This City is a Battlefield: an absorbing Indonesian historical epic
Director Mouly Surya’s elaborate depiction of the Indonesian resistance in post-WWII Jakarta keeps a tight focus on its characters as it grapples with broad themes of Dutch colonisation and fractured national identity.
- Reviewed from the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam
Fresh off directing Hollywood thriller Trigger Warning (2024) starring Jessica Alba, Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya returns to the independent film circuit with an ambitious historical epic.
Set in Jakarta in 1946, This City is a Battlefield (Indonesian title Perang Kota) is a tightly-paced and richly-textured film, its present-tense title suggesting the notion that the narratives of war, national identity and cultural remembrance persist long after swords and guns have been laid down.
An adaptation of Mochtar Lubis’ 1952 novel A Road with No End, Surya’s film follows Isa (played by Chicco Jerikho), who is at once a school teacher, a talented violinist and Indonesian resistance fighter. Actress Ariel Tatum elegantly plays the role of tenacious Fatimah (Isa’s wife, who is equally confident wielding a gun as playing the piano). Isa is tasked with carrying out an assassination with the help of Hazil, a fellow rebel who gradually becomes attracted to Fatimah.
The film opens with black-and-white reels of post-World War II Jakarta, with a narrator referring to the islands of Indonesia as “prized possessions” and claiming how “the Dutch colonisation has given the East Indies infinitely more” through bringing culture to a “savage land”. These imperialistic affirmations sharply give way to Isa’s first appearance on screen, more than three minutes into the film, when we find him scribbling sentences in Dutch on a classroom blackboard.
Such a juxtaposition introduces the sociopolitical narratives threaded throughout the film, against the backdrop of a city and country that has not quite yet shaken off its colonial hangovers, nor quite achieved a stable sense of national belonging. At one point in the film, a group of Jakarta residents sit together around an outdoor table. One asks: “Is it better to be under the Dutch or the Japanese?” Another quickly retorts: “Who wants to be colonised?”
Surya frequently frames her characters using doorways, emphasising a sense of distance between the spectator and the protagonists. The device consistently summons contrasts: interior and exterior spaces, domestic and public spheres, as the film similarly shapeshifts through these opposites. In one scene, viewers witness Isa as a battle-hardy rebel, in another he struggles with impotence, frustrating his relationship with Fatimah.
These shots of doorways frame some of the key plot points in the film: Isa and his adopted child Salim hugging at a moment of reckoning in their familial relationship; three resistance fighters plotting the assassination. It’s a poignant motif for the film, suggesting a family, city and country in an inescapable state of transition.