3 Days to Forever

Used by a skilled and ingenious director, the road movie remains a genre with plenty of opportunities. The journey as a metaphor for the mental state of a character, or even of a whole country as in this case, turns out to be an indestructible visual metaphor in the right hands. After his more constructed and complex film Gie (2005), Riza Nile proves with playful ease that he can present the genre freshly and with new élan.
The film tells the story of two cousins – 21-year-old Yusuf and Ambar, 19. They have spent the night partying too late and too intensely, so next morning they miss their flight to a family wedding in Yogyakarta. As a result, they have to take the wedding present, china, by car. On the way they get lost and allow themselves to be drawn along in the intoxication of an unexpectedly exciting journey. Exciting thanks to the encounters with strange and interesting people and situations on the way, exciting thanks to the many discussions they have about religion, marriage and sex and not lastly exciting because of each other’s company.
The film was made with apparent ease but well and meticulously and has the right rhythm to suggest nonchalance. As the title indicates, the journey takes three days and basically that is one day too many. But what’s a day in a human life? What’s a day in the history of a country? (GjZ)

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