Given the title, it isn’t surprising that Falling in Love Like in Movies would be a metanarrative with the main romance mirroring the filmmaking and the filmmaking reflecting the main romance. It’s a familiar approach, and at first, Falling seems to follow the inevitable ending where the couple falls in love, but right on time, in around Sequence Four, writer-director Yandy Laurens chooses a more honest, less chosen path– a path that plenty of previous romance films hasn’t examined– that still falls within the eight sequence screenplay structure Bagus talks about. While Bagus is pitching his film to Hana, and to his producer, Jatuh Cinta Seperti di Film-Film pitches a new way of thinking about love, grief, and of course, filmmaking.
Bagus, a screenwriter, reunites with his high school friend and crush, Hana, who is still grieving from the loss of her husband. He wants to convince her to fall in love once again, just like in the movies.
After reconnecting with his high school friend Hana, adaptation screenwriter Bagus remembers and feels the sensation of having a crush again. While she’s still grieving from the loss of her husband, Bagus hopes that by the next year, he’ll convince her to fall in love once again, through the first original movie he’s currently writing.
The editing. While Bagus makes a new suggestion, and the producer complains about it, the film stubbornly keeps the suggestion Bagus makes, like making the film mostly black and white and placing the title card later on in the introduction. It’s a little cheeky retort to the conventions Indonesian romance films tend to have.
It truly is a cinematic experience.
Hi! An indonesian here. I definitely agree this is a great Indonesian film!