Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

A martial arts film in the sense that the ability to fight fluently carries a disproportionate amount of socio-political currency (when compared to the real world), Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash takes place in an Indonesian underworld where an unquenchable desire to square up allows men to exert themselves on a landscape lousy with bull-headed machismo. Beginning in the 1980s then jumping back-and-forth in time with little heed, the film chronicles the relationship between Marthino Lio's Ajo Kawir and Ladya Cheryl's Iteung. When the couple first meet Ajo is impotent, attempting to cure his uncooperative penis through, by turns, righteous and trivial violence. Iteung is no stranger to combat either, acting as the bodyguard for a man who Ajo has judged to be morally dubious. The two fight, an even match that is captured from an observational distance then conveyed to the audience in an unhurried edit that naturally tracks fatigue and frustration. Their back-and-forth is a flurry of palms and elbows; a series of twisting embraces in which the two briefly conjoin then detach. Naturally, they quickly fall in love. 

Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, directed by Edwin and co-written for the screen with Eka Kurniawan, the author of the book on which this film is based, often plays like a magical realism reimagining of Lo Wei's The Big Boss; specifically the idea of a self-sufficient working class hero who becomes (or already is) compromised by their dealings with criminality. Triumph in Edwin's film drips out over decades, captured slowly by people defying destructive impulses and surrendering themselves to genuine vulnerability. Ajo and Iteung share a similar damage; Iteung apparently less apt to share the horrors that have been visited upon her. The revenge she takes is not necessarily even her own, in terms of the specific actors or situation, but the power dynamics that have wrought life-long damage on her beloved are all too familiar. Ladya Cheryl is captivating throughout, grappling with co-stars and contradictory emotional frequencies with a swaggering confidence. Edwin's deliberately anachronistic film constantly defies expectation, able to juggle sequences that terminate using the kind of soundtrack swing deployed to smooth transitions in televised spy serials with hurried glimpses of screeching human horror. There's a sustained and insidious sense throughout that the women and children crammed into the piece are all at the mercy of men who can only express themselves through the barbarous application of force.