Budak Kelantan

So Julia and I went to see Budak Kelantan the other day.

It was her idea. Really. She saw the poster many weeks before and ever since then had been eagerly anticipating the movie. Even called me budak Kelantan in the days leading up to our outing.

Why the interest in this local flick? It was because she was learning BM. Once she demonstrated her knowledge by reading an article from Hai magazine and explaining to me what it was about. What Que Haidar said, what Fazura said and so on. I was impressed!

But then again, Budak Kelantan is not your typical Malay movie. It's a feature-length film shot entirely in Dolby Digital Kelantanese.

So I guess therein lies the novelty.

We planned weeks in advance to see the movie.

But even the best laid plans can go awry. For some reasons, my friend decided to get tickets to one of the earlier shows that day. I, on my part, managed to get myself stuck after-hours at the office and ended up being very late to the movie. Like half an hour late.

"You missed a rape scene," Julia whispered as I joined her, huffing and puffing after walking briskly from NST to Mid Valley.

The hall was half-full (me being optimistic) and my educated guess would put the audience at 83 percent Kelantanese and 1 percent German. The rest consisted of people whose Kelantanese bf/gf/spouse made them come.

And yes, it was quite a novelty to watch an entire movie in Kelantanese. Even I learnt a few new words that day, one of which was kachik. Which means getting high on drugs.

Thank God for the BM and English subtitles. Otherwise someone like me would have been left to my own devices as to what kachik really means.

I like the Buchek character. He is always excusing himself to go for prayers. "Kawe tupae semayae buleh?"

I like the antagonist too, Jaha. He is so evil, he might as well have been called Jahak.

Overall, we both liked the movie except maybe for the jerky camera work, which was overused, and the abrupt ending.

And Julia was furious about the reference to Amerika during the rape scene. "What are they saying, that Westerners condone rape??"