Watching Leonard Cohen in Jakarta

Well, it may not be quite the same as reading Lolita in Tehran (or even reading Playboy in Indonesia, which is quite a hot topic here at the moment) but it was quite strange watching a documentary about Leonard Cohen in a theater filled (for a few minutes, at least) with Indonesians at the Jakarta Intl Film Festival last night.

Tickets were free (as they are for all documentaries at the festival) and, because you needed to get there a couple of hours before the 6:30 showtime to get them, the crowd was made up of mostly students who have come every day after school during the festival and seen whatever film they could get into. Therefore, of all the attendees I talked to while waiting in line, only one actually knew who Leonard Cohen was.

So we didn’t take it personally when most of the crowd walked out shortly after the movie started. I just don’t think it was their kind of music. The write-up in the festival booklet said that U2 was in it and people may well have been expecting music along those lines. (For our liking there was actually way too much Bono and The Edge yammering on about their love of Leonard Cohen.) The film did touch on Cohen’s religious background a little bit, but it didn’t seem to faze anyone who was left in the theater at that point.

All in all we quite enjoyed the film, which was a combination of footage from a tribute concert and interviews with Cohen and other artists. Pretty typical concert film, really, but the topic and the venue made it feel a bit different.

Oh yeah, and when the credits came on we discovered that the film was co-produced by none other than Mel Gibson.