Rangga & Cinta

When she loses a poetry contest to a newcomer named Rangga, high-school superstar Cinta finds herself torn between loyalty to her girl gang and a budding attraction to this lonesome outsider. Rangga & Cinta revives the Indonesian pop culture classic What’s Up with Love? as a bittersweet teen musical. 

Editors of the school’s wall magazine and all-round superstars, Cinta and her four friends are an inseparable gang who have sworn never to keep secrets from one another. When Cinta loses a poetry contest to a virtual unknown named Rangga, her curiosity for this brooding, literature-loving loner is piqued. Soon, she finds herself stealing time away from her girl group in a clandestine adventure that will test her friendship and loyalty.

What’s Up with Love? (Rudy Soedjarwo, 2002) was a cultural and box office phenomenon, inspiring hit sequels and a TV series. With Rangga & Cinta, filmmaker Riri Riza – who served as a producer on the original – reimagines the generation-defining teen romance as a buoyant high-school musical featuring a new cohort of young actors. Set in the early 2000s, this reboot is a nostalgic, bittersweet trip back to an era of scrapbooks, alarm clocks and secret love letters smuggled in library books – the last gasp of adolescent privacy before the advent of constant surveillance through smartphones.  

Shot in widescreen in elegant pastel tones, Rangga & Cinta remobilises genre conventions and archetypes, injecting fresh life into a widely beloved pop culture classic. 

– Srikanth Srinivasan

Trailer

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