A billboard advertising “Manohara,” the series. (Photo: Yudhi Sukma Wijaya, JG)

Manohara’s Newest Drama

Manohara Odelia Pinot made a media splash in April of this year with claims that she had been kidnapped and abused by her husband, a member of the Malaysian royal family. Already a model before her teen marriage, although little-known by many Indonesians at that time, Manohara’s dramatic claims propelled her into the national consciousness.

With an unblemished Asian-Caucasian look that has been described as “drop-dead gorgeous,” no one should have been surprised — and we weren’t — when local soap opera producers began to vie to give her airtime.

Not only did Manohara get a self-titled sinetron , produced by SinemArt, but private television station RCTI is already running it daily in the 6 p.m. time slot.

But, instead of sticking to the plot of teen meets and marries her prince, only to see the fairy-tale romance disintegrate, “Manohara” the show follows the formula of so many other sinetrons. Girl meets boy, girl meets another boy, girl chooses wrong boy and is destined to endure painfully prolonged consequences.

If you find such melodrama engaging, fear not, as there seems to be hope that Mano will eventually be with her one true love. Until then, allow us to give you some views of what this latest offering is, and isn’t, all about.


Life Skills 101
Ashlee Betteridge

My mother always told me to never get involved with boys who drive sports cars with personalized license plates. Especially if they already appear to be in a relationship.

So perhaps this is why I am so enthralled with the situations in the “Manohara” sinetron. She’s living the life that years of my mother’s commonsense nagging has spared me from.

When I get separated from my friends in an unconvincing fog in the wilderness because I answered my mobile phone, I tend to use that phone to call for help, instead of spending the night with a strange man under a tree during a lightning storm, as Mano did in the first scene of her show. This kind of practicality is why my life is boring yet stable.

But, unlike mine, Manohara’s on-screen mother recommends she marry the sports car owner. Her real-life mother allegedly encouraged her to marry an abusive prince, then allowed her to appear in a sinetron without first enrolling in acting classes. What hope has the poor kid got?

With my limited Indonesian, I may not understand every word Mano mumbles. But her never-ending tears and vacant stares make it clear that life is challenging. I blame bad sinetron parenting.

It must be confusing to hold down an office job as a teenager. A job with no computer, at that. No wonder she gets into work, stares at the wall for a good three to five minutes, then goes home. That’s what I would do without the Internet, too.

It must be bewildering to bring your new husband lunch and then have him smoosh a handful of steamed rice in your face. If it were me, I’d cry. Then I’d call my mum and she would bash the abusive little turd with a broomstick. Where was Mano’s maternal backup?

So I have a proposal for young Manohara. Mama Betteridge’s kids are grown up, and I think she’d like a replacement daughter for the one that moved to Indonesia. She’d sort out that good-for-nothing husband and enroll Mano in the finest educational facilities that rural Australia has to offer. She could even learn a trade, like sheep shearing.

If that’s not an option, I’m thinking of starting a charity boarding school to turn teenage-socialite-models into functioning citizens. In addition to the regular curriculum, there’d be classes on how to avoid marriage to sports car owners, what to do when your 15 minutes of fame is up and the all-important Life Skills 101.


Lacking Sex and Sense
Dalih Sembiring

When “Manohara” was in its embryonic stage, many speculated that the sinetron would be relatively loyal to her tragic true story — or what she claims it to be — from the moment she first met her sadistic prince to the happy ending of her great escape to mommy’s loving arms.

I was intrigued by the sinetron’s early disclaimer that it had passed censorship. “Wow,” I thought, and looked forward to sex, violence and the use of coarse language. I overlooked one crucial thing, though: “Manohara” airs at 6 p.m., way too early for anything more than PG-rated behavior. Besides, my sinetron-loving mother later informed me, all Indonesian soap operas have such disclaimers of late.

More intriguing to me is how the sinetron has thus far shied away from any violence entailing the use of sharp objects, purportedly the very core of the real Manohara’s misfortune.

After the scriptwriters married Mano off in the second episode, I suspected that the evil husband character, who has no royal airs but is instead the boss of some Jakarta-based company (like most sinetron villains), would start exhibiting censor-friendly sexual perversions involving razors and lit cigarettes in episode three.

However, the only things close to perverse in that episode were: 1) Bad guy Rico held Mano tight in their bedroom and whispered barely audible sentences in her ear, commanding her, of all bedroom demands, never to meet Rezky, the good guy, again; 2) A Manchurian Candidate-like chemistry between Rezky and his mother, who seems younger than her son, best seen in a scene where he lays his head on her lap and falls asleep; and 3) Rico’s vaguely infantile fondness for smearing food on and splashing water in Mano’s face.

This altered story may eventually have different effects on different viewers. Disappointment awaits those who remain hopeful that the sinetron will portray Manohara the model’s truth, as the setting and the characters have, from the beginning, veered away from her yet-to-be-proven allegations against the Malaysian prince.

For those who don’t mind the changes and will therefore help keep “Manohara” one of the most-watched shows on local television, expect the helpless heroine to follow the sweeping trend of good girls by taking to wearing a jilbab and praying constantly to God this Ramadan, as she continues to wail and suffer in the la-la land of painful acting. 


No Risks, No Surprises
Lisa Siregar

When I first heard that Manohara would be starring in a sinetron, I wasn’t surprised. And for all the reasons that I don’t usually watch sinetron, I find “Manohara” full of scenes that are far from enlightening. It’s the typical soap-opera formula with lots of close-up shots, dramatic background music and characters that are one-dimensionally very good or very bad.

Manohara’s character is a prettily-angelic but timid woman who doesn’t say much but cries a lot. She marries Rico, a wealthy but evil man, to save her family from bankruptcy, but her true love remains Rezky, a worker in Rico’s office.

The results are unsurprisingly predictable. Rico hits Manohara, throws her around and warns her not to see other men. When Manohara brings him lunch, he grabs a handful of rice and stuffs it into her face. Of course, being a dutiful wife, she just sits there in silence and weeps.

Soap operas like this can be ironically funny at first. But with its nonstop crying, yelling and acts of abuse, it quickly loses its amusement factor and just becomes sad and humiliating.

As an Indonesian who grew up having to watch sinetron during my pembantu’s rest time at home, I crave good shows on local channels. I miss the Indonesian shows of my childhood, such as “Keluarga Cemara” (“The Cemara Family”) and good old “Si Doel Anak Sekolahan” (“Doel, the Student”) — made before Rano Karno became too old to play a fresh graduate struggling to find a job.

I’m disappointed that the production house behind “Manohara” isn’t trying to make a better show. I mean, Manohara was already famous and the Indonesian film industry is showing a promising future.

Assuming that people are eager to see yet more of Manohara on screen, why not take the risk of making a truly unique show of better quality?


No Longer My Manohara
Armando Siahaan

After surviving just one episode of “Manohara,” I came up with three reasons I shouldn’t invest more time and energy in this over-the-top soap opera.

First, “Manohara” was a waste of time, in the literal sense. The show ran for about 75 minutes, but after every 10 minutes or so came commercial breaks that lasted between five and seven minutes each. The show itself was less than 50 minutes, if that. It felt more like watching a series of commercial breaks, with sinetron clips as intermezzos. Give me a break!

The episode I saw was also blighted with yawn-inducing slow-motion scenes and many long pauses.

Whenever there was a dramatic scene, characters would stare at one another — or at a mosquito on the ceiling — for 15 seconds, with eyes widening, or bulging at times, as if looking at the living dead.

Some scenes would go straight into slow-motion mode, mimicking a shampoo ad. Since Manohara was, and still is, a teen model, that might be the perfect way to kill two birds with one stone, right?

The sinetron also exploited frequent flashback scenes. Not, however, flashbacks to previous or unseen episodes, but rather from earlier in the same episode. The futility of the device suggested the director was aware that the plot of the show was so preposterous that the audience needed constant reminders of what was going on.

Second, “Manohara” was plagued with implausibility — which makes it a typical sinetron.

All of the cast wore full makeup, including the male characters, and had neat hairstyles all day. Rico’s mother was made up as if to attend Rico’s wedding when she was actually being hospitalized, and Manohara went to the office in thick makeup and dressed as if headed out to a nightclub.

The mother of Rezky, Manohara’s former love-of-her-life, looks so young that it is unfeasible she could be his mother — unless, that is, she got pregnant at the age of 10. And Rico, Manohara’s antagonistic husband and the villain of the piece, is supposedly superrich and a womanizer. But in the episode I saw, he was depicted in such a contradictory manner that it didn’t make sense. He smeared rice on Manohara’s face and threw water at Rezky when the two had an argument. Would a womanizer who drives a yellow sports car do such feminine things?

Third and lastly, I was disappointed that “Manohara” wasn’t the “true” story of Manohara, as the idea of watching a fictionalized version of her tragic story appeals to me. I was expecting a quasi-documentary that narrated and dramatized the details of all the alleged iniquities inflicted upon the teen model by her psychopathic prince.

Instead, I was presented with just another sinetron, just another love story involving forced marriage, a love triangle, an invasive family and incessant tears.

The Manohara story was so much better when she was still dealing with real reporters, cops and lawyers. What’s so juicy about another sinetron? With Manohara’s mediocre-at-best acting, she’s better off staying with tabloids and infotainment shows.

At the end of the day, this sinetron is the ultimate killer of my sympathy for Manohara. When the news first broke about her tragic story — the allegedly forced marriage, the traumatizing rape, the abduction from Saudi Arabia, the razor-blade abuse and the great Singapore escape — she won both my attention and my support.

My sympathy deteriorated gradually when she seemed to abandon her quest for justice and instead focused on appearing on television shows and doing photo shoots for lifestyle magazine.

The sinetron only does more damage to her cause as people will no longer care about the abusive treatment she claims to have received during her time in Malaysia. And it will validate accusations by skeptics that the whole Manohara story was just a publicity stunt to milk fame and fortune. Perhaps, the sinetron will make others ask about Manohara: Where does the truth stop and the acting begin?

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