Ratu Ratu Queens Netflix Review: A Show About The Daily Lives Of “Aliens” Hits The Spot

One of the first shows centering female friendships emerged in 1998 and over the years achieved a phenomenal status quo. Yes, I am talking about Sex and the City and its playful narrative accommodating everything from the tiniest issues to hovering ones that the four women face in their lives. Among its emotional nuances and a sort of lived-in experience in its protagonists’ shoes, the show is often criticized for having too many white-women-first-world problems, which is not necessarily untrue. Despite its capitalistic, surface-level issues, it still caters to a large chunk of the audience for its relatability factor. People do not relate to seeing what bag Carrie Bradshaw is carrying but to what she feels when she is left at the altar by her fiancé. The universality of emotions is what makes a show immersive. Ratu Ratu Queens is also a show about nothing; it is a slice-of-life drama that looks like an anthology of life events of its four major protagonists—Party, Ance, Biyah, and Chinta—but interestingly, it makes its space into a very relevant genre—the lives of immigrants in the US. In fact, the show majorly centers on problems these four women face and their emotions while navigating their “identities” and “status” on the backdrop of Queens, New York.First of all, I would like to praise Ratu Ratu Queens for its bold yet understated attempt to bring up an issue that is extremely politically relevant. With the US bringing new rules on the status of immigrants, sending them back to their home countries chained, and cancelling student visas, a large number of the audience would find themselves in one or the other character irrespective of being Indonesian or not. The Indonesian identity of the protagonists makes for a distinctive subculture that is built brick by brick in the series by showing aspects that they have to deal with in their everyday lives—it consists of food, language, customs, and even notions about forming relationships. Above it all looms large the question of citizenship: the ability to find a piece of home in a land that in a moment’s notice can tag you with an alien tag.Like many other shows, like Lena Dunham’s Girls or the US Shameless, the show etches its major characters as archetypes to open a window for the audience to leap in and situate themselves beside the characters. There is Party, a worker in a restaurant dealing with her mother’s illness and debt; there is Ance, a single mother raising a child in foreign soil; there is Chinta, who is processing grief related to her cheating husband and her divorce; and then there is Biyah, a free-spirited paparazzi who is being chased by loan sharks from the black market. Each of their problems can be inherently traced back to their identities in the foreign soil; Party’s crisis is that she does not hold a green card and is unable to go back to see her ailing mother once her application process starts. Ance’s daughter Eva has assimilated with the white customs, while she feels a growing distance and isolation. Chinta’s quintessential Sundanese identity and values become boring for her white husband, and he thinks she is better off at home in Indonesia. Then there’s Biyah, who came to New York with her best friend Tuti, who ran away with her money, leaving her to the loan sharks. The women feel unwelcome; they feel chased, and they feel isolated. In a situation like this, they end up in the same apartment.

Co-living starts as a coincidental convenience. Each woman, seeing the other woman speak their same language, holds the other’s hand and begins inventing a new space. In a way of sorts, there is an act of reclamation. In a system that is ever so eager to throw you out of its boundaries, the women create a community that is tangible, a support system that exists beyond its minor faltering. The diasporic voice is extremely traceable in the show—with the women starting their own business with their own cultural currency of recipes, inviting men to taste their cuisine, and in general switching to their mothers’ tongue to find temporary ease.

Even though I speak of how immigrant status and the diasporic voice play a major part in the show, the show does a brilliant job of balancing it with the emotional scape of its characters. Individually, the show measures up against the crisis of each character—Party’s dilemma of whether to stay back and build her life or go back and soothe her mother, Ance’s denial of facing the reality of her husband Jon’s death, Chinta’s culture shock of getting out of a bougie marriage and standing on her own feet, and Biyah’s sense of betrayal around Tuti make for a polycrisis of identities that one can easily borrow from.Although Ratu Ratu Queens does not resolve their issues in a jiffy, it does move towards a collective, eventual resolution. Each of the characters finds their own standing with a little help from their friends; it also highlights how difficult it is to survive as an individual in any alien landscape that fails to see you. With the apartment becoming a safe space for the friends, they eventually move towards their goals with tiny steps. Party loses her mother while she is on the way to the airport and decides to stay back. Ance confronts her reality and finds friendship in the most unlikely place, and Chinta grasps her life back and becomes a massage therapist, while Biyah makes the small sacrifice of selling her van and giving the money back. The little changes result in a collective change—the women are able to cook their sambal, and Party opens up her new brand. It is a small step in many steps in her dream of opening up a restaurant, but from here onwards she does not have to walk alone. 

Each of the actors plays their part with ingenuity and poignancy, portraying the littlest nuances and spicing up the narrative with their quirks. The narrative itself presents itself with a fragmentary totality of multiple stories being told at once, but at the same time it never loses its heartwarming, feel-good essence. I would say, this is a very good show if you are feeling low, rotting on your bed, and all of your friends seem a little occupied with their lives. It will definitely lift you from a solipsistic perspective and put you on a map of invisible love and care and make you feel the hands that hold your hands gently whenever you are in need of it! 

At its core, Ratu Ratu Queens redefines the struggles of dealing with immigration paperwork, cultural estrangement, or even the hardships of survival on the gentle background of female friendships. The series shines on as a reminder that despite institutional refusal to grant you a status of belonging, it is love and the spirit of community that makes you feel truly accepted in any given place, at any given time.