Susi Susanti: Love All
    
 
Director: Sim F.
Year: 2019
Country: Indonesia
Rating: 6.5
A fine sports movie from Indonesia. About badminton. That may not get a lot of people excited but in Southeast Asia badminton is huge. Why? I have no idea. Most of us played badminton as kids in the back yard and rarely as adults. But I get it on TV here a lot and will end up watching it and it is not a kid's game at this level. Speed, flexibility, great reflexes, conditioning and a killer mentality are needed to be successful. Susi Susanti had them all and is considered by many to be one of the greatest if not the greatest female badminton player of all time. In the 1990s. she dominated woman's badminton and won the Gold Medal in 1992. She was from Indonesia. Of Chinese descent. That mattered.



A lot of this is standard sports film narrative that we have become used to. Since it is a true story, if you know of her history, there really is not a lot of drama but it still makes for a feel-good movie when she wins. It begins when Susi (Moira Tabina Zayn as a teen & Laura Basuki as an adult) is a teenager in a small village outside of Jakarta. Her brother is beaten in a badminton tournament and the opposing player makes fun of him. Susi challenges him - there and then - and whips his ass. Word gets to the Badminton foundation in Jakarta and she is invited to join a training facility. And she practices hard, gets good and starts beating the pants off everyone. When she wins the Olympic Gold the whole country was rooting for her and she brought pride back home. Her boyfriend at the time and later husband won the men's Gold in badminton.



But she was of Chinese ancestry - as were nearly all the good players on the Indonesian team. Why? Again, I don't know but the Chinese tend to dominate the sport as they do ping pong.  There were around 500,000 people of Chinese descent in Indonesia in the 1950s and because of the doctrine of "Right of Blood", China considered them Chinese citizens. In 1962 Chinese-Indonesians had to choose to either renounce Chinese citizenship or leave the country. Some 60,000 left the country.  In 1966 Indonesia abolished Communism and Chinese were considered suspect and not given citizenship. There were large anti-Chinese riots in 1998 that had many Chinese thinking about leaving. In the film, Susi is asked by a reporter if she considers herself to still be Indonesian while the horrific riots were going on - she replies I will always be Indonesian. And the music swells.

Susi Susanti and future husband with their Gold Medals in 1992