The anxieties of influence and inheritance in Imaginur (2022)

Imaginur, the latest film by Malaysian indie filmmaker Nik Amir Mustapha, has been one of the most buzziest local cultural products of recent times, bringing in over RM 5 million in Malaysian cinemas and being praised among many of KL's arts and culture cognoscenti. It’s a sign of some intelligence and sophistication among Malaysian cultural producers. And it deserves all its accolades for daring to be something different in its exploration of more abdtract concepts and a more experimental style, instead of relying solely on narrative.

The movie follows an average working man named Zuhal (Beto Kusyairy) in his search to explain the mystery of Nur (Diana Danielle), a woman who keeps appearing in his dreams and making him question reality. Contrary to its suggestive (and, honestly, pretty lame) title, the movie is not about imagination but rather about memory. It borrows liberally from Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a cult classic among aughts-era hipsters. Both films feature the following: a quack doctor, a medical procedure that involves sci-fi headgear resembling a hairdresser’s perm chair, a recurring scene, a middle-of-nowhere landscape, and a girl. The cues are so abundant that I don’t think I’m wrong in comparing it to Eternal Sunshine — Imaginur is not just homage but, it seems to me, an active re-interpretation or re-working of Eternal Sunshine towards themes that are more personal to the director, within a Kuala Lumpur context. The movie deftly plays with chronology and time, daring to confuse and even frustrate audiences in order to achieve its vision. But in the end, just like most other local independent films of this nature, the initial daring gets resolved with a logical explanation; the catch at the end amounts to the popular prompt in high school Malay essay-writing excercises: “it was all just a dream.”

Eternal Sunshine was my favourite movie throughout my teenage years, before I knew anything about romantic love and relationships. I thought the scenes shot in the chiaroscuro blue light, with God’s spotlight shining on Joel and Clementine’s lost faces, were beautiful and the final scene in the apartment lobby sad. Eternal Sunshine was successful and touching because it showed the stubborn triumph of memory over the present and the tragi-comedy of love’s gullibility in the face of nostalgia. As Joel’s procedure to erase memories of his relationship with Clementine gets underway, he journeys back through the memories as they’re being erased, and the closer he gets to the beginning, the more urgently he feels that he’s made a massive mistake by having the procedure. Not to have loved at all (or, not to possess the memories of having loved) is a greater emptiness than the grief of failed love. Nostalgia for love's early days compels couples to fall back into each other again, foolishly, hopelessly, and against their better judgements; ironically, memories don't serve any educational function, instead they compel us to repeat the same old fights and agitate the same old wounds. Memories crush a person’s will. Memories lock a person in the past, keeping them strapped within the safe, white cushioned rooms of what has been so that they never have to face the thorny, vast unknown of the future. These philosophical meditations upon memory are absent from Imaginur, which mostly reads as a cinematic allegory for the experience of Alzheimer’s.

A big part of Imaginur follows Zuhal’s struggles in caring for his father, who has Alzheimer’s. In the beginning, his father merely appears as a side concern, just one of the many examples of quiet everyday suffering that characterises Zuhal’s life, but as the movie progresses it is revealed to be a larger concern that eventually eclipses the romantic mystery between Zuhal and Nur. The father’s disease is related to the son’s anxieties, we realise. As the movie skips back and forth through time with increasing regularity and scenes keep repeating themselves, we begin to wonder if Zuhal has more in common with his father than we initially thought.

That’s enough of a giveaway as to what the film is “really” about, which is, yeah, Alzheimer’s: the medical dream that explains the movie dream. It is towards an allegory of Alzheimer’s that the movie’s more psychedelic elements have been in service.

Alzheimer’s sometimes runs in the family. In one chilling scene at a quack doctor hypnotist’s office — the film’s counterpart to Eternal Sunshine’s Dr. Mierzwiak — Zuhal flashes back to the “present” (or what we assume is the present) to realise that he’s been plugged into the doctor’s brain scan machine with his father, and the hypnotist-doctor is making vague allusions to switching their brains… The scene succinctly captures the fear of ageing and the uncanny shock of not realising how alike your parents you are until it’s too late. You’ve been locked in the lunatic cell with them the entire time, playing out their versions of reality thinking you’re distancing yourself from them. Up till now, we’d been lulled into believing that the movie is about Zuhal’s search for dream girl Nur but, midway through, the movie blossoms into a story about losing a parent. Zuhal’s father passes away (though because of his condition, he was “lost” to Zuhal a long time ago) and his passing is dealt with poetically and emotionally.

The death of his father triggers a more confusing succession of events in regards to Nur. Like Eternal Sunshine, the timeline jumps between Zuhal’s initial acquaintance with Nur, followed by a series of events with shaky foundations in reality; up till the movie’s final moments we’re still questioning whether Nur’s a real person or merely a figment of Zuhal’s imagination, a guardian angel dreamt up by him in a fever daze after getting hit by a car. Briefly, it’s suggested that she is the one who was hit by a car in the beginning, not him, and that she died a long time ago. The final revelation is like Eternal Sunshine’s: everything was real — she was real — they had a long and loving life together that was soured by a single incident that Zuhal’s diseased mind continues to fixate on. But where Eternal Sunshine embraced its sci-fi elements in a romantic fashion, using the possibility of memory erasure to say something about the nature of love, in Imaginur the sci-fi elements are explained as an actual representation of how Alzheimer’s feels and functions.

Zuhal’s mind continues to reenact a specific moment in his life — when Nur was about to leave him after they had a big fight, and he runs after her at the bus station but then gets hit by a car. In the end, this doesn’t make for a convincing enough point of trauma. It doesn’t have the dramatic emotion of Joel and Clementine’s relationship, in which the two memory-wiped lovers are nevertheless drawn to each other even after forgetting their shared past. Joelly and Clem are soulmates—no matter their attempts to deny and erase each other, their bond is destined in the stars; in Imaginur, this magic and mysticism surrounding the lovers’ bond has become medical.

The bluntness of this return to reality and logic isn’t softened by the lack of chemistry between Zuhal and Nur. Their story and dialogue were mostly unconvincing, they spoke to each other like two overly-educated millennials texting over Bumble. Although our first introduction to Nur should have already told us all we needed to know: a pretty girl in a white dress standing in front of what looks like… Mount Kinabalu with an Instagram filter over it? In his memories and daydreams of Nur, Zuhal continues returning to this totally cliched, affectless landscape that’s basically a paradise of Eden in contrast to Eternal Sunshine’s more oneiric, sad, and strange landscapes (which in turn seem like lite versions of David Lynch’s nightmare-scapes).

It’s unfair to keep comparing it to Eternal Sunshine, but as it borrows so many cues from it, what else can I do? Aside from the beautiful soundtrack from Bayangan, little else about the production is worth commenting on. The cinematography was featureless, as for example in the Mt Kinabalu-esque dream-scape; the film was colour graded like an Ana Abu ad (why do Malaysian filmmakers keep doing this?); the actors were OK but their scripts needed serious work. (Malaysian scriptwriters: stop with the existential Europeans and manic pixie dream girls — it’s 2023, not 2013. Eternal Sunshine was pretty good for the time, but in hindsight also lacked a strong emotional bond between the characters; Clementine was a bitch and Joel was a loser. I recommend viewing of Paris, Texas, or The Brown Bunny instead.)

As a creative infomercial about Alzheimer’s, it succeeded, in parts beautifully, but if it wanted to say something deeper about the broader human condition and the nature of romantic love, then it could have worked a little harder. And if this was my movie, I wouldn’t be too happy with so many people recognising how much it resembles my influences — so much so that hardly a Letterboxd review gets posted without mentioning Eternal Sunshine. I wouldn’t let myself get too comfortable lounging beneath the borrowed valour of said influence, a superior movie that was released nearly 20 years before mine.