One aspect of the Malay dramas that Noi so often watches intrigues me. There's usually at least one pretty young thing involved in the on-going storyline and the actress involved invariably wears make-up, regardless of whether the make-up is appropriate for the character. Assuming the world of the particular drama is not terribly realistic this can be easily ignored. But even in dramas involving a fairly realistic take on kampong life the make-up is still applied.
One show broadcast last night is set against a refreshingly small town - small village background, and visually it works well. The male performers uniformly look the part, but the young lady playing the romantic lead - who wears hijab, by the way - sports make-up that would not look out of place in a Vogue photo-shoot. It isn't that the make-up is garish, you understand, if anything it's very tastefully applied, but that's the problem. Young ladies living on kampongs in my experience don't spend time making sure they're wearing perfectly applied make-up every minute of the day.
What puzzles me is that the incongruity is so striking that the average viewer must surely notice it. So is this what the producers assume average viewers want, even though considerable trouble has been taken to achieve a reasonable degree of verisimilitude in all the other aspects of what's on view? It seems the very essence of the objectification of women that the fair sex so vigorously, and rightly, complain about. Don't the actresses playing these roles feel that this takes them completely out of character? Do they make a noise about it?
Or is there still a fundamental need for some kind of glamour to blind all involved, such that they don't really register the falsity?
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