Things start off promisingly. Even as the posters warning “God is Watching” are strewn across the devout village, warning its residents against any possible deviance, Yazid (Wafiy Ilhan), a quiet and timid young man, with an artistic bent of mind seems to be doing exactly that. Local cop Salihin (Shaheizy Sam) warns him that his “obscene” works of art are bound to attract the wrath of the village chief Tok Hassan (Wan Hanafi Su) little realising that his own daughter Azura (Syumaila Salihin) is engaged in a battle of wits with him over the confiscation of her petition, featuring the defiled face of the chief.
There’s something extremely likeable about Azura’s cheekiness as she protests against “fascism”, calling the confiscation “unconstitutional” and an “invasion of her privacy”. When the chief tauntingly asks her what she’d be up to after having strayed into art films and hip-hop music, she is quick to come up with a cocky response: pole dancing. It’s good fun to see her berate her well-meaning father and other assorted “middle-aged Malay men” and then go on to rattle him by jokingly demanding a pregnancy kit when he disallows a movie date with her boyfriend. Unfortunately, this smart and sassy touch and the homespun humour aren’t spread consistently through the film, even though the story seems to progress promisingly. There are stirrings of liberalism with the young Ustaz Fauzi (Iedil Dzuhrie Alaudin) trying to make his religious sermons “entertaining” but the real challenge to the incipient status quo and orthodoxy comes with businesswoman Hanie Binte Abdullah (Sharifah Amani) when she returns to the kampong to renovate her grandfather’s house into a lingerie shop called La Luna. What the chief refers to as Satan, “leading us astray with the promise of a brighter but uncertain future”, a threat of “contamination of the pure minds”.
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