After years of not a single Malaysian film being featured here, we’ve seen a succession of them recently. This is a Malay language film to boot and was shot in black and white giving it an artistic flair. I really wanted to like this one and indeed the premise of a Malay man from Pahang trying to get by in Kuala Lumpur has a lot of promise. Unfortunately the film’s idea of a main plot is weak and makes poor use of the main character. Bella is a terrible supporting character and every interaction they have together is so clichéd and unconvincing that it really brings down the entire film. It’s still worth watching in my opinion for its portrayal of Kuala Lumpur but it could have been truly great.

Aman’s father dies and he inherits his old, beat up car. He decides to move from his home town in Pahang to Kuala Lumpur to earn more money. He rents a room in an apartment and signs on with a ride hailing company. However as his car is too old to pass the minimum requirements and he himself doesn’t have a driving license as he is color blind, he pays a bribe to use someone else’s account. He runs into numerous problems including being kicked out of his room and being forced to sleep in his car. Still he continues driving and talks to many different clients including both locals and foreigners. One evening he has Bella, a young Chinese girl, for a client and it’s evident that she is an escort. The next time he sees her on the street, he returns a cigarette lighter than she forgot in his car and they become friends. She trusts him to fetch her late at night and eventually invites him to stay in an extra room in her apartment though their relationship remains a strictly platonic one.

I got more of a kick out of watching the numerous shots of urban Malaysia that I expected. It’s just so refreshing to get this more gritty view of Malaysia instead of the rose-tinted, cleaned up version we usually get. I actually rather liked Aman’s mundane interactions with random passengers and that much of what they talk about are bread and butter issues like the cost of rent in the city and how much salary people are being paid for different jobs. There’s an election campaign going on in the background but that Aman more of less completely ignores, adding to the sense that nothing the politicians do will actually improve the lives of ordinary people. There’s also a running theme of how every Malaysian passenger keeps complaining about how tough life is while all of the foreigners rave about great the country is. It’s not particularly deep or subtle and we’ve seen this plenty of times before but it does make a difference for me that this is Malaysia.

The film’s problem is that it’s main story wants to be about Aman’s relationship with Bella and everything about her character is awful. Leaving aside the cliché of her being a prostitute, her backstory of being from Penang feels wrong given that it’s just as much a city as Kuala Lumpur. Going for a Malay-Chinese rapprochement theme is admirable but the relationship between these two is so hackneyed that it’s barely believable. The film could really use some supporting characters to better situate each of the two protagonists in their respective milieus, so as to show how these two really don’t have anyone else but each other. The final straw is the very predictable and old fashioned plot development with Bella that totally ruins the film for me. I believe that director Muzzamer Rahman simply isn’t sufficiently familiar with Malaysian Chinese society to create credible Chinese characters.

I’d have far preferred a film with no real main plot. Just Aman driving around in his beat up old car, talking to random passengers and trying to solve everyday problems. The black and white cinematography would even better suit this style of film and it would have been an honest depiction of urban life from the perspective of a rural Malay man. As it is, this counts as another one of those films that are decent by Malaysian standards but are nothing special when going up against international peers.