PKR strategic director Rafizi Ramli is to be lauded for offbeat thinking.
In wanting to produce a movie of the cattle-breeding project that went spectacularly awry, it appears he intends to turn obsession into irony.
These days when some among the obsessed have resorted to turning up their butts at their targets, Rafizi’s attempt at wringing humour from neurosis is usefully diverting.
Since details of the RM250 million cattle-breeding scandal broke into the public sphere last October, Rafizi has been in the news almost daily, picking at one or another facet of the drama that seemed nicely scripted for television.
Though at times Rafizi had seemed, by the tenacity of his concentration on the National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) controversy, like a vulture surveying his ample carrion, he has not picked at it with a ghoul’s lack of humor.
He treated his nemesis Wanita Umno leader Shahrizat Abdul Jalil’s tweeting him that he was stalking her with suitable levity.
Rafizi quipped that his wife wasn’t feeling jealous at Shahrizat’s snide comment; she expects better taste from her husband, noted the PKR politico.
Thus the entire episode of the cattle-breeding project gone-off-the-rails was not without its lighter side.
Shahrizat’s vociferous claim
Perhaps the only other drama in the history of political scandals in the country with comparable frisson was the one to do with the shenanigans captured on video of a deputy speaker of Parliament in flagrante delicto more than two decades back.
But that episode had sex going for it, something always certain to guarantee the interest of a public apt to suffer from attention-deficit syndrome.
Truth to tell, in some of its details, the NFC scandal can evoke themes that could make for accomplished cinema.
Since the arts are expected to flourish under a Pakatan Rakyat government, Rafizi’s intention to depict on the screen the NFC contretemps could well be a herald of things to come, in cinema at least, under a new dispensation for the arts.
By this one does not mean that the arts under Pakatan rule would encourage freak ego trips by very ordinary minds with high expectations for their creative affections.
No; rather, it would encourage people like filmmaker Fahmi Reza whose film ‘Sepuluh Tahun Sebelum Merdeka’ was a stirring depiction of an alternative (to Umno’s) version of pre-Merdeka history.
Perhaps, the most intriguing aspect of the NFC caper is Shahrizat’s vociferous claim that just because she was the wife of the controversy’s principal protagonist, Mohamed Salleh Ismail, it did not mean that she had anything to do with decisions that made the cattle-breeding project the scam it became.
Happy families
Here one recalls the intriguing opening lines of Leo Tolstoy’s great novel, ‘Anna Karenina’:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
This has been called the Anna Karenina Principle. You could expect Rafizi to render in his planned movie the cinematic metaphor for what could plausibly be called the ‘Shahrizat Principle’, with a doffing of the hat to Tolstoy:
“Happy families are all alike in the strict Berlin Wall of separation they observe between public and private spheres.”
A sly fable, maybe; a thin and specious conceit, perhaps. But cinematic art is built on imaginative recreations of real lives and dramas.
The NFC scandal has just about everything required of the genre: a government-funded multimillion dollar allocation, emblematic of all that is wrong with plutocratic governance, the whiff of conspiracy, the presence of a leader and wife that plays the part of supposedly wronged woman, shifting explanations, an investigator of public scandal who is hauled up his exertions, and a tale that grows more interesting as the recitation of its twists and turns progresses.
Invested with a beguiling sensibility, this is the sort of script can make for a grand movie.
The PKR director of strategy is to be congratulated for intimating that the political dimension can be grist for cinematic depiction.
In wanting to produce a movie of the cattle-breeding project that went spectacularly awry, it appears he intends to turn obsession into irony.
These days when some among the obsessed have resorted to turning up their butts at their targets, Rafizi’s attempt at wringing humour from neurosis is usefully diverting.
Since details of the RM250 million cattle-breeding scandal broke into the public sphere last October, Rafizi has been in the news almost daily, picking at one or another facet of the drama that seemed nicely scripted for television.Though at times Rafizi had seemed, by the tenacity of his concentration on the National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) controversy, like a vulture surveying his ample carrion, he has not picked at it with a ghoul’s lack of humor.
He treated his nemesis Wanita Umno leader Shahrizat Abdul Jalil’s tweeting him that he was stalking her with suitable levity.
Rafizi quipped that his wife wasn’t feeling jealous at Shahrizat’s snide comment; she expects better taste from her husband, noted the PKR politico.
Thus the entire episode of the cattle-breeding project gone-off-the-rails was not without its lighter side.
Shahrizat’s vociferous claim
Perhaps the only other drama in the history of political scandals in the country with comparable frisson was the one to do with the shenanigans captured on video of a deputy speaker of Parliament in flagrante delicto more than two decades back.
But that episode had sex going for it, something always certain to guarantee the interest of a public apt to suffer from attention-deficit syndrome.
Truth to tell, in some of its details, the NFC scandal can evoke themes that could make for accomplished cinema.
Since the arts are expected to flourish under a Pakatan Rakyat government, Rafizi’s intention to depict on the screen the NFC contretemps could well be a herald of things to come, in cinema at least, under a new dispensation for the arts.
By this one does not mean that the arts under Pakatan rule would encourage freak ego trips by very ordinary minds with high expectations for their creative affections.
No; rather, it would encourage people like filmmaker Fahmi Reza whose film ‘Sepuluh Tahun Sebelum Merdeka’ was a stirring depiction of an alternative (to Umno’s) version of pre-Merdeka history.Perhaps, the most intriguing aspect of the NFC caper is Shahrizat’s vociferous claim that just because she was the wife of the controversy’s principal protagonist, Mohamed Salleh Ismail, it did not mean that she had anything to do with decisions that made the cattle-breeding project the scam it became.
Happy families
Here one recalls the intriguing opening lines of Leo Tolstoy’s great novel, ‘Anna Karenina’:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
This has been called the Anna Karenina Principle. You could expect Rafizi to render in his planned movie the cinematic metaphor for what could plausibly be called the ‘Shahrizat Principle’, with a doffing of the hat to Tolstoy:
“Happy families are all alike in the strict Berlin Wall of separation they observe between public and private spheres.”
A sly fable, maybe; a thin and specious conceit, perhaps. But cinematic art is built on imaginative recreations of real lives and dramas.The NFC scandal has just about everything required of the genre: a government-funded multimillion dollar allocation, emblematic of all that is wrong with plutocratic governance, the whiff of conspiracy, the presence of a leader and wife that plays the part of supposedly wronged woman, shifting explanations, an investigator of public scandal who is hauled up his exertions, and a tale that grows more interesting as the recitation of its twists and turns progresses.
Invested with a beguiling sensibility, this is the sort of script can make for a grand movie.
The PKR director of strategy is to be congratulated for intimating that the political dimension can be grist for cinematic depiction.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.
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