Review No.119: Position Among the Stars

After the cheesy musical idea didn't work out too well as a birthday film I decided to watch one of my LoveFilm DVDs that had been hanging around for a while that being Position Among the Stars. The film is the third in Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich's documentary trilogy looking at an Indonesian family and this time it deals with the changing nature of the country as well as how different life in the country is to the city. It starts with grandmother Rumidjah travelling from her small village down to Jakarta to look after he intelligent niece Tari who is college-bound and will be the first member of the family to get a decent education. As Rumidjah enters Jakarta we see a differing view of the city as the slums are shadowed by imposing tower blocks in the distance, and if The Raid is anything to go by they'll soon be plenty of dead bodies stacking up in these blocks. The rest of Tari's family are a bit useless, especially the men, with Rumidjah's son Bakti making a living getting members of the community to be on fighting fish while his brother is living on welfare and has to hide the TV every time the council come around to check on him. To me though this is the story of the two women Rumidjah, who unlike her Muslim family is a Christian, trying to make her young grandson understand why she goes to church as well as Tari who describes herself as 'a city girl' and would rather be at The Mall with her friends then at the slum with her family. After a rather nasty altercation between Bakti and Tari, which involves the revelation of a boy who may've got too close to the latter, Ramdjah retreats to the village using some of the knowhow she's picked up in the city to help her friends out.

Having not seen the two earlier parts of Helmrich's trilogy, Eye of the Day or Shape of the Moon, I'm not sure how much of the family's life had previously been looked at. What I can say is that Position Among the Stars is a snapshot of family life from another continent which basically demonstrates that life isn't that different in the slums of Jakarta than it is on a British council estate. We see stroppy teenagers, men trying to falsely claim benefits and a rather nasty case of domestic abuse but thankfully the scenes of violence are few and far between. Now and then I struggled to keep my interest in every one of the scenes and at 110 minutes I felt the film was overlong but more often than not I was captivated by the stories presented in the film. The best thing about Position Among the Stars is Helmrich's cinematography which really takes you into a city that is constantly changing as the camera zooms among the bustling slum towns presenting various different characters later he counteracts this with a scene involving Tari and her friends as they flit through the neon lit roads on their scooters. Position Among the Stars is definitely an uneven film but one that benefits from a whole host of colourful characters and a director who really takes you into the heart of Indonesia's capital city.

Verdict: Though overlong Position Among the Stars is beautifully shot with wonderful characters so I will award it an above average 6.5/10