Tribeca Review: Love for Share

In the Indonesian drama Love for Share, the lives of three women in polygamous relationships are presented, end to end, as a way of exploring how women deal with polygamy, a tradition that has once again achieved mainstream acceptance under the current government. The three women occupy completely different social strata and are of different ethnicities, and their experiences are just as diverse as their backgrounds.

In the first and most engaging story, Salma discovers by accident -- and at a public event, no less -- that her husband has another wife. She's torn, but out of respect for both her religion, which dictates that a man may take multiple wives if he can treat them all equally, and the status of her husband, who is a leader in the Indonesian-Arab community, she gradually learns to outwardly accept her husband's choices. At the same time, both those principles go against what she personally believes. She and her husband continue to live in their palatial house with their son, while the other wife maintains her own household with her own child. As years pass, Salma becomes more accustomed to the routine of her existence, even as a new, younger wife is added to the mix; even when her increasingly-disgusted son voices the objections that are in her own heart, Salma maintains her serene air, and carries on with abundant dignity and with a degree of satisfaction. All of the wives are brought together when their husband is felled by a convenient heart attack, the effects of which leave him mostly paralyzed. When it is possible to be moved, he elects to go “home” -- that is, to Salma’s house. As a result, the house becomes a gathering place for the wives and their endless array of children, a circumstance that forces everyone involved to truly confront their collective situation for the first time.

Due mostly to the warmth and skill of the actors involved, the “Salma” segment of the film is wonderful. Despite what must have been a temptation to engage in easy stereotyping, Salma and her husband are complex, mature characters, both of whom have flaws. When Salma finds out about the second wife, her husband is utterly heartbroken at her pain, and his inability to reassure her. He is not the humorless, misogynistic figure that Westerns audiences might expect, but instead combines distant dignity with a sneaky sense of humor and flashes of insecurity. Salma, meanwhile, is a professional woman with strong ideas, who must deal every day with her decision to subsume her personality and beliefs to her religion, and her husband’s ambition. The other wives are, by necessity, less fully-formed, but they are engaging and opinionated, and with their young children, they give audiences a rich sense of the chaos that must, on occasion, be unleashed in the head of their husband.

The other two stories examine the lives of Siti, a young woman introduced into a poor Javanese household in which she eventually becomes the third wife, and Ming, a cocky, ambitious woman in Jakarta’s Chinese community, for whom marriage is a means to an end. Like Salma’s segment, both Ti’s and Ming’s are presented with a nonjudgmental air; what we see are real people, not stereotypes, and their actions rarely conform to our expectations. (Interestingly, in director Nia Dinata’s early writing on the film, this was far from the case; perhaps her opinion of her characters changed as she began to see them come to life.) The performances are uniformly good, but the woman who plays Siti (Shanty, a pop star who is a former model and MTV Indonesia VJ) deserves special mention -- she expresses her character’s lack of experience with sex and marriage achingly well, and her face expresses every doubt and though with spectacular, simple clarity. Her close-ups, particularly immediately after she arrives at the house, are a wonder to behold in their uncalculating openness.

As well-done as much of Love for Share is, it suffers from what are essentially three discreet stories. Each is effectively told (the third, Ming’s story, is the least engaging, because its protagonist lacks the depth found in the other two women), but the fact that each one ends before the next begins makes the film seem much, much longer than its 120-minute running time. Whatever the reason for this -- part of it, surely, comes from our ingrained understanding as movie-goers that the end of the story means the end of the movie -- it makes the movie very hard to sit through; when I saw it, at least half of the (small) audience left by the start of Ming’s story. This reaction is unfortunate, because Love for Share is both a good movie and a rare, open-minded look at polygamy that offers confusion, humor and love in place of judgment.