‘Before, Now & Then’ (Nana) Review: Wong Kar-Wai Meets Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Transfixing Political Drama

variety.com:

Michael Nordine authorImagining what “In the Mood for Love” might have been like had Apichatpong Weeraserhakul directed it will land you somewhere in the vicinity of “Before, Now & Then,” Kamila Andini’s beguiling drama set in 1960s Indonesia.

Anyone familiar with that country’s history, even if only through Joshua Oppenheimer’s devastating companion documentaries “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” knows that there’s little happiness on the other side of this film’s end credits, but Andini’s literary adaptation is so transfixing that her characters never feel as doomed as we know them to be.The “before” prologue finds Nana (Happy Salma) and her sister Ninsingh (Rieke Diah Pitaloka) fleeing for their lives, with our heroine convinced that both her husband and father are dead as the result of the country’s anticommunist purge — a fate that may await her should she refuse to marry an insurgent leader who lives in the forest.

It’s no spoiler to say that the “now” finds Nana instead living a comfortable domestic life as the wife of a wealthy Sundanese man (Arswendy Bening Swara), but with survival assured, she’s now longing for something else from her past: fulfillment.

The dynamic between husband and wife is such that, when presented with evidence of her husband’s infidelity, Nana has little recourse but to maintain appearances and act as though nothing has happened — “I must be like water,” she says to herself in a kind of soliloquy/pep talk, adapting to the environment rather than pushing back against it.