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This film has recently won the Best Film category for the 2021 Malaysia Film Festival.

Synopsis:
The story revolves around the central character of Bapak, an ageing, polygamous, British-educated, Malay, Muslim, retired journalist, patriarch, who realises he doesn't have much time left on Earth and so invites his five children to have dinner with him to discuss some unresolved family matters with them, including who will inherit his house, their childhood home, an old decaying mansion, set in an acre of lush garden in the centre of the rapidly developing capital city of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.

Review: 
According to Joseph Campbell, Schopenhauer once said,

*“When you reach a certain age, at the back of his life, seems to have had an order. Like it has been composed by someone. And those events when they occur seem merely accidental and occasional, turn out to be the main element of a consistent plot. Who composed this plot?”* - We will get back to this quote later.

A pirate boy! That is the first shot of the film. And he leads us to see where the other pirates are hiding! - in a big house that might be the allegory of non-other than the country itself, Malaysia.

The reference to it is everywhere. The shot of the giant 1Malaysia logo at night. An "accidental" slide of Najib Razak on the screen whilst the line 'pressure from Malay political leaders' were spoken.

And these are shot back in 2011, right in the midst of the 1MDB controversy. Sure, when it was written back in 2002 by the late Jit Murad there was no 1MDB and no Najib Razak as PM yet. This is where the brilliance of the adaptation and translation into the screen by Zahim Albakri comes to life.

That is just one of the 'naughty' bits of this film, labeled as a 'Malaysian satirical black comedy' from their Facebook page description.

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For a Malaysian film to be as 'Malaysian' as this one, we had to go back to the days when Malays were at the center of the storytelling and other races have to be 'represented' with slang, costume, and fake mustache - to this. The Chinese character Hortense Chia aptly said during her screentest, on a stage, wearing a red Cheongsam, talking without the script about the Chinese dilemma in Malaysia. 

"You think the only way to be a part of this land is to be born on it, or even to own it."

You just have to watch the whole performance for yourself. It is like how the Chinese came from a white guy with a fake mustache playing them back in the classic days, to Bruce Lee and have a full-fledged Chinese Marvel superhero.

For Malaysia, it is a fusion. A rojak. Imagine if everyone just unite and produce instead of being divided by the political devils. But the state of Malaysian society now is not the fault of anyone in particular, but the byproduct of time. 

Hence the song that plays when the character 'Bapak' dances with Jackie in that Lido nightclub. It is a song about time. Referring to that Schopenhauer's quote earlier, this whole film is about Bapak and his life right until he dies. All those memories of old times played back like rewinding over old films. So does the life of all of us. We are all heroes of our own stories, and Bapak has lived his life, and how he affects other characters in their journeys.

Earlier I mentioned that the state of the country and the society now are really just a byproduct of time and are linked to each other like a network so you cannot really blame anyone for anything, just as one cannot solely take credit for anything. 

Jit Murad acknowledged the spiritual character of sneezes. The sneeze marks the creation of Adam and Eve. The sneeze was the first image recorded in film hence has lifted the significance of the new media as also shared by the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky. Hence you might have been able to deduce their meanings in this film, the presence of something which transcends the genre and the medium. 

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When I was watching it in the theaters back in June this year, there were only a couple and myself. Near the end, one of them sneezed. How a bit of Bapak is in all of his children, there is a bit of Jit Murad in me now. To be remembered.  That, some say is one key to immortality. 

Another tiny bit of something that Jit Murad wants us to think about. Only Bapak, who is a Muslim, and Concepcion, his Christian maid could see the two angels of death... 

That is not even scratching the surface of what this film really is! Similar to 'Rosebud' in Citizen Kane, the death of Bapak is the 'McGuffin' of the story for everything to happen. The two angel characters are needed to relay to the audience about themselves through interaction with one another.

Bapak, when he finished with his children, asked the two angels to wait for him, to what one said,

"You know that will be ironic if we waited all day for you and then forgot about you."

To which Bapak replied "I didn't know you guys understood irony (the literary device)"

To which the angel replied "Look who we worked for" (looks up above) - the writer/director.

And finally, one angel says to another,

"You did a good thing, letting him say what he needed to say, breaking protocol and all that." 

Like how this film does. Jit Murad looking down upon us.

P/s: Note the different endings between the theatrical release to the Netflix one. The theatrical one ended with none of Bapak's children coming home while he passed away. The scene of his spirit getting into each of his children was just a wishful dream. And the scene of him walking away with the two angels was on the post-credit scene and they said something quite significant but I cannot remember what. Probably it is about the irony.

Showing now on Netflix.

Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyX-bMUqJBw