This article contains major spoilers for the Tersanjung: The Movie ending.
Streaming on Netflix from today, Tersanjung: The Movie is one of the best films of the year thus far. But it also has plenty of twists and turns that are certainly deserving of some explanation. The question of who the film’s protagonist Yura ends up with romantically is only one of the relevant ones. Her tumultuous love life — not to mention the turbulent social politics of Indonesia — leaves plenty left unresolved.
The film’s plot is kick-started by Yura’s arranged marriage to a privileged, despicable man who tries to rape her on their first date, and her defending herself causes his wealthy family to nix the arrangement and thus plunge Yura’s struggling musician father, step-mother, and sister into crippling debt. Having been unaware of the circumstances of the arrangement in the first place, Yura feels understandably betrayed and violated and goes to stay with her best friends Oka and Christian. The stress of the whole thing causes Yura’s father to have a stroke, and she’s forced to drop out of school to find employment.
That employment turns out to be a fledgling instant noodle business with Oka and Christian, and it does well. In their success, Yura and Christian, with cheerleading from Oka, begin to fall for one another and eventually become engaged, at which point Yura realizes that her best friend is actually from an exceedingly wealthy family. When she meets them, despite his mother showing some obvious reservations, Christian’s father seems unusually generous. His only condition is that Christian flies to L.A. to bail out his brother’s struggling business, which, given his obvious facility with management, should only take a week or so.
Yura discovers she is pregnant with Christian’s baby at almost exactly the same time that she discovers he doesn’t seem to be coming back — he drops out of contact and his entire family relocates to America, leaving her stranded and living in Oka’s house. The exact circumstances of Christian’s disappearance are never explained, and are actually made even more interesting in the Tersanjung: The Movie ending, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
In the meantime, Yura and Oka begin to fall for each other, since he sticks by her all throughout her pregnancy, supporting her even at her lowest moments, just as he has done, quietly, throughout her relationship with Christian. As he’s forced to repeatedly pose as her husband at various points, seeing them together is easy. But it’s actually Yura who proposes to him, which is rare in Western culture and presumably almost unheard of in Indonesia. The scene occurs in such a low-key setting, in the presence of some of the film’s warmest and most caring characters, that it’s impossible not to be moved by it. Oka’s recollections of how he has been there for Yura perhaps without even realizing it, confirming his reciprocal feelings, is a lovely moment.
So, Yura and Oka get married. But Tersanjung: The Movie delivers a final twist when Christian turns up at the wedding, his face horribly disfigured. What happened to him? Leave your theories in the comments.
