Saturday, May 01, 2010

I finally finished watching Ayat-Ayat Cinta today.

Spoilers!

Mostly, I want to make this face: -________- but I concede there were a few saving graces. And it got a little better near the end, although of course everything was quite predictable. A brief synopsis: Fahri marries Aisha while his Christian neighbour, Maria (who is secretly and desperately in love with him) is away to visit a relative. She comes back and is devastated. Prior to this, Fahri always treated Maria as a friend and they were chummy, and together they helped a girl, Noura, escape the clutches of her abusive fake-father. Noura also falls in love with Fahri (let me make this face again -_______-) and does not hesitate to make it known to him, only of course he doesn't reciprocate. Noura then, inexplicably to him, accuses him of raping her. Maria then becomes a key witness in saving Fahri, and to do this, he had to marry her. -______-

Biggest, widest, gaping loophole: that the court refused to accept future DNA testing in order to ascertain that the child was Fahri's. Hello, which court of law today would refuse to do that??? The excuse of possible miscarriage is rubbish! My goodness. By this point, I was already feeling pretty irritated (and I'll explain why soon) and this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I was very irritated with almost all the female characters. Seriously. I only barely like Aisha. The general theme is supposedly to show how Islam dignifies women but the ladies in the story are pathetic! As though Fahri is the only dude worth having! Especially that Nurul girl, his senior -- like what was she thinking, letting her parents beg him for marriage after he's married??? Fahri's roommates seem equally decent what -- pick one of them lah. Also, I'm sure the real Al-Azhar female undergraduates feel affronted that Nurul represents their kind; a Muslimah scholar ripping pictures of guys off noticeboards and pasting them in her notebook and drawing hearts and scribbling 'I love you's all over???? Seriously? If I were an Al Azhar student, I'd be waaay irritated. Bloody hell, I'm irritated already. I don't know if I'm being overly sensitive or what -- but I feel irritated, deep in my bones, at how females never seem to be portrayed well enough even by Muslims themselves when we know Aisha r.a. for instance, was a fantastically intelligent woman whose authority on hadith was very much undisputed. We have these guys learning from big sheikhs and being wonderful Muslims and on the other hand we have the women in the movie being pathetic saps, tearing their hair over a single man, however nice he may be notwithstanding.

Haiyoh, things like these make me irritated. I think the drama Nur Kasih made a better portrayal of the issue of polygamy. The Malaysians were a little bit more realistic -- although we have to concede that they both conveniently had the second wife die at the end.

What I did like about Ayat-ayat Cinta: the jail scene - when Fahri was being taunted by his jail mate, and the weird dude actually made reference to Nabi Yusuf a.s.. Very nice. Also, cinematography was very very pretty. And okay, the songs -- awesome, heh.

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Gotta go for liqa' soon, and want to paste this here.

furby from madagascar! :P

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