You know when you see the ratings information at the top of the screen on a show, and one of the explanations for the rating is “smoking?” Our reaction is usually, “pish tosh,” because the idea of seeing smoking on our screens isn’t foreign to us. In fact, the lack of smoking on shows these days feels more jarring. But a new Indonesian miniseries takes place in that country’s cigarette industry in the 1960s, and there’s more smoking on the screen than we’ve seen in the last year combined.
Opening Shot: A woman in a wedding dress walks through a reception, where a lot of people are smoking.
The Gist: An older man (Pritt Timothy) is in a hospital bed in his bedroom, hooked to oxygen and a monitor. He yells out the name “Jeng Yah”, then gets out of bed and grabs a canister from a cabinet. He gives it to his youngest son Lebas (Arya Saloka) and tells him to “find her.”
This in Jakarta in 2001. The older man, Soeraja, is the owner of a huge kretek (cigarette) conglomerate in Indonesia. The canister is a key to his desk at the corporation’s headquarters; Lebas, normally a free-spirited playboy, goes to the desk and finds a picture of people he never saw before and a letter written by someone he never met.
Back in M City in 1964, Dasiyah (Dian Sastrowardoyo) works for her father Idores Moeria (Rukman Rosadi) in his small-scale kretek factory, where only women are allowed to roll the clove cigarettes that he sells. Dasiyah has a keen nose for the flavor the cigarettes should have, but she’s fighting against the idea that a woman can work in this industry. She doesn’t even have access to the blue-doored “flavor room”, where tobacco blends are created to make different and distinct flavors and aromas.
When a tobacco blend comes in that doesn’t smell like the usual, she insists on going with Idores to the market to confront their supplier. There, she sees a man running away from a merchant then getting into a fight. But when he catches her eye, he’s the only man that hasn’t looked down at her.
Back at the factory, Dasiyah tries to assert herself, even as her mother and father try to arrange a marriage for her. Idores brings in a new worker: Soeraja (Ario Bayu), who is the man they saw fighting at the market the day before. Idores likes Soeraja’s fighting spirit, and it turns out he’s educated, as he and his family ran away from persecution when they lived in the Dutch-occupied north.
In a move to prove she knows what she’s doing, Dasiyah puts Soeraja to work with the cigarette-rolling women, and he starts proving his worth to her when he supports her efforts to try to make her father’s company more competitive. For instance, he suggests getting tobacco from suppliers up north so they can avoid the supplier that is not only shortchanging them but insulting Dasiyah in the process. But as the two of them grow closer, Idores announces that he’s arranged for Dasiyah to get married to the son of one of his biggest competitors.
In 2001, Lebas travels to M City and visits a kretek history museum to see who Jung Yah might be. He is led to a room full of artifacts and files donated to the museum by the daughter of one of the smaller kretek makers from the recent past. When he meets the donor, Arum (Putri Marino), she surprises him with her reaction to the picture he’s holding.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Cigarette Girl (Original title: Gadis Kretek) has the feel of similar forbidden-romance series like Crash Landing On You.
Our Take: Your enjoyment of Cigarette Girl is really going to depend on how romantic you find its backdrop. We don’t mean Indonesia in general, but its cigarette industry. Much of the discourse in the series revolves around Dasiyah trying to make her way in an country and industry that maintains that women should not only be in traditional roles but they don’t even actually have the skills to work in the industry.
There is a ton of smoking in the show, of course, but there’s also a lot of talk about tobacco supplies, about developing flavors to make the clove cigarettes distinctive from competitors, and about what seems like a tradition-bound, old school process being brought into the 20th century. Even in the 2001 scenes, there’s lots of smoking, as we see when Lebas’ brothers are surprised to see him hanging around the office. But at least there’s some slight acknowledgement there that smoking is a bad habit that’s detrimental to people’s health.
The sixties-era romance between Dasiyah and Soeraja is the best part of the series; we’re not sure where the story of Lebas and Arum’s search for Dasiyah/Jeng Yah will take them, but that part of the story feels much less developed and essential. In fact, if it was lifted out of the story, we wouldn’t miss it. But at the end of the miniseries’ five episodes, perhaps the more modern half of the story will make more sense in the series’ big picture.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Arum tells Lebas, “Why do you have my mom’s picture?”
Sleeper Star: Rukman Rosadi, who plays Dasiyah’s father Idores, is a key figure in her life because he actually trusts her to help him in his business, despite the fact that most of the people who work for him don’t trust her simply because she’s a woman.
Most Pilot-y Line: There’s so much smoking in this show, we were craving a cigarette by the end of the first episode, and we don’t even smoke. We think we might have gotten a nicotine contact buzz through the screen.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Cigarette Girl is a conventional romance set against an unconventional backdrop, but one that was important in Indonesian society sixty years ago, and it’s a good illustration of just how important it was.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.