‘Before, Now & Then’ Review: Love and War

Kamila Andini’s “Before, Now & Then” is a domestic drama set against a tumultuous historical backdrop: In 1960s Indonesia, as communists are massacred by the state and the authoritarian president Suharto seizes control (with the backing of the United States), the film alights on the story of one woman, Nana (Happy Salma), who is caught in an unhappy marriage and haunted by past traumas. It’s a daring narrative mix of the personal and the political, though Andini struggles to find the right balance between the two.

The movie begins in the aftermath of Indonesia’s fight for independence in the 1940s, with Nana on the run, fleeing nationalist soldiers who are forcibly taking women from villages. Nana’s husband is presumed dead, and, in a startling scene, she imagines her father being beheaded by a group of men. A temporal jump then transports us to her new life 15 years later, when she is the wife of a wealthy, absent and adulterous plantation owner. From the high-stakes prologue we switch, jarringly, to a languid, mist-swept melodrama about Nana’s fraying relationship with her unfaithful husband and her friendship with his younger mistress, Ino (Laura Basuki).

The political and historical contexts fade into the background, emerging only in stray scenes of locals discussing current events, which Andini inserts like punctuation marks in an otherwise typical midcentury tale of a woman awakening to her independence. It doesn’t help that this feminist arc is a little too cute, particularly after the brutality that precedes it: All it takes to bring Nana out of her shell is Ino — a manic-pixie figure — encouraging her to dive into a lake fully clothed. It’s a pity for both Salma and Basuki, whose expressive faces convey depths of feeling that the script and direction cannot quite match.

Before, Now & Then
Not rated. In Indonesian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.