Bukas na Lang Sapagkat Gabi Na (2013)

Bukas na Lang Sapagkat Gabi Na (Jet Leyco, 2013)

English Title: Leave it Tomorrow for Night Has Fallen

"Bukas na lang sapagkat gabi na (Leave it tomorrow for night has fallen).” It is a phrase most commonly used by doting mothers who keep secrets from inquisitive children. Jet Leyco, who has heard the phrase as a kid curious to know the fates of his two grandfathers, takes the phrase from personal memories to encompass a nation troubled by a history of institutionalized silence.

The film opens with a montage of photographs of smoke bellowing out of the land. The photographs are revealed one by one, with bits of cryptic information, such as the year presumably when the eruption happened. They do not reveal much. In fact, the figures do not pertain to anything definite or specific, but the images themselves evoke something troubling, something pertaining to events of cataclysmic proportions. The greater tragedy however is what is not revealed, that nagging impression that something important has happened but was not disclosed for whatever reason. The montage has a feel of evidence being laid out in court, pertaining to a truth masked for decades. Without the comfort of definite answers, the pictures immediately come to life, exposing both the enormity and the spectacle of a calamity.

The rest of Bukas na Lang Sapagkat Gabi Na follows the same maxim of censorship, although in various degrees and for various intentions. Its first episode, an observation of a provincial wedding as captured from the camera of an amateur videographer, reveals nothing but riddles surrounding what supposedly is a celebration of love. Mystery necessarily looms as questions trickle in from guests unlucky enough to be the subject of the videographer’s impertinent mind. Nothing is definitely divulged, just bits and pieces about a priest gone missing, rebels in hiding, and in-laws quietly fuming.

The second episode, an observation of the affairs of the communist rebels that were briefly spoken of during the wedding, concentrates on a rebel soldier’s own inability to tell his father of his homosexuality, a subject that is also taboo within the armed revolution. Leyco dissects a movement that is plagued with an identity crisis. The montage of actual footage of communist rebels that closes the episode serves as both ode and elegy to a struggle that has survived through years of being quelled into the margins of both national consciousness and history by a campaign characterized by government propaganda and censorship.

While communist rebels are struggling to topple a prohibitive regime, the clergy indulge in prohibited pleasures that are kept hidden from the public. The third episode, aptly pervaded by a certain sense of godlessness, has a young sacristan witnessing the priest perform sexual acts in his private chambers. On their way to a wedding, the priest would eventually abuse his sacristan in the guise of showing him the ropes towards his sexual awakening. Wrapping up Bukas na Lang Sapagkat Gabi Na is the story of the communist rebel’s father, who is hired to drive an ice delivery truck to the military camp. Little does he know that inside the truck are bodies of fallen rebels to be used as propaganda tools by government troops to cause fear in the hearts of the villagers.

Through Bukas na Lang Sapagkat Gabi Na, Leyco exhaustively and compellingly dissects a nation’s culture of suppression. He even becomes his own censor, replacing drastic sounds of gunshots with innocuous noises from low-budget sci-fi laser beams. He upends the immense gravity and seriousness of his episodes with ironic turns only a repressed over-imaginative mind can cook up. The video-captured moments prior to an imperfect wedding surprisingly give way to a sequence straight out of a cheap action flick. The abusive military’s victory over rebels is interrupted by a montage of communist propaganda. The morally depraved priest peacefully passes away with an amusingly paternal parting sermon for the sacristan he victimized. Dead rebels come back to life. Leyco proposes that fantasy, in all its shapes and forms, is but a product of a vast unknown, which is but a product of curbed information.

And who else could be the most apt mascot for censorship but Ferdinand Marcos, who masterminded an entire country’s ignorance with several decades’ worth of laws and rules that suppress basic freedoms. When Leyco, in the spirit of worthwhile mischievousness, concludes his film with the famous bust of Marcos crudely animated to mouth the same words mothers tell overly-inquisitive children, the effect is both humorous and quietly disturbing. The dictator’s shadow still looms, and his legacy remains, although evidently not in the same degree as when he was in power. Still, like children forced to sleep to dream of answers to unanswered questions, the nation remains bamboozled and blinded by tall tales and fantasies, all in the name of paltry escape from a country's persisting calamity.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Woman of the Ruins (2013)

Keith Sicat's Woman of the Ruins: A Marriage in Ruins

In the middle of all the post-apocalyptic madness of Keith Sicat’s Woman of the Ruins is a story so painfully familiar. When a woman (Alessandra de Rossi) washes ashore in an island ruined by wars and storms, Pasyon (Art Acuna), one of the island’s resilient survivors, immediately claims her as his long-lost wife Maria. The woman, bereft of any memories from the past, hesitantly assumes the role. Her hesitation irks Pasyon, urging him to hold her captive, for him to easily claim from her marital obligations owed to him. Most of the island’s residents just ignore the atrocities, seemingly content with the religious implications of Maria’s dubious return.

Sicat claims Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (Miracle, 1982) as an unconscious inspiration for his film. However, Bernal’s masterpiece is not as consciously crazed as Woman of the Ruins If there is one classic that resembles most the moods, themes and rhythms of Sicat’s allegory, it is Elwood Perez’s Silip (Daughters of Eve, 1985), the screenplay of which was also written by Himala’s writer, Ricardo Lee. Perez’s film features a parochial community, not unlike the one that lives in Sicat’s desolate ruins, that is overwhelmed with religious fervor. The arrival of a woman breaks the calm, testing collective morality amidst dogmatic dedication.

Lee served as Sicat’s creative consultant for Woman of the Ruins. Sicat however has more to say about religion than the hypocrisy that it naturally germinates, which seems to be the unifying theme of Lee’s screenplays for Himala and Silip. Where Bernal and Perez’s masterpieces pertain to communities that expose darkened hearts amidst spiritual convictions, Sicat’s film depicts a community strangled by communal norms.

In the spotlight of Sicat’s interests is Pasyon and Maria’s marriage, which essentially is just fiction arising from the community’s persevering beliefs. Immediately depicted by Sicat as grossly imperfect, the film’s central marriage persists not out of love but of pressure and necessity.

Rape and torture then become logical after-effects of a forced relationship. Forgiveness is forthcoming, given societal and religious pressures. The sins, however, are never erased. They gnaw on whatever remains of the marital union until nothing is left, except a stark desperation to escape despite the limitations society provides.

In a way, despite its obviously foreign landscapes, Woman of the Ruins reflects present-day society, where religion has a grab hold of the very concept of marriage and gender roles remain steadfast despite modernity.

In one scene, Sol (Peque Gallaga), who serves as the community’s wizened leader who keeps an almost perverse eye on the affairs of everyone, urges Sabel (Chanel Latorre) to become a mother. The exchange leads to her and Maria’s rape by unknown perpetrators, a sequence visually reminiscent of Silip’s devastating conclusion. The horrid crime eventually leads to her and Maria getting pregnant, in fulfilment of the role she should have readily accepted as reality instead of an option.

Sicat effectively captures a society crumbling not from natural or man-made disasters but from persisting norms and religion. The film’s landscape is bleak, one where reminders of an unforgotten desolation tower over empty fields and derelict forests. The ruins are themselves populated by shadows, men and women whose lives were salvaged but whose souls are permanently tainted. They desperately cling to religion, perhaps out of guilt for sins that gave way to their apocalypse. Woman of the Ruins visually captures suffocation.

In a twist laden with arresting irony, the film ends with its married couple drowning, physically suffocating. Gone are the ruins, its denizens and their pressures. There is no one else but them, enveloped by the sea and its unfamiliar sights. Dying, Pasyon and Maria embrace each other. Love exists, in another world, far and away from the society that seeks to cage it.

(First published in Rappler.)

Kabisera (2013)

Kabisera (Borgy Torre, 2013)

The bookends of Borgy Torre’s Kabisera are presented with such disarmingly romantic flair that they immediately stand out from the gritty reality that consumes most of the film. Andres (Joel Torre) sits in the head of the table, while the rest of his family are eating dinner. In both the opening and the ending, Andres is all smiles, delighted in seeing his family intact and sharing a meal together. The stark difference lies with Andres’ family, all of whom exchange their immaculate smiles in the film’s opening with the tears and gestures of resignation in the ending. Only Andres is left in a state of joy, obviously oblivious of tragedy.

Kabisera opens with a dream. It ends with a nightmare. Everything in between is a modern parable of skewed ambitions compromising traditional virtues. Torre has crafted a modern Faustian tale. The devil here is ambition, the dream that Andres wakes from in the start of the film. He realizes that dream, but at the price of his own humanity.

A humble fisherman who has contented himself to playing second fiddle to Jose (Art Acuna), his wealthy best friend, Andres is nonetheless the overly protective head of his family, controlling everything from his son’s college education to his daughter’s upcoming wedding. One morning, he finds two boxes of meth floating in the sea, opening for him an opportunity to keep his family within his watchful reach.

What happens next is nothing new in Philippine cinema, which has somewhat fetishized stories about virtuous men and women falling from grace. It comes natural in a country where class boundaries are vague, and the difference between being rich or poor is a single decision that compromises values. Torre aptly situates Andres’ dilemma within such a familiar circumstance. When Andres and his wife (Bing Pimentel) pursue the crooked path to easy riches, Torre affords no explanation, no intense characterization with a belief that their motivations are clearly spelled out by their dire straits. Morality simply takes the backseat in matters involving one’s family’s survival.

The tragedy of Kabisera is therefore not the loss of morality of Andres. He starts out as a man of ambition, dreaming only of good things for his family. Torre, both Borgy and Joel, portray him as a man with vague morals, grounded primarily by two things, his concern for his family and his loyalty to Jose. The tragedy therefore lies in the loss of Andres’ most utmost virtues. When pushed by criminal elements that he has not prepared himself for, he abandons friendship and unduly warps his position in the family.

Kabisera is inconsistently paced. Torre is gifted with creating tension out of quietude, as in Bonsai (2009), his short film about an obese man who is desperately in love with his neighbor, and prolonged conversations, as in Despedida (2010), his short film about a man and a woman who meet in a graveyard. Kabisera however feels like it lacks a certain balance, relishing in protracted moments of silence, or heated verbal exchanges between characters, before being distracted by rhythmic montages or listless sequences. It certainly drags in the middle, painstakingly addressing the process of Andres’ painful transformation via his dealings with drug dealers and corrupt cops, climaxing in the fruition of all his aggravating trespasses that is but inevitable.

Joel Torre carries the film through its lows. It is not only intensity that he brings to the role, but also a certain complexity. Andres is simply not just a stern or stubborn father or an ambitious criminal upstart, he is also a man torn between decades of accepted humility and an immediate future of being the boss. Torre inhabits Andres acknowledging that the transformation of the character is best revealed through subtle changes in gestures and behavior. Pimentel similarly inhabits the role of Andres’ wife with such surprising grace that only adds further layers to a role that could have been slight if portrayed by a less sensible actress.

Kabisera may be an imperfect film but it succeeds in dissecting the transformation of a fisherman who barters his soul with the devil for the sake not of his family but of his role in his family. Torre’s film, although deliberately bound by genre conventions, is delightfully complex. Laced with details, from the performances to Torre’s own directorial choices, the effects of its disturbing portraiture of Filipino patriarchy linger longer than the initial pleasures it immediately produces.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ang Tigmo sa Aking Pagpauli (2013)

Arnel Mardoquio's Ang Tigmo sa Aking Pagpauli: A Profound Purgatory

Arnel Mardoquio’s Ang Tigmo sa Aking Pagpauli (Riddles of My Homecoming) opens with an explanation of a Lumad belief that all souls of the departed return home to serve as guardians of the homeland. After the prologue, Mardoquio wastes no time in setting up his puzzle. Images burst and blur, giving way not to the typical logic of a story but to moods and landscapes of pain and sorrow. The film never lets go of its own confusion, enduring as an abstract mosaic of an island’s profound agony.

The souls are linked by melancholy. They aimlessly wander, probably in recurrence of something they had to do out of necessity in their previous lives. They are consumed by love, then lust, then by prejudice, by greed, and power. They are less the guardians that the Lumad belief promised and more prisoners sentenced to an eternity of sin. Their sins are not to each other, but to the land itself.

This is Mardoquio’s purgatory. It is an abstract portrait that weaves absolute beauty with pandemonium and strife. After all, his Mindanao has already gained such a reputation of being pristine despite its crisis. Its virgin forests hide rebels and soldiers engaged in decades-old battles. Its rich mountains conceal the mines that enslave them. Its rivers flow with the waste of an exploitative industry. Its people’s smiles mask a history written with suffering caused by class and faith.

Mardoquio has persistently told stories about his island’s plight. From Hunghong sa Yuta (Earth’s Whisper, 2008) to Ang Paglalakbay ng Mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (The Journey of Stars Into the Dark Night, 2012), he has been consistent in humanizing the conflicts that consume his homeland, introducing characters whose desperations are intertwined with the land’s suffering. However, the souls in Ang Tigmo sa Aking Pagpauli are as broken and fractured as the limbo they roam. Mardoquio communicates not through words or slogans, but through images.

Ang Tigmo sa Aking Pagpauli is more than a film. It is a poem. It is performance art. Some scenes even ache with the same profundity of a painting. Its elegant rhythms belie its beautiful confusion. Mardoquio himself seems to be consumed by the riddle that is his homeland. His film has the feel of a spiritual experience, a purging of guilt and sorrow by an observer who has only his art as weapon. There is pain in the film’s silence, and prayer in its score’s repetitious drone.

Death is the only thing that is certain. It unites us all, from the powerful cult leader whose feculence is manna from heaven to the baylan who has been forgotten. Mardoquio understand its power. He acknowledges its beauty. Ang Tigmo sa Aking Pagpauli appears to be his ode to it, thoroughly sincere and stirring as it comes from a heart who has observed far too many in his homeland needlessly succumbing to it.

(First published in Rappler.)

Islands (2013)

Islands (Whammy Alcazaren, 2013)

The easiest thing to do is to either stop at faulting or praising Whammy Alcazaren’s ambition in mounting Islands, a deeply personal meditation on the complexities of loving. The film is hardly about the director’s ambition. It is more about his humility in communicating how imperfect he is as a person in love. The film, despite its visual elegance, has the affecting awkwardness of a juvenile poem. Like a poem, it is replete with obvious metaphors, from the solitary spacemen to the despondent hunter, that pertain to one nagging idea: the inability to communicate love.

Its stanzas are all beautifully composed. They are fragile sequences, all carefully designed to evoke a somber mood. In a forest, a hunter longs for the love of a princess he can never have. In space, two astronauts suffer the most profound of loneliness despite each other’s company. In a quiet house, a widow suffers through infrequent visits of her migrating daughter and grandson.

The three storylines, separated by time and space, are linked through signals and gestures. The grandson plays with a toy spaceship while his elders talk about the weight of quietness. He becomes the sole witness of two individuals bursting with love for each other but unable to declare it. An astronaut sings a familiar pop song out of a memory of his past, which is curiously our present. It breaks the languor of the film. It also makes the spaceman human, suddenly turning the last life in the universe into one of us.

The astronaut hurts himself just to remember emotions. The hunter hurts others to evoke emotions. He sees a dinosaur caught in his trap, and proceeds to kill it, before succumbing again to pains of alienation. The hunter’s princess weeps for him. Garbed in a wedding gown, she laments to the sea that took her lover away from her. The astronaut, newly landed on her planet, consoles her.

The episodes’ connections are at once apparent and ephemeral. They work like figures of speech, adding layers to verses. At the moment where the connection becomes real, when the spaceman finally bridges to another lonely soul, Alcazaren breaks his deceit, revealing the fiction that masks his truth. The director of the film within the film, intriguingly played by Peque Gallaga, releases words that have been aching to be released. That an entire cosmos was created to add eloquence to the simplest of words reveals Alcazaren’s impulse as a filmmaker.

Love is never uncomplicated. It should never be. Islands veils love’s complications with such immaculate beauty. It is not only about the carefully crafted imagery that the film indulges in. It is not about the poems within the poem. It is not about the film within the film, whose eventual reveal exposes, in cinematic real-time, the awkwardness of loving from the distance and absence of words. It is definitely not about its distinct parts, which essentially are all disparate gestures and mysterious codes that obscure the need of verbalizing love.

Islands is about the inability to express directly what is felt. It is about the empty spaces, the wasted eras, the torturous silence that all result from needlessly caged emotions. It is about the boy and the girl talking about everything except love when love is everything they want to talk about.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Bendor (2013)

Ralston Jover's Bendor: Life as Prison

It all seems routine. Over coffee, Blondie (Vivian Velez) animatedly recounts how she caught her husband cheating. Her story is amusing, how her husband’s philandering eventually caught up with him when he ended up flirting with their own goddaughter who grew up to work as a bargirl. Her story is aborted by sounds of wailing. There is actually more to Blondie than her domestic squabbles. In another room, a woman who she assisted to have an abortion is quickly losing blood, and is screaming for help. She brings her to the hospital and leaves her there. Luck was on her side, as she was able to escape before the hospital could figure out the abortion.

At home, everything still seems routine. Blondie prepares for work, plucking the white hairs that reveal her age. She helps her granddaughter dress up for school. Her son greets her with a request for money to pay his own utilities bills. A few minutes later, her daughter starts to pontificate about how she should just forgive her husband so that things can go back to normal. She storms out of their apartment, only to be met by her drunken husband who violently pleads for forgiveness, and eventually suffers a severe heart attack. This time, routine is on her side, as she was able to escape that morning’s drama because she has to work.

Blondie detours and visits her optometrist and beautician, delaying the inevitability of old age. She then proceeds to her stalls in Quiapo Church, where she catches her vendors slacking. She then mans her own stall, selling various colored candles to women depending on their needs. Goods are sold and money is exchanged, all outside the centuries-old cathedral that feigns ignorance of all sorts of commerce. Her daughter suddenly arrives, begging for money to pay for her husband’s hospitalization. Blondie gives her daughter her day’s entire earnings, promising to look for more money to complete the payment. The money she gave is not enough. Her daughter begs for her to visit the hospital. She cannot escape for long.

In Bendor, Ralston Jover painstakingly plots the life of a woman who has been wasted to routine. As portrayed by Velez, Blondie seems to be a woman who has seen better years. She desperately clings on remnants of her fleeting youth, while also attempting to raise a family that is tittering on dysfunction. All her efforts are funded by illicit dealings with abortionists and corrupt cops. Jover offers no moral judgments. The illegal trade Blondie plies is as ordinary and routinary as her morning shouting matches with her husband.

However, the life she leads is one where risks are part and parcel of survival. There seems to be far too many close calls. She only manages to avoid them when mysterious visions of another Blondie suddenly appear, almost mocking her of the freedom she lacks. When her salvation is nothing more than hallucinations of a life that could have been, it becomes apparent that she has imprisoned herself in a life whose dire ordinariness is but symptomatic of a more profound plight. She is just one amongst many other women circling the surroundings of Quiapo’s grand cathedral and bound by fate to either buying with both money and soul another opportunity at life and freedom or being content with the damning routine of domesticity and servitude.

Jover ends the film with blunt irony. Blondie and Quiapo’s many vendors are finally set free from prison after several hours. Upon release, she is greeted with news that her husband has been released by the hospital. Her daughters merrily exit the police station. Blondie decides to stay, behind bars. She looks on, motionless, with eyes heavy with tears. That morning’s freedom, as it turns out, is nothing more than a one-way ticket back to her life’s persisting prison.

(First published in Rappler.)

Blue Bustamante (2013)

Blue Bustamante (Miko Livelo, 2013)

It is inevitable for the Philippines, a country whose economy thrives because of the inward remittances of its overseas workers, to develop a film culture that revolves specifically around the experiences of those expatriated breadwinners and the families they left behind. It is perhaps the penchant for Filipinos for melodrama that eventually shaped the unique genre into what it is now: an enduring portrait of marginalized sector that has become most famous for its selfless sacrifices. From Joel Lamangan’s The Flor Contemplacion Story (1995), a dramatization of the life and death of a domestic helper in Singapore, to Hannah Espia’s Transit (2013), about a family in Israel being threatened of deportation, overseas Filipino workers are consistently depicted in a state of physical, emotional or mental anguish.

Blue Bustamante, Miko Livelo’s awkward entry to the depressing genre, is therefore a very welcome breath of fresh air. George (Joem Bascon), Livelo’s Japan-bound family man, is not exempt from the trials that usually befall overseas workers. Early on, he is booted from his job as an engineer, and forced to don a mask and a tight body suit to play Blue Force in an ongoing sentai show, just to be able to provide his family back home with comforts. He also becomes a victim of homesickness, relying on the threat-laden letters of his loving wife (Dimples Romana) for company. Despite the very familiar issues, the film never allows itself to wallow in regret and remorse. Instead, it bursts with ingenious energy, reminiscent of the low-budget Japanese television shows it offers itself as a tribute for.

It is thoroughly and enjoyably simple. In fact, its conflict is blatantly trite. Simply put, George is embarrassed of his job, not knowing that his son (Jhiz Deocareza) for whom he sacrifices what remaining dignity he has left for is his character’s number one fan. Livelo pads the plot with unsophisticated charm. Humor is abundant, and wit, overflowing. The conversations between George and his glib roommate (Jun Sabayton) are funnily pointless, stretched indefinitely until its perfectly timed punchline.

Livelo surprisingly understands the purpose of his film’s comedy. It is its levity. It is its sincerest effort to prevent itself from taking itself seriously and turning into just another of those films that turn modern-day heroes into hapless victims of circumstance. Absent its irreverence, Blue Bustamante is nothing more than a rough-on-the-edges attempt to one-up sentai, which it is obviously not. The blatant imperfections are essential to its charm. Like the kids whose crayon-colored cardboard masks are their greatest tributes to their favorite after-school pastime, Livelo crafts the film to be his grandest compliment to nostalgia.

That is precisely why the film works, despite the obviousness of its low-budget roots, or its inconsistent plotting, or its stubbornness in its straightforward sentimentality. It never complicates the emotions it is trying to pull off. The plentiful sketches and lovely anecdotes on the sentai shows of the past decade are all effective diversions from its immediate heart, which is the father-son relationship that was sadly suspended by distance and lack of communication. When Livelo suddenly strays from his antics and diversions to concentrate on his film’s emotional core, it is just impossible not to get affected.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Babagwa (2013)

Babagwa (Jason Paul Laxamana, 2013)

English Title: The Spider's Lair

Jason Paul Laxamana's Babagwa (The Spider's Lair), an exploration of the proliferation of deceit in a rapidly virtualizing world, centers on Greg (Alex Medina), who fronts himself online as Bam Bonifacio (Kiko Matos), an affluent and handsome model whose sexual orientation depends on the gender of the target victim. The ruse is the brainchild of Marney (Joey Paras), who gets a sizable portion of the money earned from the swindle. Like all of his previous victims, Daisy (Alma Concepcion), a wealthy and philanthropic middle-aged woman, easily falls for Greg's dashing alter-ego. However, caught in a web of domestic drama, a shallow and stunted romance with his girlfriend (Chanel Latorre), and a slew of unsatisfying paychecks from his illicit gigs, he suddenly finds himself falling for Daisy.

Babagwa is ingenious. Laxamana creates a believable world where fantasy and reality are immediately interchangeable. Set in Laxamana's native Pampanga, the film enunciates the nagging pains of living indolent lives. His characters are scoundrels, products of their own doing and a society that forces them to scrape the very bottom of barrels to experience a semblance of a decent life. Marney needs to uproot his parents from a house that is being threatened to be demolished by the local government. On the other hand, Greg, Marney's former talent who has allowed himself to fade alongside his dreams of fame and glory, has only his afternoon trysts with his girlfriend to remind him of what he has lost. To his annoyance, his girlfriend seems to be more interested in a vacation he cannot provide than stroking his fragile ego. Presumably, their victims certainly live similarly pathetic lives.

Laxamana conceives the world with Darwinian precepts, a bazaar where love is peddled to the loveless, and thieves and cheaters are abound. Facebook has made the marketplace smaller and has made it even more difficult to detect fact from fiction. It has allowed for the commodification of virtual lives, those products of wants and necessities multiplied exponentially by a specific moment's mood. In one's playful mind, depending on one's gullibility and specific need, a swindler sitting alone in a dark and unkempt room is a sensitive prince lying in an expensive condo unit and in need of part-time passion. Trust is a too expensive luxury if the need is desperate.

Laxamana clearly understands the foolishness of it all. Babagwa is after all still a comedy of errors, one whose humor is reliant on the very foolishness of humanity to fall for the obviously illogic all in the name of love, or lust. He doesn't take his observant musings too seriously, and instead concentrates on balancing the tension with moments of delightful levity. His actors share the same responsibility, peppering their convincing performances with playfulness. Babagwa is refreshingly balanced, its heavy themes never outweighing the need to still entertain.

It is therefore unfortunate that Laxamana chooses to give up the balancing act in favor of a neat resolution. The film's parting shot suggests Greg's comeuppance. The politics itself of such comeuppance seems questionable and misshapen. Moreover, it is a misstep that forces Babagwa to be a mere cautionary tale on the dangers of mixing virtual lives and real longing. For sure, the ending perfectly wraps Laxamana's brilliantly conceived concept, but it only does so for the purpose of completing a narrative, to satisfy the demands of tradition. In the end, Laxamana's sophomore feature feels more like an exquisitely filmed urban legend, an urban legend that has been whispered around by those unfortunate enough to be enthralled by the internet's promises of quick love only to be fooled in the end.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi (2012)

Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi (Richard Somes, 2012)

English Title: Mariposa in the Cage of the Night

Manila has often found itself a central character in many Filipino films. Manila, in Lino Brocka’s Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975) and Macho Dancer (1988), is a place of failed promises, where innocent men and women from the provinces are sucked into a labyrinth of deceit and violence. On the other hand, Manila, as depicted in Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (1980), is a city that has become home to the perpetually despaired, depressed, and disillusioned. Brillante Mendoza, in his films set in Manila like Tirador (Slingshot, 2007), Kinatay (The Execution of P, 2009) and Lola (Grandmother, 2009), the city is characterized by squalor, where dignity and humanity have become virtues amidst overwhelming corruption. The way Manila has been depicted in films has been rooted to the fact that its allure betrays. The city is a predator that feeds on the need for salvation, for respite.

Richard Somes’ Manila is similar in feel. The difference lies in the way he dresses up Manila. Gone are the hyper-realistic slums and its pitiful dwellers. Instead, he focuses on the labyrinthine alleyways that houses lost souls and strangers. The storyline of Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi (Mariposa in the Cage of the Night) is not unlike the many tales of provincial dreamers traveling from their rural villages to the city for the promise of a better life as depicted both in celluloid and real life. What differentiates Somes’ dark tale from the rest is how he molds his protagonist, a barrio lass in search for her missing sister, into the antithesis of the stereotypical victim.

Maya, played by Erich Gonzalez, one of the very few mainstream young actresses who is able to venture towards playing more complex roles, is not one who easily falls victim to the city’s empty charms. Her mission is not survival, but to ease her gnawing curiosities and suspicions as to the strange fate of her only sister. From there, she uncovers the hidden face of the city, one that ekes its existence out of vanity, greed, and pride, despite the abject lack of resources.

Despite the seemingly fantastic design of Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi, it remains to be one of Somes’ most personal works. It reflects his initial understanding of the big city. Somes, who hails from Bacolod City in one of the islands south of the capital, has moved to Manila to work. Although dark, damp and dreary, his version of Manila is littered with eccentricities that may or may not be exaggerations of what is really happening deep in the metropolis. Sausage factories are lively with flies and other crawlers feasting on fermenting meat and pig intestines scattered all over. Restaurants serve monkeys and other seemingly unpalatable delicacies. Plastic surgeons make do of tire sealants and other dubious liquids, transforming women into monsters, ready to be hired by the most daring of sexual adventurers. Somes’ film bizarrely charms through its showcase of the colorful depravities that thrive in the city. Framed by a deepening mystery that comprehends the outrageousness of it all, the film outlines the very extent and margins of our humanity the same way it depicts the hidden dirt and grime of the city it lives in.

With Mariposa sa Hawla ng Gabi, Somes adds another dimension in the ever-growing scope of Manila’s character. Brocka showed Manila’s deceit. Bernal showed Manila’s despair. Mendoza showed Manila’s stubborn resilience. Somes showed Manila’s blatant insanity. The film more than just offers a gripping descent into the exotic unknown, it also opens up to a perspective of a city that has too often been relegated by cinema to the boredom of reality.

(First published in the programme of 15th Edition of the Far East Film Festival in Udine.)

Melodrama Negra (2012)

Melodrama Negra (Maribel Legarda, 2012)

Like Loy Arcenas, Maribel Legarda has several years’ worth of theater experience to guide her first foray into filmmaking. Unlike Arcenas, whose first film is from an original screenplay by Rody Vera, Legarda chose to adapt for the screen an award-winning stageplay by Allan Lopez. Interestingly, Nino, Arcenas’ first film embraces theatricality, limiting most of its moments within the striking dialogues spewed by the characters with such exaggerated extravagance. Legarda’s Melodrama Negra, on the other hand, abandons theatricality in favor of gloss, spectacle and other cinematic excesses. Remnants of the material and Legarda’s stage roots linger, creating an uneasy mix of both theatrical and cinematic excesses.

Melodrama Negra opens with three wandering ghosts (Gee Canlas, Gerald Napoles and Bong Cabrera), wondering what they need to do to move on. Through flashbacks, their respective lives, all of which are typical sob stories designed primarily to grant humanity to those who are no longer human, are revealed. Their deaths are conveniently connected to the individual stories of the film’s living characters: an good-hearted thug (Gerhard Acao) who falls for a prostitute (Sheng Belmonte), a group of high school sociopaths (Nicco Manalo, Cindy Garcia, Ria Garcia) who stage the kidnapping of a congressman’s son and his girlfriend, and their respective respectable parents who have hidden monstrosities. Legarda fervently weaves the stories together, crafting a light-hearted and mostly cinematic take on the innate darkness of humanity.

Eskrimadors-director Kerwin Go turns cinematographer here, giving the material a palatable-enough look, appropriating for the material just enough polish to drown the bleakness. Myke Salomon’s musical score gives the picture a likable upbeat feel. Overall, Melodrama Negra has the tone of a genuine crowd-pleaser. Its humor is amiable. Its drama is relatively efficient.

Legarda is clearly in the business of entertaining. However, it is that eagerness to entertain that bars the film from being nothing more than a well-crafted offbeat caper. The film’s morbid impressions are nothing more than embellishments that serve the purpose of satisfying a curiosity or the need to be different. Its descent to the darkness of men feels false, unable to linger beyond the four corners of the darkened theater.

Melodrama Negra stands out when it doesn’t overreach, when it remains grounded, exploring emotions and relationships that are elementarily human. It leaps when it bares the grief of a drag queen who laments his foster son’s death through an impromptu ballad sung among friends. It flies when it exposes a sister’s concern for her younger sister who is traumatized by their sexually abusive father. It radiates when it tells the blossoming romance between a misunderstood bodyguard and his master’s favorite hooker. Unfortunately, these very human scenes are but half of the experience. The rest is enveloped in tolerable but ultimately forgettable artifice, the same artifice that can only work on stage, where the props, the acting, the lighting, and the sets are as large and as loud as the convolutions of Lopez’s theater-bound material.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Slumber Party (2012)

Slumber Party (Emmanuel dela Cruz, 2012)

Emmanuel dela Cruz’s Slumber Party is a film of undeniable charms. It revels in color. It delights in diversity. It sustains with mainstreamed queer wit, the type that makes use of self-referential humor for much of the laughter earned. The brand of comedy is of course a staple in the Philippines, where there is an abundance of gay entertainers who mine their experiences with intolerance for everybody’s humor. Fortunately, Slumber Party does not limit itself to the stereotypical inanity of its more commercial kin. It attempts to offer the mainstream it seduces with its approachable wit and comedy a slice of homosexual reality in the country.

Perhaps Dela Cruz’s most masterful stroke here is to cast popular straight actors as his film’s tri-beki, the trio of gay friends who find themselves both captors and guardians of a fraternity initiate they caught invading into their yearly Miss Universe vigil. Trusting first, his ability to mold his actors (commercial model RK Bagatsing, singer Markki Stroem, and comedian Archie Alemania) into homosexuals with nary a hint of falseness, and second, his actors’ untested capability to melt into the written characters, Dela Cruz adds a cinematic sheen to the exercise instead of relying on overused realism. He infuses a certain feeling that everything, despite the excellent performance of his cast, all a play, a deliberately engineered romp, a piece of entertainment.

The script, written by dela Cruz alongside gay rights advocates Philippe Salvador Palmos and Troy Espiritu, is a patchwork of inspired ideas and convenient contrivances. It struggles to make every light-hearted moment deep and relevant, pumping each hilarious scene with heavy-handed revelations involving nearly every current queer dilemma and issue. However, the film works best when its celebration is unburdened. There is enough humanity in the characters’ interactions with each other to excuse it from the need to spell out its intentions in a needlessly clear and obvious manner. In turn, Slumber Party becomes overlong, chatty, and bewilderingly redundant.

The very danger of straying from mere entertainment into the territory of advocacy is that every skit, every joke, and every plot point become more open to scrutiny. A film that begs for acceptance cannot take lightly affairs and experiences that are obnoxious as they are and can only be deemed acceptable given more sober and solemn circumstances. The story of Slumber Party already takes many liberties with mainstream sensitivities, given the fact that it essentially revolves around a straight man being denied his freedom by likable homosexuals who are written to commit dastardly deeds draped as comedy.

Dela Cruz and his scribes’ most glaring misstep is to turn an act of sexual assault against the captured straight man into a boisterous act of hilarity that becomes completely forgotten in pursuit of the film’s lofty objectives. Whatever charms and understanding earned are eventually betrayed by a scene that uncomfortably feels very wrong, most especially since its wrongness can easily be glossed over because it is staged for laughs. Slumber Party is a pleasure for the forgiving. It is disconcerting for the rest. It earns as much as it conveniently wastes away.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Palitan (2012)

Palitan (Ato Bautista, 2012)

English Translation: Exchange

Ato Bautista’s Palitan (Exchange) opens with a business transaction. Ramiro (Mon Confiado, who gives a performance that carries the film from start to finish), the shrewd owner of an electronics shop, is convincing a client to buy his surveillance cameras. The client, troubled by his wife’s brazen infidelity, wants to build proof of her cheating. Ramiro then coolly suggests another one of his wares, a pistol, declaring that the only way for a jealous husband is to kill the cause of jealousy. Ramiro is a convincing businessman. He has a distinct way with words, delivering them with the primary objective of making a sale and enjoying the profit. His client, given the freedom of choosing the surveillance camera or the gun, is hooked and ready to let go of his cash for the peace of mind he desires.

Throughout the film, Ramiro is in the process of bartering and bargaining, to convince Nestor (Alex Medina) to give him videos of his wife (Mara Lopez) showering in exchange for the erasure of his debts, or to woo the wife into having sex with him, and later on, loving him back. Nestor is pitiful, a miserable loser who works in Ramiro’s shop to supposedly pay off his debts that only keep increasing. Nestor’s wife, newly plucked from the province and wasting away in a rundown parlor doing pedicures of horny clients, is the ultimate prize for Ramiro. When Ramiro finally wins the wife, through a marvellous display of gab and cunning, he is rewarded with an indulgently long sex scene, enunciating the near-soulless quality of the newly formed relationship. In the end, he begs to be loved by the confused wife. There is still work to be done, a deal to be closed.

Bautista admittedly pegs Peque Gallaga’s Scorpio Nights (1985) as an inspiration for Palitan. He replicates the design of the film, setting his story within the cramped interiors of the electronics shop or Nestor’s unkempt apartment. Unfortunately, the setting of Palitan is unconvincing. Unlike the tenement in Scorpio Nights where the audience is able to physically map out the mechanics of the characters’ strange sexual affairs and establish the spaces that allow for the possibility of the connections, the setting of Palitan feel like convenient stages that only serve the purpose of approximating claustrophobia. While Gallaga painfully recreates a heightened reality, creating a festering and heat-infested environment where it becomes entirely logical for the characters to be trapped in their sexual longings, Bautista seems satisfied with merely the idea of suffocation, utilizing the most minimum of production design to convey the illusion. Palitan feels too clinical and smart, too removed from the rest of the world. The sweat seems manufactured. The violence becomes only a narrative function. The sex becomes too long and repetitive.

Fortunately, Bautista modifies something new to Gallaga’s masterpiece. He intelligently maneuvers the politics of Scorpio Nights, appropriating the role of the voyeur not to the helpless and powerless but to the moneyed and prone to be abusive. While Gallaga’s desperate voyeur, a struggling student renting the apartment directly above the home of his target, steals his sexual thrills, Bautista’s, the slickly abusive Ramiro, buys his. Despite the variation, the differently situated voyeurs become addicted to the women of their fantasies to the point of falling in love, eventually leading to tragic consequences.

Palitan could be seen as exploitative, especially with its overindulgent bed scenes that seem to overpower what essentially is a thin story. However, the exploitation is an overt part of the milieu Bautista attempts to explore. It is a milieu where everything is traded, judged with whatever commercial value they have. In the absence of love and money, even our souls have a tag price.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ang Paglalakbay ng Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (2012)

Ang Paglalakbay ng Bituin sa Gabing Madilim (Arnel Mardoquio, 2012)

English Translation: The Journey of Stars Into the Dark Night

Arnel Mardoquio’s Ang Paglalakbay ng Bituin sa Gabing Madilim is essentially L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had it been set in present-day Mindanao and draped in reality instead of fantasy. Faidal (Irish Karl Monsanto) is suddenly orphaned when his parents, Muslim freedom fighters who end up becoming bandits involved in kidnapping for ransom, are killed, leaving him with a knapsack full of dollars and a band of American and local troops trailing him. He ends up with his aunt Amrayda (Fe Gingging Hyde) and Fatima (Glorypearl Dy), who decide to aid the orphan in his escape. They end up in the house of Baba Indu (Roger Gonzalez), the family patriarch, who joins them to ensure everybody’s safety in their passage away from their embattled home.

Like Dorothy’s companions, each of the characters in Mardoquio’s remarkably directed film are possessed by their individual needs and motives, which seem to align with Faidal’s quest to escape. The tedium of travel is punctuated with poignant revelations. Their military predators appear deliberately, always accompanied by an otherworldly drone that emphasize the innate violence of their mere presence in the land. Mardoquio could have easily staged rousing chases or intense gunfights. Thankfully, restraint overpowers the need to preach and burst. He tells his story with admirable confidence, showing only what needs to be shown, telling only what needs to be told, and trusting subtlety in its pursuit of accomplishing his advocacy. When he allows his characters to talk lengthily, the burden of their words are always well-earned.

Ang Paglalakbay ng Bituin sa Gabing Madilim is visually arresting. Mardoquio displays his mastery over the spaces of the vast jungles and their surrounding fields. While his camera is often still, capturing the contained drama of his travelling protagonists with hardly any intrusion from the filmmaker, he sometimes deliberately navigates his camera through a wider location, showcasing the fact that the stage of his actions are not limited by the frame of his film. His film feels vaster than what is depicted visually. In a sense, he breaks the illusion of film and keeps his audience repeatedly aware that danger lurks outside his frames.

Mardoquio directs the sequences lyrically. In one beautiful scene where the four travelers take a rest before heading to sea, he has Baba Indu dutifully look for boats for their journey and Faidal, true to his being a child who just found himself in the middle of conflict, take a leisurely swim in the sea. Amrayda and Fatima, fresh from a lover’s quarrel over the harsh realities of their forbidden and impermanent relationship, take the time alone to relish the remnants of their damaged love. Amrayda leaves, allowing Faidal to talk to Fatima, about things that concern most humanity, and not just those endangered by war. They reassure themselves. They have a bagful of money, a new love waiting out there, and a future ahead of themselves. The scene is utterly heartbreaking, summing up the entire conflict in Mindanao within terms that is closer to the heart than the ego.

They nearly reach their Oz, a sea where the horizon is littered with lights emanating from foreigners’ factories and refineries, an indication that they are utterly trapped. They look up. The sky is littered with pale stars and other heavenly objects. Mardoquio conveniently concludes his story with the end of the chase, finally signalling a political stance he has been grooming right from the charged first frame of the film. In the midst of a war that has a national history as its never-ending fuel, there are no wizards, no magic, no steadfast friends, and no easy solutions to abruptly kill the conflict. It is a dreary struggle, where each participant becomes both an unwitting victim and a quiet perpetrator.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (2011)

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (Mes de Guzman, 2011)

English Title: At the Corner of Heaven and Earth

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa (At the Corner of Heaven and Earth), Mes de Guzman’s elegy to childhood innocence, is relaxed in its pace and elegant in its imagery. Set in De Guzman’s native Nueva Vizcaya where continuous fields meet proud mountain ranges, the film reinforces its powerful images of rural hardship with gorgeous passages of slopes being enveloped by clouds, creating a certain lyricism to its straightforwardness. Instead of portraying children as passive victims of an unfortunate circumstance, they are shown to be more in control of their fates, capable to exist within penury without much tragedy, but handicapped by their pride and other vices.

Four children, most of whom have chosen to run away from their families, have turned an abandoned hut in the middle of an idle lot outside the border of the town of Bayombong into their home. Days are spent looking for work, or fooling around, or fighting among themselves. Nights, on the other hand, are mostly committed to rest. The predictability of their daily routine has turned their simple lives into some sort of paradise. Their concerns are minuscule. Their main goal is survival, to eat at least a few times a day and to maintain a semblance of order in their motley crew. Except for the occasional sickness, these kids seem to do well in their chosen independence.

De Guzman depicts these kid’s lives’ comfortable predictability with levity and earnestness. He avoids crossing the line towards melodrama. Instead, he admits to the subtle joys of their little lives, of sharing a piece of candy or a bottle of soda, of the pranks played, of falling hopelessly in love with an uptown girl. These little slices of the kids’ humble lives, laced more with the comedy of childhood defiance than simpleminded pity whoring, prepare the film for its belated conflict, the inevitable collision of these kids’ precious innocence with real life’s corrupting harshness.

As De Guzman morphs his film from being a document of his protagonists’ youthful antics into something darker, the seemingly innocuous landscape of Nueve Vizcaya turns more ominous, more burdensome, and more painful. He is after all a master in establishing atmosphere without crossing the borders of tasteful subtlety.

In Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong (The Road to Kalimugtong, 2005), the simple story of two children hiking their way to their school is not spiced by dramatic confrontations or grandiose turns in the narrative. The conflicts are merely suggested by gunfights overheard in the forest, or petty thievery in the name of survival for a day. Instead of working up stories to compound the dilemmas of his youthful subjects, De Guzman turns his setting, whether it be the road towards an ill-equipped public school or the impoverished margins of a rural community, into the story, allowing the place to breathe drama into the lives displayed.

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa ends supposedly in tragedy, with the kids no longer existing in the fringes of a society that neglects them but somewhere else. De Guzman crosses over to poetry, with the children, in some sort of trance, escaping from their shelter into the field to be engulfed by a conquering fog. De Guzman merges the reality of the children’s situation and the lyricism of Nueva Vizcaya’s mysterious geography in a sequence wherein the film’s little heroes confront their being in limbo, their being in the middle of life and death, in the center of hope and despair, in the corner of heaven and earth.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (2011)

Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone, 2011)

Most famous for the several short films which displayed a very casual understanding of the idiosyncrasies of Filipino life without relying heavily on cheap charms, Antoinette Jadaone has been regarded by the late Alexis Tioseco as the person that is most qualified to give Filipino mainstream filmmaking that much-needed burst of novel inspiration. Tioseco’s observations are very much valid, considering that Jadaone’s shorts are all tightly packaged confections that marry the popular appeal of mainstream escapist entertainment and the unique wit of more adventurous fare. The only concern remaining is whether or not Jadaone can replicate and sustain the irresistible charms of her short films in a feature length film. Fortunately, Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay is more than enough proof that she can.

Lilia Cuntapay, the film’s endearing subject, is the perennial extra, playing nameless characters in various films. Perhaps because of her distinctly memorable features, she has been type-casted to play hags or ghosts in horror films. Cuntapay is actually most famous for having a face that is easier to recall than her name. Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay springs from that unique fame of Cuntapay, opening with a montage of popular actors and directors who have all worked with Cuntapay who can’t seem to recall who Lilia Cuntapay is, until Peque Gallaga, who discovered Cuntapay while shooting one of the episodes of Shake Rattle & Roll 2 (Gallaga and Lore Reyes, 1990), breaks the name’s supposed unfamiliarity to describe Cuntapay’s strange appeal.

Set in a fictional scenario wherein Cuntapay gets a very surprising nomination as Best Supporting Actress, a filmmaker (played by Jadaone) ventures into Cuntapay’s neighborhood to document Cuntapay’s life a few days prior to the awards night. The film follows Cuntapay as she goes to work to play another nameless role for a television melodrama, or as she excitedly sets up a viewing event for her first-ever interview for a popular primetime news program, or as she tearfully recounts her memorable past few days to her stepdaughter who lives in Canada.

Despite the numerous humorous depictions of a woman who has always settled to be in the fringes of an industry whose main currency is popularity, the film remains a very human portrait of Cuntapay, who suddenly finds herself in the brink of her long-ambitioned recognition. Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay succeeds not only because it seamlessly merges fact and fiction or because it manages to tackle a personality who exists in the margins of Filipino pop culture within a context of absolute familiarity but because it is genuinely touching. As the film reveals Cuntapay’s other sides, as longing mother to an absentee stepdaughter, as dutiful mentor to her patient assistant (Geraldine Villamil), as a beloved and loving neighbor, it graduates from merely being just a witty and hilarious satire into something more worthwhile, more enduring.

Jadaone may have just made the quintessential Filipino underdog movie. Cuntapay is in fact the quintessential Filipino underdog. She struggles in a world of pretty faces, supple breasts, and pleasant gestures, despite the fact that she is the epitome of the complete opposite of what her world values the most. She is someone to be rooted for, not exactly to be given the fame and fortune luckier talents would normally aim for but only to be recognized, to be given a permanent place in that world she has devoted her life and uniqueness to but cannot give the same devotion to her. Jadaone’s film, rooted in that fantasy that someone who has persisted for so long like Lilia Cuntapay may actually cross-over to be pitted against established and talented actresses in a glittery awards ceremonies, is a heartfelt tribute to each and every person who dared to dream dreams as big (and probably far-fetched) as the ones dreamt by Lilia Cuntapay.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Big Boy (2011)

Big Boy (Shireen Seno, 2011)

We live in the present, for the future. The past only becomes part of the present through memories, which are but figments of the imagination, collections of reality as perceived, designed and fashioned by the creative mind. Memories are never conjured spontaneously. They are urged, perhaps, through people, objects, faces, or emotions. It is this very malleable aspect of memories that makes them infinitely fascinating. We trust them but never fully, knowing that they are hardly objective, rarely completely reliable. They are dreams dreamt while awake. They are preludes to a trance subsisting on pain, joy, and everything else that have become requisite ingredients of evoking nostalgia.

Shireen Seno’s Big Boy is a film that lives up to the feeling of being in a trance, of being transported in a place that could only exist within the boundaries of the mind. While familiar and unfamiliar episodes of somebody else’s childhood flicker on screen, its audience’s very memories are urged, eliciting emotions that are at once both daunting and comforting. Adapted from Seno’s own memories of her childhood in the province, the film’s plot details the experiences of a boy who is routinely stretched and served with fish oil by her parents so that he can be tall enough to be the poster boy for their business of selling fish oil.

True to the very element of memories that Seno attempts to replicate in the film, the plot is overtly disjointed, with points voluntarily left unseen, untold and unexplained like events consciously forgotten for whatever reason. Apparently, the film has bigger ambitions than merely telling a very personal story. In fact, the way the story was told with points consciously left out alludes to the limitations of memories, how some events, especially those done in repetition or coupled with violence or other things that would render them indelible, become ironclad memories and how some are simply forgotten.

The film attempts to replicate remembering, where sights and sounds are products of the imagination rather than of the senses. Cinema however is an art that is reliant on the senses, making it Seno’s task to create in her film sights and sounds that resemble the ones seen and heard by the mind during the act of remembering. Shot in Super8, the film persists as a lyrical artifact of a forgotten era. The soft daytime hues, the kerosene lamp-lit nights, and the timeless Mindoro town become relatable images of a collective past. Conversations are inaccurately dubbed, with conversations jumping from Tagalog to the local dialect seemingly unplanned.

Seno regards memories as imperfectly crafted episodes. She pinpoints to the idea of remembering as a very personal effort, modified in time by the vast differences, whether in morality, politics, beliefs, the language spoken and other things, of the person remembering during the time when the event happened and the time when the event is remembered. Memories, in a way, are akin to fiction. Although more grounded on actual events than ordinary imagined stories, memories are still just fragments of the reality that gave birth to them. Big Boy, in that sense, with its very intimate story of a town still enamored by its past as an American colony, weaves memories and fiction together into an intoxicating portrait of a people who are unable to forget.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria (2010)

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria (Remton Siega Zuasola, 2010)

English Title: The Dream of Eleuteria

In To Siomai Love (2009), director Remton Zuasola tells the story of two strangers who meet in a street-side eatery and eventually fall in love. Making use of only one shot that deliberately follows the strangers in their minutest of romantic gestures and most exciting of mundane discussions, the film brings its audience into the picture as quiet observers of love being birthed from the strangest of circumstances. Perhaps the film’s biggest fault is that it succumbed to revel in its technique when it concluded with the entire film rewinding to reveal a twist that ultimately betrays the seductive honesty Zuasola masterfully sustained for several minutes.

In Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria (The Dream of Eleuteria), his debut feature length film, Zuasola also makes use of a single shot to document the Terya leaving the island where she has lived her entire life. It is very easy to either praise or criticize the film for its audacious storytelling method. The single shot especially limits the scope of the narrative, keeping it within a certain time frame and the geography that is allowed by the logistics of that single shot. Zuasola thus limits the film to the hour and a half prior to Terya’s departure, patiently capturing everything that happens from when Terya is discovered submerged in the ocean to when she embarks the pumpboat that will bring her to the airport that will ultimately bring her to faraway Germany.

So Terya, following the wishes of her mother to escape from the impoverished life her father can only provide for them, is to leave for Germany to marry an older man. Within that hour or so when the camera follows Terya and her family as they walk to the port, Zuasola deliberately unravels the pains and frustrations that are deeply hidden within the spoken ambitions of the people around Terya. Terya, on the other hand, quietly enduring the outspoken rationalizations of her mother and the submissive affirmations of her father during the first half of the film, only bursts into the picture midway, revealing what could possibly be is an irreversibly hurt heart, especially when it is her dream that was bartered for the dream of a better life for her family.

This precursor to Terya’s lifelong journey fleshes out the mismatched rationales that ultimately push Terya to commit herself to a loveless union. The masterful camerawork, the very apt music that drowns the visuals and becomes the supporting backdrop when it needs to, the courageously convincing acting of the entire cast that blurs all moral condescension, and the narrative that naturally flows without need of a single cut all, communicate the emotions that pulsate as Terya nears the demise of her very own dream. In the end, despite the mostly mundane goings-on that comprise most of Zuasola’s film, it still holds for its purposes the poignant reality that poverty has skewed the very purpose of ambitioning, pushing people to break familial ties, to dessert pained lovers, to abandon the country for the dream of a better life.

Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria, much more than exposing the physical state of the country because of the abject poverty that pervades it, exposes the dissipating values that are only natural repercussions of that poverty that has become cliché in the so-called national cinema. That the gorgeous vistas shown in the film hardly represent the social and economic decay that is actually thriving therein makes the film’s careful attempt to expound on the more intimate state of the nation more resonant, more resonant in fact than the films whose supposedly pertinent advocacies or themes are worn on their sleeves. Zuasola, despite the near-perfect use of the one shot which clearly establishes him as one of more talented young filmmakers nowadays, thankfully disappears and does not commit the brilliant although self-serving conclusion in To Siomai Love, allowing Terya and her indisputable pain that we’ve become familiar with to occupy the spotlight.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Layang Bilanggo (2010)

Layang Bilanggo (Michael Angelo Dagñalan, 2010)

English Title: Life Sentence

An illusion is brilliantly hatched. Playing alongside each other are two storylines, seemingly separated by time and an immense change in the character of Pol (Pen Medina), a jailed convict who doubles as an assassin for the jail warden (Archi Adamos). The illusion is cleverly maintained, at least up until the cleverness wears off and the need for exposition becomes imminent. The film opens with Pol’s unflinching assassination of a man, briskly revealing in a sequence so judiciously executed Pol as a man of hollow virtues. Yet, Pol, noticeably aged, is also seen communing with a group of other retirees, revealing a character that is opposite the ruthless man of the opening sequence. The gargantuan distinctions between the two Pols of the supposed two storylines of Michael Angelo Dagñalan’s Layang Bilanggo (Life Sentence) are so gargantuan, that it is impossible not to be intrigued by what could have converted Pol the obedient killer into Pol the gentle geriatric.

Given that the two storylines differ in mood and style, since the storyline involving Pol the killer is unabashed in its use of violence and portrayal of reform institutions as ridden with corruption and exploitation while the storyline involving Pol the elderly seems to be a quiet portraiture of people living out the twilight of their lives, the film naturally shifts pacing, requiring a bit of diligence and skill from the director. Thankfully, Dagñalan mostly juggles the two storylines with understated efficiency. Yet when Dagñalan lets go of the conceit, revealing that Pol’s peaceful and reformed presence in the home for the elderly is but a sham for his next mission as an assassin, the film loses a vital piece of what makes it momentarily poignant, the endearing sincerity and simplicity of a life redeemed from what seems to be an inescapable hell.

Layang Bilanggo suffers ultimately because it is told with that conceit in mind. It cheapens the emotions sought to be fleshed out, putting focus more on the ingenuity of the storytelling than the story itself. The story itself though is not as notable as it thinks it is. It’s primarily a tale of redemption of a father who left his wife and daughter decades ago and now attempts to reconnect with her without revealing himself while waiting to eliminate his next target, a journalist who is researching about corruption within the prison system. There are certainly moments where the emotional heft that is being carried by Pol is exposed for some onscreen poignancy. With the help of the consistently believable portrayals of Medina and Miriam Quiambao as the criminal father and his daughter, respectively, Dagñalan manages to sustain a breath of the familiar in a story that wraps itself in blatant contrivances.

The attempts at familiarity, however, are nowhere near noble or novel, because they are based incidentally on melodramatic turns and character motivations that are often used to the point of garnering cliché status. The perfunctory anecdotes in the home for the aged make up for all the film’s many faults, puncturing the convoluted main storyline with much-needed humanity. Jaime Fabregas, who plays a retired Metrocom officer who ironically becomes Pol’s best friend in the home for the aged and later in the film, dons a grandmother’s garb while wielding a high-powered armament, adds much-needed levity to the mostly serious and moribund affair. Thus, despite the plentiful excesses in Dagñalan’s scripting and directing, one cannot simply take away the fact that Layang Bilanggo works, even if only as a random curiosity.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Astro Mayabang (2010)

Astro Mayabang (Jason Paul Laxamana, 2010)

Jason Paul Laxamana’s satire Astro Mayabang is about titular Astro (Arron Villaflor, who very ably inhabits the role with equal parts arrogance and vulnerability), an Angeles City local who literally wears his nationalism with shirts, jackets, caps, and rubber shoes bearing Philippine emblems, who it seems is the film’s singular joke. His oft-mouthed mantra is a not-so-accurate list of Filipinos or men and women with Filipino blood, no matter how little, who have made an impact, no matter how little, on the world. He berates a Caucasian tourist for not giving alms to one of the many mendicants in the city when the United States has colonized the Philippines for several decades leading to its very visible poverty, only to be told off by the tourist that he is not American, but British. He is supposedly supportive of locally produced music but buys his music from pirates. Simply put, he is a package of inconsistencies.

The film’s most oddly beautiful moment involves Astro and Dawn (Megan Young), a Filipino-American lady who wants to discover more of her Filipino lineage, alone in the latter’s house. Angry at Dawn for not wearing the nationalistic clothes he bought for her in the dinner with her friends that she invited him to, Astro scolds Dawn for being ashamed of her roots. Dawn, initially taken aback by Astro’s accusations, starts seducing him, pointing to him how each flag-adorned article of clothing which she is removing from his body, means nothing to what she feels for him. Just before Dawn gets her way with him, Astro rejects her advances, pleading for her to wait for him as he rushes to the city to scour for the cure for his embarrassing impotence.

From then on, the film, in a way that shows a director whose confidence in his material is unassailable, ties all the seemingly incoherent parts of the film together to reveal a portrait of a country far too engrossed in outside appearances to cure its embarrassingly decaying core. That night before the Pacquiao fight that almost surely rejuvenates nationalistic pride to all Filipinos, the proudest one of them resigns to the pointlessness especially amid the malady that pervades the culture, as exemplified by the people surrounding Astro, from his hedonistic employer to his good-for-nothing parents. In the end, he abandons his obsession with everything and anything Filipino in exchange for faith in the Church. The film’s end however notes not salvation but repetition, arguing that impotence within can only exude impotence outside.

In sum, Astro, at least during the initial parts of the film, when his nationalistic angst is in full irresponsible display, is a walking hysterical satire, representing the absurd ironies of the kind of nationalism that is pervading the country: loud, proud and unabashedly branded nationalism. Like a fake Louis Vuitton bag to a shameless social climber, Astro’s clothes, slogans, and unmitigated anger against anything and everything foreign supposedly expresses the abundance of his national pride. As the satire and humor wear off, the film plods into seriousness, reveling in its statement on the values the misdirected youth of this country has skewed, mostly because such values have been intertwined with commercialism and fanaticism, all of which are by-products of the nation’s past as colony to various world powers.

Yet, the character of Astro, the biggest asset of both the entertainment and substantial value of Astro Mayabang, seems to be also the film’s most telling liability. As soon as his novelty wears off and he is unclothed of the momentary charms of his humorous psychosis, Astro is revealed to be rather unlikeable to the point of utter annoyance. That is probably Laxamana’s intent to begin with, to slowly but surely dissipate the artifices of the character until what’s left is nothing but the emptiness of what the artifices represent. It is supposed to chafe, to repel, to frustrate. It is supposed to rock you to your core, push you to evaluate whatever nationalism, whether it is as little or as ridiculously grand as Astro’s, and determine if it stems from the right place or if it is only there to cover up embarrassing shame. If only for that, Astro Mayabang, though it could be more abrasive than funny, is a more than worthwhile comedy.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Tsardyer (2010)

Tsardyer (Sigfried Barros-Sanchez, 2010)

English Title: Charger

Supposedly inspired by the news of the kidnapping of a famous journalist by the Abu Sayyaf, Sigfried Barros-Sanchez’s Tsardyer (Charger) tells the story of Shihab (Martin delos Santos), a young boy who is recruited into the group to run back and forth from the kidnappers’ den to the nearest house to charge the cellular phones used by the kidnappers to communicate their demands for the release of their captives. Barros-Sanchez, unsatisfied with the already promising premise of the boy who gets caught right in the middle of the war, needlessly expands his reach, tackling without benefit of any clear direction everything from corruption within the military and the role of media in the troubles in Mindanao. The film, already hurt by an ambition that is supported mainly by convoluted storylines that only reveal empty aspirations of social relevance, is rendered further unwatchable by stale and tasteless filmmaking.

The film’s cast, composed of mostly reliable thespians like Neil Ryan Sese, who plays Shihab’s pacifist father, Dimples Romana, who plays the reporter who was kidnapped, and Shamaine Buencamino, who plays the media executive tasked to negotiate with the kidnappers, sift through a screenplay that is a patchwork of atrociously stilted dialogue and confused approximations of what is happening in Mindanao. Perhaps the biggest perpetrator of the dangerously one-dimensional acting that contributes to the film’s abominable one-sided appreciation of the conflicts in Mindanao among the actors involved in the film is Pipo Alfad, who plays the kidnapping band’s high-strung leader with unadulterated and detestable villainy, reciting his hammed up lines with mismatched conviction, and filling the screen with probably well-intentioned but inevitably vulgar gesticulations.

The musical score, if one can consider the unimaginative and annoying repetitions of trite melodies music, lazily cues the mood, the setting, the intended emotion. Even more unjustified is the film’s ridiculous utilization of various songs, all made more abominable by how they are tacked on to specific scenes to manipulate emotions. Visually, the film is frustratingly flat, with cinematography that seems to function only to record what is happening within the frame, nothing more. It’s not just the acting, the music, or the visuals. Barros-Sanchez seems oblivious to subtlety. The production is crippled by bluntness. Tsardyer attempts far too hard to be socially relevant, yet it fails more than miserably. What Barros-Sanchez achieves is exactly the opposite of his intentions, inadvertently revealing the pitfalls of using social relevance and advocacy to justify bad filmmaking, or any filmmaking at all, which seems to be a fad for Filipino filmmakers nowadays because of its allure to organizers of film festivals from all over.

The evident bad filmmaking, however, is not the only problem of Tsardyer. The film obnoxiously packages the important and sensitive issues it intends to shed light on within a story that swims in clichés and stereotypes. Moreover, Barros-Sanchez pussyfoots, trapping himself with his righteous advocacy for peace while telling a story wherein the Muslim rebels are deranged antagonists and the media are the poor victims. While he reserves a musical montage displaying the undiscovered beauty of battle-torn Sulu and its people, he nevertheless pushes the limits of taste as he presents a portrayal of the problems of the region that seems to irresponsibly turn the pressing issues into a massive caricature that is thankfully not funny at all. To make matters worse, Barros-Sanchez seems clueless to his very own incoherence and inconsistency as he champions peace with a sensationalized dramatization of the war.

Tsardyer is one of the most insulting films I have had to suffer through. The insults stem more from the film’s irresponsible oversimplification of the grave complexities of the Mindanao problem than the indubitable fact that it is terribly made. For me, it would have been better if the film was forgettable since forgetting it seems to be the only cure to the agony this carelessly mounted film has caused me, yet it is not. Thus, my only hope is that the film, charmless asit is yet persisting like some memory of a traumatic experience, will prove me wrong and be really instrumental in its goal, though questionably communicated, of peace. That's what we all want, anyway.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)