Review: Mukhsin

Nina Simone’s music has brought out the best in filmmakers as diverse as Emanuele Crialese and David R. Ellis. To their fold we can now add Yasmin Ahmad, who makes canny use of Simone’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” in her Berlinale-winning Mukhsin, a bittersweet and feisty Malaysia-set love story between a young boy and girl.

After her grandmother amusingly instructs her grandfather on how to pronounce Simone and Nat King Cole’s names, Orked (Sharifah Aryana) joins her parents in a dance to the Simone classic. Yasmin connects the heritage of the tune (a song by Jacques Brel that was covered in its original French by an Black multi-genre chanteuse) to the customs of Orked’s progressive family, then deepens that connection by cutting to a shot of Mukhsin (Mohd Syafie Naswip) staring at Orked from outside—personal longing soulfully tied to cross-cultural reverie.

Throughout Ahmad’s film, Orked is seen as something of a mini woman warrior, trying to cross boundaries by proving that she’s good enough to stand on the same patch of playground with boys her age. She’s clearly cut from the same mold as her mother, who pretends to whip the girl while the family of the boy whose schoolbag Orked casually flung out a bus window listens from the adjoining room. In this incredibly directed scene, Ahmad calls subtle attention to the irony of the town’s women gossiping about Orked’s mother’s ability to speak English, presuming that it means that she’s shunning her Javanese heritage, while one woman expresses shock over a no doubt common ritual of child discipline.

The film is spiked with similar such episodes of cultural surveillance and reverence, with Ahmed peering at the mischievousness of youth with a mixture of lovingness and randiness that brings to mind Ozu Yasujirô’s Good Morning. The difference is that her style is snappier, very much synched to the way lives intersect, gazes are exchanged, and love is neglected. The story is quaint but its heart is sweet and mellow, just like Simone would have liked it.