Film Review- The Wounded Artist in P Ramlee Ibu Mertuaku

From an indulgent mood of youthful complacency that characterizes the romance of the film’s main characters Kassim and Sabariah in Ibu Mertuaku, the unfolding of a series of turbulent events and traumatic ending leads us inevitably to experience a sense of disenchantment acutely—of a material reality being violent destabilized. A general look at the plot alone will yield the story of a young couple’s love destroyed by the trickery of the evil mother-in-law who casted her own daughter out with her lover due to disapproval of the young man’s inferior social background as a musician. Thereafter, she parted them forcefully through double dealing and marry her daughter off to a doctor with social privilege.

In this tragedy, the atrocities of class distinction and discrimination is hence very pronounced, aligned with the juxtaposing aesthetics of impoverishment and opulence, just as tradition and modernity is. The tragic turn of events unleashed—culminating in Kassim the musician/artist mutilating his own eyes—is hence not merely a chastisement of the mother-in-law’s cruelty but of remarkable lack of remorse and compassion in society in class discrimination and moral failings. Due to Kassim’s identity being inextricably linked to the role of an artist/musician, his individual tragedy of lost love and his eventual self-mutilation is perhaps an embodiment of art that is implicated and eventually wounded by social prejudices and brutality—itself a victim of the dictums of power and class. In contrast, the figure of Dr. Ismadi who came back after being educated in England gains social acceptance and respect, highlighting the unmistakable affiliation of a westernized culture with the local, Malay elites. Hence, though the all too fresh memories of a colonial past did not enter the film directly, it nevertheless exists as a precondition for the locally construed social prestige and wealth.

Furthermore, the mechanized reality of the train that Sabariah and Kassim took to move between Penang and Singapore is also part of urbanization of both Malaysia and Singapore is undergoing, itself an invention made possible by the massive capitalistic flows and modernity. Furthermore, although the film presents a more subjective experience of a particular Malay family and a lack of intercultural exchange, the movement between the spaces—Penang and Singapore— bears testament to the process of hybridization of Malay culture formed through different cultural subjectivities. In tandem with the film’s historical positioning on the cusp of Singapore and Malaysia’s merger, it perhaps highlights the diasporic dream of seeking a new life through migratory movements afforded by the proximity between the two countries.

Lastly, Kassim’s self-mutilation conjures the sobering image of art having to re-articulate itself through a bleeding orifice that becomes its own embodiment of ineffable loss and pain. Evidenced in Kassim abandoning his art and being concerned with economic survival, the position of art in the ordinary lives of Malaysians and Singapore is highlighted—sidelined in consideration of the urgent and practical need for physical survival in a rapidly urbanized and modernized reality. In the light of an autobiographical account of P. Ramlee own’s role as an artist, the film’s own positioning in the nexus of the art world as a cultural text is foregrounded—itself perhaps also wounded by the subjective cruelty that runs through the film that is an imprint of an impoverished and base reality.