Memories of Overdevelopment (1980-2011)

Memories of Overdevelopment (1981-2011)

At around 9 in the evening, in Vocas, a vegetarian restaurant/art space/wonderland that Nick de Ocampo aptly described as a nook straight out of Kidlat Tahimik’s mind (the place comes with a galleon and several other objects that are undoubtedly products of the artists’ sariling duwende), Kidlat Tahimik presented the latest version of his Memories of Overdevelopment, a thirty-minute version of the filmmaker’s dream project about the first man to ever circumnavigate the globe. Except for a few seconds of scenes that were inserted into the perpetually unfinished film and several minutes of footage that were restored from several generations of film decay, the film remains the same, an enduring fragment of what possibly could be the best film never made.

As it is, Memories of Overdevelopment is a lyrical ode to the ingenuity of both its subject, Enrique, a Filipino who gets sold to Ferdinand Magellan in what the film describes as history’s first buy one take one deal, and its maker, Kidlat Tahimik, who resigned to the fact that the film would require an enormous amount of money to mount started to put together scenes using whatever resources he had available and as a result, came up with the film. Utilizing relatives, friends, backpackers and expatriates who would frequent his Baguio home, Kidlat Tahimik assembled several lovely sequences that are strung together by his narration, which most of the time, resembles a storytelling session by a father to his children, and at other times, sounds like a pitch from an artist to a shrewd financier.

Enrique’s story is laced with wonderment and humor. Notwithstanding the inherent ambition of the project which would span miles of sea travel and between two diverse continents and cultures, the film never loses perspective. It remains an intimate portrait of a man of meager beginnings fated to accomplish big things by virtue of fortune, ingenuity, and a desire for home. The intended film, as can be gleaned from this most recent version, never strays from the playfulness that has defined Kidlat Tahimik’s filmography. Even during the sequences that venture towards some form of reverence or would normally require a semblance of sensitivity, Kidlat Tahimik injects an abundance of cheekiness, steering the film’s discourse from narrative seriousness or historical accuracy towards commentaries on the Filipino psyche.

Despite the nature of the film as a self-aware work-in-progress, the film actually feels oddly complete. Sure, Kidlat Tahimik himself admits that there are the sequences that the film lacks like the shipbuilding scenes in Spain, the grandiose sea voyages, the battle between Lapu-Lapu’s men and Magellan’s invaders. However, there is an endearing charm to Kidlat Tahimik’s straightforward modesty and honesty that makes the film’s inadequacies negligible. Instead of pleading for forgiveness because of the lack of those scenes, he pleads for creativity and imagination by supplying images of quaint sea travel in the Philippines and Indonesian shipbuilders to supplant the more ambitious imagery in his mind. There’s a certain sense of Kidlat Tahimik taking the place of his Enrique and the film’s audience taking the place of the curious young boy who suddenly invades his morning bath to be told stories of his adventures in the way Memories of Overdevelopment takes form.

The current version of Memories of Overdevelopment may or may not be the film’s final form. It all depends on Kidlat Tahimik and the cosmos. Part of me wants the film to get finished but part of me is also deeply satisfied with this admittedly flawed but infinitely intriguing version. It is after all that rare but persisting document of the Kidlat Tahimik, that odd but indisputably talented filmmaker whose films seem to be more beholden to unhinged imagination than monetary funding, who at one point of his illustrious career has seen himself as strangely a part of the traditional mechanics of movie-making, with its need for sizable investments, and because of that investment, certain compromises. The film shows Kidlat Tahimik to be a carefree hostage to unforgiving economics, a thankful victim of luck, and a constant dreamer.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Waikiki (1980)

Waikiki (Elwood Perez, 1980)

It is undeniable that Filipinos are addicted to migration stories. In a way, despite the far-flung locations of these tales, there is always a strand in the tale that would be instantly relatable, either because immigration has been a common ambition of the ordinary Filipino or immigration has been vicariously experienced through a loved one. From Gil Portes’ masterfully lyrical ‘Merika (1984) to Lav Diaz’s slow-burning Batang West Side (2001), the Filipino diaspora is always depicted with a discontent and ennui, of a gnawing longing for the homeland, of a certain pride for being rooted in a culture despite being detached from its source for so long.

Elwood Perez’s Waikiki is different from these migration stories because its main character, Edad (Alicia Alonzo), a mother who was separated from her husband and two daughters who migrated to Hawaii, is the outside, the seeming trespasser, to the stories of the migrants that her loved ones have become. Left behind because of tuberculosis, she waits for the day when she’ll be able to be reunited with her family. When she gets to Hawaii however, she discovers her daughters (played by Rio Locsin and Lorna Tolentino) adversely changed, with morals looser than what she would’ve expected, with husbands and boyfriends whose attachment to family is less grounded than hers. She finds her husband (Raul Aragon) with a different family, putting that final nail in the coffin of her own American dream, forcing her to go back to the Philippines, with her dignity more or less intact.

Instead of dwelling into the sordid problems of migration, Perez peeks into the specific life of someone who was left behind, expectant of joyous reunions with the loved ones she knows through happy memories when they were still together but instead was greeted with indifference and alienation from loved ones obviously changed through the passage of time and the sudden shift in culture. Alonzo portrays the mother’s coming to terms to the fact that her precious family has been shattered by the American dream with believable intensity. She fights until she no longer can fight, and her eventual surrender to the realities that have literally hit her in the face is quite heartbreaking.

The mother’s story however is just one half of the film. The other half features Mikaela (Alma Moreno), Edad’s eldest daughter who decides to stay behind with her ailing mother, falling from her mother’s graces when she decides to work in a nightclub as a dancer. With the help of her doting neighbor (Bella Flores), she discovers the practical functions of her sexuality, parading in grass skirts and dancing a bastardized and overly-eroticized version of Hawaiian dances with scantily clad Ricky Belmonte to the beat of drums and suggestive chanting of the word “Wai-ki-ki,” subliminally evoking images of what is kept hidden by those strategically placed shards of dried grass.

Despite the obvious erotic undertones of the dances, Perez withholds from designing the scenes to be plainly lewd, plainly objectifying Moreno’s womanly curves in compromising rhythms. Instead, Perez injects the scenes with some sort of feminine empowerment, where men are beholden to the hypnotizing grooves of the show’s main attraction. Waikiki, despite being advertised as a sexy film in obvious reaction to Moreno’s sudden rise to fame as a sex symbol especially after her stints in Joey Gosiengfiao’s Bomba Star (1980) and Nympha (1980), is actually a film that features strong women amidst a world of men made frail by very real circumstances.

Waikiki is deceptive in a sense that it allures with exoticization of female sexuality, of a very foreign land, of the migration experience, before exposing very familiar truths of how families are pulled apart by the Filipino diaspora, how there is an immense divide between traditional mores and the virtues of progress and modernity. Perez, by adeptly juggling the commercial requirements of studio filmmaking and his own artistic impulses, has created a film that is strange because it almost always works in all its attempts to be whatever it needs to be. As a sexy film, it does not fail to arouse. As a melodrama, it does not fail to force out tears. As a portrait of the Philippines then and now, it does not fail to impress with both its astuteness and simplicity in expressing its points.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Bedspacers (1980)

Bedspacers (Joey Gosiengfiao, 1980)

The late great Joey Gosiengfiao is more than a director of campy movies, he is also a very fascinating filmmaker with an eye for structures compounded with a sincere heart for his art (which translates very well into his films). There's no denying that the man has both wit and humor (as anybody who has seen Temptation Island (1981), with its shipwrecked characters and their palpable lust for both flesh and food, would agree). There's something more to Gosiengfiao though than the glamor poses of his bikini-clad beauties and the witty one-liners thrown with elitist stance.

Bedspacers is Gosiengfiao's favorite work because it allowed him to explore the wealth of themes that compounded college life (which he has fond memories of). The film juggles the stories of several university students --- Nadia (a sublime performance by Alma Moreno), who gathers funds for her schooling by prostituting herself; Margot (Rio Locsin), a social climber who parades around in posh parties to integrate herself in that exclusive social stratum; Dindo (Mark Gil), a student-thespian who is struggling with his stage role; and a lass (Amy Austria) plucked from the province to study in the city and balances the the needs of her boyfriend and her very conservative ways; and their respective partners (played by Al Tantay, the dazzling Deborah Sun, and Orestes Ojeda).

It is of course, like all of Gosiengfiao's films, has scenes overflowing with camp, like the three-way cat fight that leads to Margot's wet blouse being torn into bits; or the several episodes of all-male or all-female bonding in their respective dormitories; or when Nadia is slapped in the rain; or when Deborah Sun's professor steps on the roses given to her; or that sequence wherein Margot sneaks her way through a posh party (where she mistakenly refers to chicken as Peking duck) with her facade of elitist snobbery.

What impresses me is Gosiengfiao's very structural approach to the film, both thematically and visually, and sometimes all at once. The film is easily dismissable because of its juvenile settings and its preachy demeanor, but there's a hint of brilliance in Gosiengfiao's filmmaking here. The term bedspacers refers to those tenants (mostly students or young workers) who merely rent beds in overcramped dormitories, the purpose of course is to save money. It is that concept of proximity that astounds me: these tenants literally sleep a few inches from each other; share a communal bathroom; the male and female dormitories divided by a narrow alleyway (the bedspacers can literally see what's happening in the other dormitory).

Gosiengfiao breaks these perceived proximities. Education is supposedly the equalizing factor in a democratic nation. In Bedspacers, Gosiengfiao attacks the institution for its elitism and hypocrisy --- he, of course, takes the side of the students and unfolds their dilemmas with sympathy. More specifically, Gosiengfiao dissects his scenes with detailed reverence to enunciate severance and emotional distance: observe how he separates his characters during key sequences --- in that tender scene wherein Al Tantay's character discovers Nadia's whoring (Gosiengfiao uses a division in the wall to literally separate the two characters); or when Amy Austria's character tells her boyfriend she is pregnant (we only see the characters faces in the circular mirrors of the bar, there's a literal space in between the two lovers); or when Margot disowns her mother (we see Margot's face through the mirror, while the mother is shown in a different space); or when Lindo professes his adoration for his professor (the two are separated by a bookshelf, and later by that distance made by their ladders).

There's a visual and thematic elegance to Gosiengfiao's filmmaking that gets overshadowed by the labels we have given the man (King of Camp, etc.). True, he defers to directors Lino Brocka or Ishmael Bernal in tackling issues of supposed import and relevance (such as poverty or politics), but in that overcrowded niche of commercial filmmaking (which is most probably the reason why his praised are received belatedly) wherein he worked comfortably and at ease (with producers and other filmmakers), he has excelled and made works that transcend the limitations of profit-making. I've only seen a fraction of Gosiengfiao's ouvre, but Bedspacers definitely is one of his most accomplished works.

Bona (1980)

Bona (Lino Brocka, 1980)

The titular character (Nora Aunor) of Lino Brocka's film Bona has an irrational devotion for a bit player in action movies, Gardo (Philip Salvador). Brocka and screenwriter Cenen Ramones do not bother to give us details as to how Bona has suddenly worshiped Gardo, except in one instance wherein Bona returns late and her father scolds her. The father tells Bona that she was just given an autographed photograph of the bit player, and she that caused the uncontrollable obsession over him. This lack of background is an arguable point for critique as it turns the character into a masochistic woman whose servitude is obtained for free and is even repayed with cruelty and Gardo's unintentional sadism.

After spending a night tending to an injured Gardo, Bona goes home and incurs her father's wrath. She decides to leave her family for good and live with Gardo, exchanging the comforts of her middle-class household with the slums of Tondo where Gardo resides. Yet the slums is actually paradise compared to the interiors of Gardo's house where Bona is treated literally like a dog. He beds with numerous women expecting the adoring Bona to merely accept that fact. He actually considers Bona's staying with him as the latter's debt of gratitude, despite the unconditional loyalty and service she has given to the immature bit player. Outside, Bona's middle-class roots is appreciated. She tutors her neighbors' children, gets food and provisions under generous credit, and her conditions are benevolently guarded over by a kindhearted Nilo (Nanding Josef).

The plot is merely a series of vignettes of Bona's sacrifices intertwined with scenes of slum-living. When the plot does move forward, Brocka is uncharacteristically controlled and rejects typical melodrama tropes to justify narrative motion. Aunor handles her character with much pathos giving the mysteriously devoted fanatic a believable human face. Salvador is tall and brooding compared to the short-framed Aunor. The couple actually looks quite odd when together. Salvador mestizo looks overshadows Aunor's more Filipino facial features. The male bit player towers over the female fan. The actors' physical differences emphasize the politics that happens within Gardo's shanty. Bona can't do anything but be obedient in absolute awe and respect to Gardo. It's can probably be seen as symbolic of the involuntary aftereffect of the Philippines' experience with colonial rule.

The film is masterfully made. Brocka exhibits bravura editing skills. He relishes in the long moments just capturing the day-to-day experiences of slum-dwelling, the same way he relishes in capturing the day-to-day sacrifices that Bona has to make culminating in an ending that can easily be described as timeless. Conrado Baltazar's cinematography is, as always, exquisite. His camera captures impoverished Tondo with acute tenderness as compared to the usually dark and dilapidated interiors of Gardo's shanty. Max Jocson's music lends an incongruent rhythm to the lives of the slum dwellers.

The question remains: Why did middle-class Bona reject her comfortable life to become a mere servant to a bit-player? It's an irrational impulse that creates a huge implausible hole in the titular character. There is really no answer to that question and one just has to impress upon oneself that the character is indeed irrational, and at the same time completely human.

We first see Bona among the crowds that follow the procession of the Black Nazarene in the courtyard of the Quiapo Church. The procession is a yearly event that claims the lives of those who are trampled by the stampede caused by the thousands of religious devouts who violently scramble towards the image of the Black Nazarene to get blessed. Just outside the imposing church are billboards of the latest films that are showing in the local cinemas. We see Bona is sandwiched between the church procession and the cinemas with its rousing billboards. Brocka seems to be connecting the irrational loyalty and obedience of the Filipino people to the irrational traditions of a Spanish-imposed Catholicism and with fanaticism. In the opening shot, we see thousands of people scrambling around the carriage carrying the image of the Black Nazarene: each and every one of these people, not including the several millions more around the Philippines who are similarly situated, are like Bona, ready to subject themselves to inhumanity to be graced by a scrape of divinity.

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980)

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pedro Almodovar, 1980)
Spanish Title: Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón

We are first introduced to Pepi (Carmen Maura) dandily placing Superman stickers in her sticker book. She grows marijuana plants on her apartment, attracting stern policeman (Felix Rotaeta) to conduct an investigation through his parallel apartment, and later on an arrest. Pepi resists arrest and instead invites the policeman to just have sex with her. Again, she resists her offer and in turn, loses her virginity through rape. She plots revenge and hires the punk band of Bom (Olvido Gara), a liberated lesbian singer, to beat up the policeman. They do beat up someone, but it turns out to be the policeman's twin brother, who due to the amount of harassment befalling him because of his resemblance to the unlikeable policeman, moves to the Canary Island. Undaunted, Pepi befriends Luci (Eva Siva), unsatisfied wife of the policeman, and turns her into a masochistic sex-crazed woman.

At first glance, much of Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap doesn't make sense. The city of Madrid is turned into a punk paradise with transsexuals, weirdos, and freaks roaming around in liberated abandon. Bom's band, while walking towards the victim of their cruel beating, insists that they sing so as to not arouse suspicion. In a normal world, a crew of weirdly-dressed individuals belting out opera choruses would instantly arouse suspicion but in Almodovar's world, such is completely normal. Almodovar's world doesn't require notions of common sense or societal norms. There is nothing permanent. Gender preferences, fetishes, religion, logic change in a wink of an eye.

Almodovar will continue this style of filmmaking throughout his career. Absurdist scenarios and characters deriving decisions based on their Freudian impulses would inhabit Almodovar's films, even his later, more tamer ones. In Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, Almodovar is nursing the world in its infantile stage, which is probably the reason why much of it looks amateurish, crude, and in a way, unrestrained. The film comes off as merely a film that is delighted in eliciting shock reactions based on its irreverence to popular notions of propriety, instead of being something deeper or more thought-out. Pepe, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap feels more like a John Waters film instead of a Pedro Almodovar one. Sure, it's Almodovar's first legitimate feature film, and it features Almodovar actor Maura (who would later feature in many of the director's films), but despite its auteur theorist-satisfying themes, it falls short in depth and even freedom and control, which is what primarily differentiates Almodovar's vision from Water's experimentations to the limitations of bad taste.

Pepe, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap would interest primarily those who are curious as to how Almodovar enriched his vision. It's a very brave first feature and it's actually very hilarious. Almodovar throws in a lot of surprises which includes a penis-measuring contest, a love-at-first-urination scene, a humorous dialogue between a bearded wife and her closet homosexual husband, and many more features that seem to come out of thin air --- especially since the plot seems to steer into so many directions, it's almost impossible to follow what Almodovar is really trying to say.

Angela Markado (1980)

Angela Markado (Lino Brocka, 1980)
English Title: Angela the Marked One

Seeing Lino Brocka's Angela Markado (Angela the Marked One), one is immediately reminded of Francois Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968), or Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood (1973), which were Quentin Tarantino's sources of inspiration (or copycatting) of his Kill Bill films (2003-2004). Actually, Angela Markado was adapted by Jose Lacaba for the screen from the comics written by Carlo J. Caparas. It's probable that Caparas could've borrowed the storyline from the Truffaut film, as Caparas is no stranger from copying (he would later become a film director of no serious merit, mostly rehashing of genre works by other directors to much dismay and boredom). But the comics, honed and most probably improved by Lacaba, and visualized by the exciting camera work of Conrado Baltazar, and ultimately put together by the seamless talent of Lino Brocka is a gorgeous piece of filmmaking: part noir, part social commentary, part vengeance film, and all fun.

Angela Delmar (Hilda Koronel) works as a waitress for one of the seedier bars in Manila. There she meets five patrons of the bar, who also turn out to be a gang specializing in drugging and raping girls and later on selling them to prostitution. Angela is the only one tending to her mother, a laundrywoman who stopped working due to tuberculosis. One night, she gets kidnapped, raped, and kept for five days by the five men. The men tattoo their names on the back of Angela, before selling her to a brothel. Angela escapes, and is taken in by a kindly hostess (Celia Rodriguez). However, upon returning to her home, she discovers her mother has died, her best friend has also been raped by the same five men and later on committed suicide. From then on, she makes it her life's mission to kill the five men by wearing wigs and costumes, and stalking the men with a handy switchblade.

Despite the plot similarities between Angela Markado and The Bride Wore Black, I thought Brocka's style is more akin to Italian giallo, most notably of Dario Argento. The careful editing, the generous amount of bloodshed, the musical score paving the way for a violent eventuality, the way the actual murders are filmed --- all of which point out to Italian giallo-filmmaking. Brocka also brings forth some noir expertise (mostly thankful to cinematographer Baltazar). Manila is mostly at night: very little illumination (mostly coming from scarce street lamps), the seedy clubs and its neon interiors, the brothels and their lonely denizens, shadows in almost every corner. Moreover, the plot is certainly a downward spiraling of Angela's life when fate decided that she be marked by the five men (not when she was physically marked by the tattoo), but when one of the men (somewhat metaphorically) determines her future when he reads her palm in the beginning of the film. From then on, Angela is pulled away from the path of righteousness, and turns herself into the film's femme fatale and victim at the same time.

It's a very cruel joke Brocka is playing here. He presents the film initially as somewhat of a melodrama, with Angela making ends meet, having to do with rowdy bar patrons, and taking care of her sickly mother. We see where Angela lives: a little wooden shack full of religious items but is ultimately filthy and poor. Brocka, a master in portraying the lives of the downtrodden and the oppressed, already shows Angela's life as impossibly difficult due to her poverty. Then, when we think things couldn't get worst, it does, and in the most cruel way. When poverty and her mom's tuberculosis has taken away all hopes for a better life by forcing her to quit school, the five men take away the last thing she can treasure, her dignity --- and that is not something anyone can take from her easily, thus turning her into a savage vengeful monster.

Brocka is mirroring a Manila that is devoid of anything pleasant. Even the good Samaritan who saved Angela from the brothel, is closely connected to her victimizers, and is also in a sense, a victimizer of men, cruelly keeping a neighbor in love with her for his everyday favors, but keeps another man on the side. The law student/police informant, who is probably the single signal of righteousness in the film, is the brother of one of Angela's victimizers and even then, there is a notion of impossibility of a better life for Angela with all the murders that she has committed (as shown by the court order in the end of the film).