Crocodile Tears is screening at BFI London Film Festival on October 13 and 15.
In most cases, a mother’s love is warm, supportive, nurturing and unconditional, but sometimes it can also be smothering, oppressive and volatile. Tumpal Tampubolon’s debut feature is a story about oppressive and smothering love and the need for a young man to break free while attempting to maintain his mother’s unconditional support. It’s about a young man caught in the jaws of a mother who fiercely protects him but could clamp those jaws shut at any time.
Johan (Yusuf Mahardika) is no longer a boy but has not been allowed to become a man. He is caught in a void of his mother’s creation, one where he masturbates in silence as quickly as he can in fear of his mother finding him, sleeps in her bed and spends all his time caring for the crocodiles at their farm. Johan has no friends, no opportunities for escape, and no life outside the crocodile shows he compères for locals and tourists. His mother (Marissa Anita) believes Johan’s father is the rare white crocodile they feed live chickens to on the farm, and she is determined to keep Johan close at all costs, even if that means sabotaging his efforts to find friends or worse, a girlfriend.
Arumi (Zulfa Maharani), a lonely newcomer to the local area who works in a karaoke bar, is untouched by the local rumours that surround the crocodile farm when she meets Johan, and it’s not long before love blossoms much to Johan’s mother’s disdain. As Johan grows closer to Arumi, his mother’s behaviour begins to spiral out of control, and when Arumi moves into the farm and falls pregnant, Johan faces the closing jaws of a mother determined to have him all to herself.
Tampubolon’s twisted family drama defies simple genre labels, effortlessly incorporating coming-of-age, melodrama, thriller and horror into a delightful pastiche of artistic styles and ideas. Sound design is equally impressive as moments of threat and psychological turmoil are ushered in by the low growl of the crocodile, further enhancing the carefully choreographed sense of dread that lingers in the air, even in the film’s lighter moments. Add to this some truly exquisite scenes where Marissa Anita and Yusuf Mahardika’s movements and actions impersonate the prehistoric creatures they feed and use for entertainment, and Crocodile Tears becomes one of the most intriguing genre-busting films I have seen since Comme Le Feu. Unfortunately, much like Comme Le Feu, Crocodile Tears will unlikely reach the audiences it so deserves due to a theatrical marketplace unwilling and unable to take risks.
Beautiful, intoxicating and fascinating in its artistic style and strong lead performances, Tampubolon’s movie lingers in the mind long after viewing as it snaps and rolls around themes of attachment, sabotage, power-play, and loneliness. It is a film that revels in its atmosphere and its unknowns, allowing the audience to fill the spaces left behind with their own thoughts on what is tangible and intangible, real or imagined. As Johan finds his soulmate, he is further submerged into the deep, muddy waters of a toxic mother-and-son relationship, one that sees the jaws of a mother’s love clamp shut to preserve and protect the boy she cannot and will not accept as a man.
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