Dear David

Never in a million years would I have expected this from an Indonesian movie. I have so much respect for the themes in this movie: being authentic, friendship, lgbt representation, mental health representation, normalizing women's sexuality!! I thought this was just going to be a wacky movie from the trailer and sure there were parts that were cringe! But I think that was the point. That it's normal to be cringe, especially since we've all been teenagers at some point and done plenty of cringe-y things ourselves. This was a lot of fun to watch with a friend and we were both extremely impressed at how much this movie was able to cover. As an Indonesian speaker I am so proud of this movie and I hope people give it a chance.

Right, while I was somewhat much older than the target audience for this 2023 Indonesian drama titled "Dear David", I have to admit that the movie actually turned out to be entertaining and enjoyable.

Writers Winnie Benjamin, Daud Sumolang and Muhammad Zaidy put together a nicely written storyline that had a richly detailed character gallery to bring the story to life on the screen. And it is a story that draws you in and takes you along on a ride as Laras's secret writing leaks to the school and turns her and David's lives upside down.

Sure, the storyline is aimed at a young adult audience, no doubt about it. But I actually found the storyline and script to be rather nicely written and constructed, and that made for an thoroughly watchable and entertaining movie.

The acting performances in "Dear David" were good. I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, but they definitely put on good and realistic performances. Leading actress Shenina Cinnamon really carried the movie quite well, and she certainly is a very talented actress.

Something that was working against the overall enjoyment of the movie was the length of the movie. It ran for nearly two hours, and would have benefitted from a much more generous cutting touch in the final editing. Nearly two hours of a drama such as this was pushing it to the limit and beyond.

A movie such as "Dear David" is one that will find a wide appeal with the young adult audience, of that I am quite sure. And not just with an Indonesian audience either. Give director Lucky Kuswandi's movie a chance, because it definitely is an entertaining movie.

My rating of "Dear David" lands on a six out of ten stars.

Sometimes the nationality IS the selling point and maybe that's what got me to sit through the whole thing.

My bias as transatlantic media consumer is that this totally feels like a professional job. Even if not every likes it, it's a respectable take on the teen dramedy genre with well developed characters and a plot that (mostly) keep moving.

It's bemusing how certain elements just sort of show up together; we begin with a story of one girl's internal life being publicized, continue into a story of old and new friendships developing and in the end it's a commentary on fascists we let run schools.

Piece by piece it all works but it's hard to find thematic unity here and maybe we don't need to. We have a sympathetic heroin and a visually appealing vision of a landscape and a community. The Cerano de Bergerac angle thankfully doesn't take up TOO much time and the rekindling of an old friendship suffers from having zero ground work placed on it. The Dilla character (David's affections) is often hard to like and I wish she had been called out on her nonsense more.

It's infuriating to watch that human garbage they call a vice-principal fixate over nothing in a dystopian way but at least we're supposed to hate her and the pay-off is good enough.