Malaysian cinema comes in many varieties: Yasmin Ahmad’s comedy dramas fit comfortably into the populist mode. But crowd pleasing laughter and tears don’t come at the expense of thoughtful social commentary, nor does Ahmad sacrifice depth.

Gubra is the sequel to her hit Sepet, but familiarity with the first film is not necessary: the important background is quickly sketched in for you. The film revolves around Ahmad’s favourite actress Sharifah Amani, a feisty sparkplug who plays Orked, a young wife with a rich husband, amusingly eccentric family and unresolved feelings for her dead boyfriend. From the beginning, her family is plunged into colourful hysterics when Papa has a diabetic incident. As he recovers, Orked meets recently divorced and alarmingly attractive hunk Alan, and begins to suspect that her super-slick misogynist husband Arif is fooling around... A parallel story sketches, with fine strokes and a glowingly humane tone, a poor neighbourhood around a mosque overseen by a gentle young muezzin and his lovely wife. The care and compassion they show for the prostitutes who live and work near them is the film’s masterstroke: both sex workers and devout Muslims are shown naturally, sympathetically, with the kind of sustained interest and compassion sadly absent in our contemporary media.

Ahmad orchestrates this rich mix of high comedy, smooth melodrama and utopian longing that resonates with the discords and harmonies inherent in Malaysia’s richly multicultural experiment.

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