"Kiss me Quick" Draws Film Censors Ire

The film titled "Kiss Me Quick" ("Buruan Cium Gue") hardly hit the Indonesian cinemas before the religious guardians of morals protested. The youth film leads young people down the path to moral decline. Anna Lay reports.

The problem starts with the title "Kiss me quick!," according to H. Amidhan, Chairman of the Indonesian Islamic Council, which explicitly invites young people to commit the forbidden.

In Islam, they are not permitted to touch each other, not to mention kiss, until after marriage. If young people are shown that they are free to steal a kiss, then the danger exists that they will also dare to commit adultery.

Sounds a bit farfetched? Not for H. Amidhan, for he sees kissing as the root of adultery.

Therefore, he is exerting moral pressure on the government, because, as Titie Sahid, Director of the Censorship Office, explains, ministries can belatedly remove films from cinema programs.

Films that destabilize society

"Regional governments as well as the Ministry for Culture and Tourism can prohibit a film that has already been approved if they believe the film destabilizes society and is offensive to the public."

This film caused its first offense with the alleged "offensive" title "Kiss me quick!" This is a film in which the first shy kiss occurs on the screen only after 80 minutes.

The film is about the first love of a young girl in the city of Jakarta and how she yearns for her first kiss: a harmless story in the eyes of most Western viewers, but regarded as morally damaging to juveniles by Islamic dignitaries in Indonesia.

Conservative Islamic forces cannot understand why the Indonesian Censorship Office approved the film in the first place. Titie Sahid of the Indonesian Censorship Office attempts to explain:

"We originally issued a permit for the film to be shown in cinemas because this way we can control and supervise access to the film. After all, the film is playing in cinemas in closed rooms, and viewer age can be controlled at the ticket office."

Intimations of lip contact

Furthermore, censors had already cut out the "incendiary" scenes. From the originally eight kisses in the film, only two remain to tantalize viewers. And even here lip contact is more or less left to the viewer’s imagination.

In Indonesia, views over morals and public decency with regard to kissing often diverge widely. At the beginning of the year, the Justice Minister attempted to push through a proposal that would have made kissing in public illegal.

But the rather moderately religious Indonesian people were not enthusiastic. The logical outcome: the proposal was rejected.

The public also had no problem with the film now under attack. And probably the Islamic dignitaries in Indonesia—a country in which the 90% of the population is Muslim—would have had no misgivings if the kissing scenes removed from the film by the censors had not been used in the advertising TV trailer.

The Director of the Censorship Office explains how this could have happened:

"We did not issue a permit for television because it is impossible to control TV broadcasts," says Sahid. "That the trailer was shown on TV was a mistake. Thus, the film can be retroactively removed from cinema programs even though we have already issued a permit.

What is amazing is that the extremely permissive films from the USA and daily soaps from India can be shown en masse on Indonesia television—and without censorship. Only Indonesian film and TV productions are subject to stricter criteria.

Anna Lay

Translation from German: Nancy Joyce