I have had a soft spot for Erma Fatima ever since I heard a friend of mine gleefully recount an anecdote which he claimed was conclusive proof of what a bimbo she was. The incident occurred during rehearsals for a play that starred not only herself but my talkative friend.

The director of the play, Rahim Razali, was trying to get her to, shall we say, emote in a certain way. He wanted to give her a motivation. He wanted to help her to, in that charming Malay phrase, jiwai her watak . Nothing seemed to work; the required emotion remained tantalisingly out of reach; cast and crew were on the verge of quiet desperation; the director finally shouted, "Erma, what state are you supposed to be in?" and she rebounded with sudden confidence: "Selangor!"

The more mean-spirited among the assembled company burst into derisive laughter, and it was on the wave of this same laugh that my friend then told me the story.

Instead of joining the malicious chorus, I was struck by empathy. I didn't find it funny that Erma Fatima didn't know more than one meaning for "state". I have a bad way with words myself. I mean, I read all of Farish A Noor's articles, and I still have no idea what the hell "discursive" means. So I felt like saying to her: Sister, you are not alone. But I did no such thing, probably because she didn't know who I was, which can be a bummer if you want to communicate with someone.

This happened about eight years ago, and since then I have followed her career and occasionally her car with interest. I had heard a lot about her acting debut in the movie Rozana-Cinta 87 (released, funnily enough, in 1988). She played some kind of lesbian, but I never saw the movie. Her other famous roles include the film Bintang Malam , where she played a kinky slut; the play Lantai T Pinkie , where she played a kinky slut; and the film Fantasia , where she played a journalist. I was impressed by her range.

Not content with merely being an actress, she decided to direct as well. Two of her telemovies in particular are very good. The first, Jangan , is about a Malaysian woman caught in a bureaucratic mess when she marries a Bangladeshi immigrant. Despite some excessive histrionics in the closing scenes, Jangan was an impressively mounted production - so daring in its indictment of official hypocrisy that it was then banned from TV.

I saw it in my capacity as juror for the 12th Malaysian Film Festival, where we gave it the Best Telemovie prize. I can disclose now that some of the discussion among the all-male jury did contain lines of the "I didn't even realise she had a brain" variety.

In the following year, we again gave her the main prize for a different work, Daerah Syafika , in which she not only was writer and director but played the lead role. This time, she played a kinky slut - but with a decidedly tragic slant.

Her two feature films are less interesting than her TV work. Her first, Jimi Asmara , was a cotton-light pastiche of P Ramlee plots. Her second, Perempuan Melayu Terakhir , stirred up quite a few people because it clashed religious fundamentalism against the sexual awakening of a young woman.

Actually, I'm giving PMT a far more flattering synopsis than you will find elsewhere: The actual plot isn't so compelling, mainly because it's studded with all sorts of pseudo-intellectual references to the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre. I don't think these pretentious asides were scripted by Erma herself. I am more likely to blame her team of script supervisors, which included malaysiakini 's beret-wearing columnist Hishamuddin Rais.

Immoral

I hope that her upcoming third feature, Bulan dan Matahari , will be her best yet. It's about a married man who decides that he is homosexual. When asked by a newspaper whether she will consult the censorship board before starting her film, she said no.

Erma still continues to act, of course. She most recently toplined the play Mambo Horse , where she played a kinky slut. The play had its share of detractors among the moral-conservative intelligentsia, including writer Faisal Tehrani, who attacked it as being immoral.

Faisal's point was that prostitutes shouldn't be portrayed in fiction unless they have an allegorical or metaphorical function that can lead to the betterment of society. Prostitutes can't just exist like that? I find this a bit patronising.

Mambo Horse (about a woman who gets raped by her father, abandons her baby, becomes a hooker and 20 years later unknowingly starts an affair with her grown-up son) seems like pretty hot stuff. All the more remarkable, then, that the play managed to secure the backing of Berita Harian and City Hall as sponsors.

The whole situation seems so delicious that it's a wonder our media continued to waste all that ink on the comparatively boring Ning Baizura. To be subversive and sanctioned at the same time is a position Erma is uniquely positioned to occupy.

Her most recent triumph was winning an award at the Pyongyang Film Festival, which Utusan Malaysia breathlessly but nonsensically proclaimed to be "the second biggest in the world after Cannes". If the festival is so big, why doesn't it have a website? Are there no bright 12-year-olds in North Korea who can set one up? But I digress. Our topic is still Erma, not a bunch of Commie cineastes.

Erma Fatima has embodied the Virginia Slims motto. I'm so impressed that she has sufficiently overcome her initial bimboistic reputation to become a viable creative and business force (she co-owns a production company with her cinematographer husband).

She has left most of her male peers behind. There are those who whisper that she's manipulative and opportunistic. Some people say that deep, deep down inside, she's really rather shallow. But I am sure that these are just the standard patriarchal sniping that accompany any progress by womankind in general and ambitious women in particular.

Still in her 30s, she continues to offend and bewilder men because she can be sexually provocative and commercially pragmatic at the same time. It's like what a British journo once wrote about Madonna: "She looks like a whore and thinks like a pimp." As states go, it's not such a bad one to be in.