However, it is too busy exploiting women’s bodies in its narration. 

Pai Kau tells the story of a couple, Lucy (Iriana Chiu) and Edy (Anthony Xie), who are preparing for their wedding. Between them is Siska (Ineke Valentina), who has a past with Edy, a notorious playboy, and holds a grudge against him.

While preparations are made for the wedding, mostly by Lucy, Edy starts to learn more about his future father-in-law, Koh Liem (Tjie Jan Tan), who runs a night club business with an iron fist.

The suspense starts when Siska accidently becomes one of the bridesmaids for the wedding. Through this, Siska sees an opportunity to ruin Edy’s wedding.

Throughout the film, Sidi seems to have no problem in exploiting women’s bodies for mere visual pleasure for the audience.

Without preamble, the opening scene of the film is a still shot of a women’s bottom wearing only underwear.

The woman, called Put, then shows her body wearing only a towel while she joins her friends at the dining table. She, who appears in the very beginning, turns out to be an unimportant character. She does not appear in the rest of the film and contributes nothing to the story.

Sidi, who has received several prestigious film awards, including the Venice Horizon Award at the Venice Film Festival for Maryam (2014), does not stop there.

As the story develops, the erotic scenes get more provocative.

Unsatisfied with the scenes of girls wearing shorts and towels, Sidi points his camera, again, to another scene showing Siska wearing nothing but white panties, and freezes it for few seconds in medium shot.

There is also a scene where a female reveals her thigh to flirt with Edy at a business presentation.

Sidi like giving the opportunity to the audience to enjoy the actress’ body and of course, most of the scenes have nothing to do with the story.

The representation of women in this film is far from positive.

Although the film tries to portray Edy as an unsympathetic character, it also glorifies him by putting countless numbers of women around him.

In a sex scene, for example, it is the girl who initiates the love making with Edy.

Siska, who is supposedly the protagonist of the film, is depicted as an ex who is obsessed with revenge but is also still in love with the man who has hurt her.

And finally, Lucy is portrayed as a spoilt woman who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and helplessly wants to marry Edy, although she knows what kind of person her future husband is.

As inviting and as sensational it can be, the exploitative scenes do not support the story but divert the audience’s attention. Hence, it ruins the narrative, unless Sidi wants it that way.

— Photos courtesy by Archipelago Pictures

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Pai Kau

(Archipelago Pictures, 88 minutes)

Directed by Sidi Saleh

Starring: Iriana Chiu, Anthony Xie, Ineke Valentina, Tjie Jan Tan

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