Given its name and promotional blurbs mentioning bloody clashes amidst 1946 Jakarta, you might assume Perang Kota – This City is a Battlefield is replete with wartime conflict. That assumption is correct, to an extent. After opening with a black-and-white newsreel that sets context for Indonesia’s struggle for independence against British-backed Dutch colonial administrators after WWII, the film launches into a 20 minute action sequence featuring British sepoys massacring civilians on the streets of Jakarta.
However, This City is a Battlefield then surprises viewers by dropping in a sudden sex scene. Sure, the movie’s main protagonist Isa—an attractive violin teacher and ex-soldier—aims to kill a Dutch colonial official, and has recruited his student Hazil to join the plot. However, Isa apparently cannot get an erection due to some unspecified WWII trauma, and Hazil has begun sleeping with Isa’s wife Fatimah. The film’s “battlefield” , then, is apparently not just against the Dutch but among these two men for Fatimah’s affections—cue the litany of additional sex scenes that get sprinkled throughout the rest of the movie’s two hour runtime.
One might think that this mix of assassination plot and adultery might have echoes of Lust, Caution. Unfortunately, echoes are probably the extent of the resemblance. While Lust, Caution does a superb job at weaving together the deception of adultery and spycraft alongside the violence of sex and war, This City is a Battlefield’s attempts to meld romance and war feel lackluster.
The introduction of Isa’s impotence feels sudden and lacks satisfactory explanation, as does the reveal of Hazil’s affair with Fatimah. Both of those sexual phenomena also seem completely delinked from the main plotline around assassinating a Dutch official. While one might expect this adultery to cause some explosive tension between Isa and Hazil, any conflict they experience climaxes in a rather flaccid manner and does not meaningfully change the assassination’s outcome.
Furthermore, This City Is a Battlefield‘s romantic subplot undermines the agency and character development of Fatimah, which is quite disappointing considering director Mouly Surya built a strong reputation with her female-centric thriller Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts.
In fact, one might assume from This City is a Battlefield’s initial 20 minute action sequence—where Fatimah features prominently and even engages in violence herself—that Fatimah (who the film also portrays as educated and erudite) is the main character, only to be sorely disappointed when she gets relegated to the role of unsatisfied housewife for the other 100 minutes of the movie. Once the film’s romantic subplot kicks in, the only inkling of agency she displays is perhaps in acquiescing to her affair with Hazil; otherwise, the film’s other characters purposefully isolate her away from the main assassination plot line.
The disappointment does not end there though. This City is a Battlefield never satisfactorily cleans up the romance subplot in relation to Fatimah either. Without giving too much away, at the movie’s end, she is depicted in a rather traditional female role, one that she likely would have still landed in without having the affair.
One might think that if This City is a Battlefield stuck to the tenor of its first 20 minutes, it would be a better work. Admittedly, the film is adapted from a 1952 Indonesian novel called A Road with No End, which features Isa’s impotence as a key plotline—so a more violent and Fatimah-centric tale may not have been a viable option.
Granted, internationally distributed movies about the Indonesian National Revolution are not especially common, and This City is a Battlefield may still be worth a watch for those interested in popular imaginings of this historical period. The film’s production values are high and its moody cinematography is also noteworthy. Just expect its oddly executed romantic subplot to render some of its storytelling promise, dare I say, impotent.
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This City Is a Battlefield (Indonesian: Perang Kota) — Indonesia. Dialog in Indonesian. Directed by Mouly Surya. Running time 1hr 59min. First released 8 Feb 2025 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Starring Chicco Jerikho, Ariel Tatum, Jermo Kurnia.
This article is part of Cinema Escapist‘s dedicated coverage of the 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.