Narrative Discourse as Social Cristique in Mouly Surya's Sumba Film Marlina the Murderer in Four Act

Bunga Islammy

doi:10.33292/locus.v3i02.28

Authors

Bunga Islammy Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33292/locus.v3i02.28

Keywords:

ellipsis, focalisation, gender-based violence, narratology, trauma

Abstract

Indonesian scholarship on Mouly Surya's 2017 feature set in Sumba has concentrated almost entirely on what the film represents: gender injustice, feminist symbolism, and female resistance to patriarchal custom. How that representation is organised as discourse has remained unexamined. This article analyses the film as an audiovisual narrative text in order to establish how its formal organisation carries an argument about sexual violence. The study applies Gerard Genette's narratology to the complete 93-minute film, read through three stages of viewing conducted between February and May 2025, with every observation logged by timecode against the five categories of order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice; Laura Mulvey's critique of the gaze and Cathy Caruth's account of traumatic memory are introduced as interpretive lenses at the point of discussion. The analysis finds an almost unbroken linear order across four titled acts, with analepsis withheld precisely where the protagonist's past and her post-violence state would conventionally invite it; a duration that expands when power relations shift, compresses movement that does not alter the conflict, and elides the aftermath of killing; a strictly singulative frequency; a mood that migrates between internal, zero, and external focalisation so that victimhood is distributed across two women without the victim's body becoming spectacle; and a voice that remains heterodiegetic and extradiegetic throughout, refusing the protagonist verbal authority over her own story. Together these choices constitute a structural refusal of the social demand that survivors repeatedly explain and prove their experience.

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