Minsan Pa (2004)

Minsan Pa (Jeffrey Jeturian, 2004)

English Title: One Moment More

The film Sana Pag-ibig Na (Enter Love, 1998), one of the several films made under Regal Films subsidiary Good Harvest, gave birth to the collaboration between Armando Lao and Jeffrey Jeturian. Before Sana Pag-ibig Na, Lao was then the very much underrated screenwriter of arguably William Pascual and Chito Rono’s best works, Takaw Tukso (1986) and Itanong mo sa Buwan (1988) respectively. Jeturian, on the other hand, served as production designer and art director for Leroy Salvador’s Dear Killer, one of the two episodes in Dear Diary (1989) that was written by Lao (the other being Dear Partyline, directed by Lupita Aquina-Kashiwahara and written by Jose Javier Reyes) and various other films and television shows. After Sana Pag-ibig Na, Lao and Jeturian would collaborate in Pila Balde (Fetch a Pail of Water, 1999) and Tuhog (Larger than Life, 2001), both of which are also critically acclaimed films.

Minsan Pa, Lao and Jeturian’s fourth film together, is more ambitious in scope. Their previous collaborations were clearly smaller. Sana Pag-ibig Na is a family drama set within a middle-class household. Pila Balde is a set in an impoverished community that envelopes a condominium complex and explores the complicated relationship between the haves and the have-nots. Tuhog is a more conceptual affair that pits real reality and movie reality, revealing a cycle of exploitation within a primarily escapist pastime. Minsan Pa is essentially a romance between a Cebu tour guide (Jomari Yllana) and a tourist (Ara Mina). However, more than just unravelling an ordinary love story, Lao and Jeturian set out to unravel not only the lives of the lovers but also the people around them.

The film often drifts away from the central romance, depicting tender episodes of other people’s lives, like the fisherman’s daughter who marries a Japanese tourist, leaving his childhood sweetheart heartbroken in the process, or the performers in a Japanese videographers’ anonymous shoot who become beholden to erstwhile passions and the need to survive. These side stories, told admirably without a sliver of judgment as to actions of these people and how these people lead their lives, contribute to an overall picture of lives existing amidst the lack of permanence.

People come and go, leaving unresolved relationships, obligations, promises and expectations. They strive for constancy, perhaps through by building a permanent home, by finding that one person for whom they can eternally be in love with, by seeking to reunite a family that has become broken by change. The characters Lao crafted and Jeturian fleshed out live lives adjusted to the fleetingness of the world. The only thing constant is heartbreak and disappointment, as when the promise of becoming settled both in life and in love are suddenly snatched not by a stereotypical antagonist but by the very nature of life.

Minsan Pa may be Lao’s masterwork, a piece so lovingly crafted, with characters that feel like they are living and experiencing life’s difficulties with us. There is very little sense of the writer interfering with how the narrative should flow and instead, the story slowly but surely manages to complete itself without succumbing to formula. Jeturian’s job becomes limited to creating the proper mood and atmosphere to finalize the picture. Backdropped by Cebu’s gorgeous sights and vistas, Jeturian expresses the irony of characters appearing and disappearing, completely engulfed by constantly changing emotions, in places that have been there for centuries or even more.

Minsan Pa is the film is fondly remembered as an underseen gem, the film where Ara Mina and Jomari Yllana gave the performances of their careers, the unlikely Filipino romance that did not need to rely on histrionics or cheap thrills to impress. Minsan Pa, however, has an actual place in the history of Philippine cinema. The film barely made enough to recoup the investment put into its production, prompting Lao to rethink the way Filipino films are written and made. Because of the film’s box office failure, Lao would come up with a system of writing films that are apt for Filipino film producers who may not have the capital to gamble into worthwhile but expensive projects that will never be consumed by the ordinary moviegoer.

Because of Minsan Pa, Kubrador (The Bet Collector, 2006), a film written in the manner Lao believes Filipino films should be written, happened. Kubrador won for Jeturian several international accolades and earned for the film’s producer, Joji Alonzo, enough money for her to continue making films despite the economic disaster that was Minsan Pa. Brillante Mendoza then made Masahista (The Masseur, 2005), then Tirador (Slingshot, 2007), then Serbis (Service, 2008) and Kinatay (The Execution of P, 2009). Young filmmakers followed suit, creating a school of filmmaking that positively or negatively changed the landscape of how films are written and made in the country. Who would have thought that Minsan Pa, a glossy film starring famous actors and actresses about heartaches, would stir such a change, opening the Pandora’s box of stories that require absolutely no gloss, no big names, and tackling issues that are closer to the stomach than the heart.

(Cross-published in Lagarista)

Bisperas (2011)

Bisperas (Jeffrey Jeturian, 2011)

English Title: Eve

Set on Christmas Day’s eve in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood, Jeffrey Jeturian’s Bisperas (Eve) details a family’s return from the traditional panunuluyan, a re-enactment of Joseph and Mary’s search for a place to stay involving the members of the parish, only to discover that their house has been robbed. As they account for what has been stolen from their belongings, long-kept secrets are uncovered, revealing the ironic dysfunctions of what seems to be a model middle-class Filipino family.

The film is deceptively simple. It faithfully follows the dysfunctional family trope, with no sharp turns in the narrative, just incidents piling upon incidents until everything explodes predictably at the dinner table. It is shot with hardly any pretense for cinematic prettiness or flair, just the drab interiors of a typical subdivision house, illuminated only by sparse room and Christmas lights. It is expertly edited, with scenes stitched together in near seamless fashion, importantly establishing continuity in the story that exists within a very short period of time.

Bisperas is a superbly acted film. Tirso Cruz III plays the beleaguered patriarch with controlled ferocity. Raquel Villavicencio, on the other hand, playing the family’s very tolerant matriarch, blends into the subtle drama with admirable ease, putting in a mannered performance until the exact moment when hysterics become necessary. As the couple’s grown children, Julia Clarete, Jennifer Sevilla, and Edgar Allan Guzman give the brood of discordant adults ample chemistry, making the strict distinction between emotional attachment and distance among them so deliciously apparent.

It is as if the film was willfully made to look ordinary and feel familiar, owing to Jeturian’s agenda of having the film mirror the pretentiousness of the Philippines’ bourgeoisie, a class as beholden as any other to the Catholic Church but displays such attachment to religion with near-absurd pomp. By bookending the film with public displays of faith and religiosity, where it appears that the Church has been successful in tending its flock to follow the ways of Christianity, Jeturian enunciates the ungodly difference between what is displayed in public and what is kept from public.

Jeturian sprinkles the film with a little too much of symbolisms and visual cues that make it a tad more pedantic than what is required to effectively communicate its message. Uneven only because of certain portions when the film is carried away by an understandable eagerness to reveal the failures of an overbearing Church and its shallow flock, Bisperas is a film that triumphs when it is low key, when its affronts to Catholic hypocrisy are gestured instead of zealously announced.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Sana Pag-ibig Na (1998)

Filipino Fatherhood from the Afterlife

A Plea to Rediscover Jeffrey Jeturian's Sana Pag-ibig Na

by Francis Joseph A. Cruz

It is not that Jeffrey Jeturian’s strangely titled family drama Sana Pag-ibig Na (Enter Love) remains sadly unheralded more than a decade after its release. Even with its suggestive poster, which should entice viewers to a promise of abundant sex between then-fresh faced Gerald Madrid and immaculately beautiful Angel Aquino, the film did not do well in the box office, sharing the same fate as fellow “good harvests” like Lav Diaz’s Serafin Geronimo, Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion (Serafin Geronimo, Criminal of Barrio Concepcion, 1998) and Mario O’Hara’s Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on the Tin Roof, 1998) which opened and closed on the same day. The critics’ praises, which came too late, were also too faintly exclaimed. The film eventually became more famous as Jeturian’s debut film, an under-seen precursor to his more acclaimed films Tuhog (Larger Than Life, 2001), Bridal Shower (2004) and Kubrador (The Bet Collector, 2006), than anything. The fact that its title is more suited for a Star Cinema movie did not help either. As it turns out, Sana Pag-ibig Na’s current reputation seems to be limited to being a mere footnote in Jeturian’s career.

It shouldn’t be, though. Seeing it now, after seeing the more recent dramas like Jade Castro’s Endo (2007) or Milo Sogueco’s Sanglaan (The Pawnshop, 2009) that occupied the same subdued storytelling temperament, made me realize that the film is ripe for rediscovery and reassessment. The screenplay, written by Armando Lao long before the ballooning expenses of Minsan Pa (One Moment More, 2004) forced him to invent real-time, is both poignant and witty. Jeturian’s direction, unperturbed by expectations of grandeur or dearth, is refreshingly earnest. The performances, from Madrid’s teenager who is coming to terms with his late father’s infidelity to Aquino’s pregnant mistress who sees her late lover’s son as her only support, are all lovely, significantly subtle in a way that seems unlikely in Filipino cinema.

Mike (Madrid), the youngest son of a respected professor (Chinggoy Alonzo) and a housewife (Nida Blanca) whose ambition is to be an entrepreneur, proudly points out his state of being a virgin in his late teens during the film’s introduction. When his father dies of stroke, he searches for his mistress (Aquino), discovers that she is pregnant with his half-brother, and proceeds to take care of her. His mother belatedly finds out of her late husband’s illicit affair, crushing her and her long-lived belief that her husband was an upright man, and later on discovers that her son has known of the affair all along, and worse, has befriended and supported the mistress.

Sana Pag-ibig Na is also that rare Filipino film that maturely maps the role of fathers in the family. For the sake of heightened drama, fathers have either been depicted in a bad light or in close-to-nonexistent or underwritten roles to enunciate the traditional role of mothers as light of our homes. Let us admit it, we are a nation of mama’s boys and girls. We have seen enough films championing the sacrifices of mothers, yet there are very few films that give the father more than perfunctory roles in their narratives. This is strange considering that much of our cinema clings on machismo, a concept that our culture — confusingly — prizes highly. Even more rare than films with meaty cinematic father figures are films that dissect the mechanics and psychology of the father’s role within the culture.

Sana Pag-ibig Na, despite the attention that is given to Blanca’s long-suffering mother, is predominantly about the relationship between Mike and his father, how the latter still reared the former to manhood even after his death. Lao’s script and Jeturian’s understated direction place the father, even after his death, at the center of all events. His voice reverberates through the carefully written words of his final love letter to his mistress. There is this one beautiful freeze frame of the mistress’s face, preceded by the father’s enamored description of that mistress. During that scene, the father’s adoration and Mike’s blossoming concern for the mistress are cinematically united.

Thus, in a clever twist, the same love letter serves as the guide to Mike, the guide that he never got when his father was still alive, as he pushes away from immaturity into adulthood. Even more importantly, his father, through acts secretly intended or via fate, was right there, right where all Filipino fathers who insist on being the first to show their sons the delights of unraveling a woman for pleasure or love or both, when he lost his virginity and skipped the line to certain manhood. Thus, his farewell remarks — that he is no longer a virgin and he is keeping it a secret as to whom he lost his virginity with — is more than just an upbeat and humorous conclusion to the tightly-knit drama. It holds a certain truth, a deeply entrenched social and cultural value that speaks more than all of the shouting sprees, the slapping matches, and the weeping wars that our cinema has been infatuated with for so long.

(First published in The A/V Club, Philippine Star, 14 May 2010)

Kubrador (2006)

Kubrador (Jeffrey Jeturian, 2006)
English Title: The Bet Collector

A local film reviewer, after watching Jeffrey Jeturian's latest film Kubrador (The Bet Collector), declared the director as the next Lino Brocka. Brocka, one of the most famous directors who emerged from the Philippines' second golden age of cinema, is internationally known for portraying the lower class citizens of Manila: the slumdwellers of Insiang (1976), the male prostitutes of Macho Dancer (1988), and the urban outcasts of Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975). However, limiting Brocka to such genre is a grave offense to the artist who also dabbled in melodrama, comedy, and period pieces. Jeturian's works are similar to the genre Brocka is most known for, his Tuhog (Larger Than Life, 2001) and Pila Balde (Fetch a Pail of Water, 1999) are scathing examinations of the cruelties of poverty. Like Brocka, Jeturian also made two comedies, Bridal Shower (2004), and the delightful mockumentary Bikini Open (2005). He also made Minsan Pa (One Moment More, 2004) a Visayan love story that is pregnant with potential emotionality that I immediately declared it as one of the finest films the year it was released when I walked out of the theater in solemn awe. Jeturian may not yet be Brocka, but he is on his way there.

Jeturian's Kubrador is a result of his collaboration with lawyer Joji Alonzo (who also produced Minsan Pa). I'd like to think that their collaboration is a sort of revision for Jeturian as he has grown in subtlety and artistry when his works are financed by the film-loving esquire. It features Gina Pareno as Amy, a bet collector, and is set in a squatters' area in Manila. The time frame of the film is a few days before All Souls' Day, where most Filipinos would take the day off to visit the graves of their departed loved ones. Amy, however continues to collect bets for the game of jueteng, a numbers game, dodging policemen, and urging the poor dwellers of the squatters' colony to hand over the few pesos they have in the hopes of winning.

Jueteng is a game that has transcended the few pesos wagered in its name because it is always linked to Philippine politics. The game after all, caused the overthrowing of then President Joseph Estrada when he was accused of collecting money sourced from the numbers game. Up to now, jueteng hounds the current president whose husband is rumored to be linked to the illegal gambling game. Kubrador can easily be misread as having political motivations, but it is clear that outside the opening information given regarding the game and a few linkages to bribery of local congressmen which is already of common knowledge, the film is clearly humanist. One just has to observe and absorb the detailed portrayals of Amy's daily routines to sense the virtues that still exist within the pervading stench of poverty of the slums of Manila.

Jeturian's film is considerably slow-paced and the plot is quite sparse. Aside from the introductory sequence where the cops chase down a jueteng operator atop the roofs of the slums area, the film patiently follows Amy as she goes about her routine. Through the routine, we are introduced to the few slumdwellers, and the other personalities who populate the clockwork operations of the numbers game. Jeturian clearly doesn't want to label these people with conventional notions of morality. His interest is first and foremost the human condition. The policemen aren't jerks and they also subscribe to betting in the illegal game while Amy is in their custody. The higher up of the game, a busy man kept inside an office where piles and piles of money are literally shoveled to be deposited to the bank the next day, is unusually friendly and even exchanges in erstwhile jokes with the underdressed Amy and her companion for that day. There's a point of humor that runs throughout the film - Amy, who deals with numbers and needs to memorize number combinations for her clients, has a mnemonic technique that has her linking numbers with everyday situations and observations: grief and death, a frog and a cowardly kid, and a toddler and testicles. Jeturian has clearly mastered depicting real humans in his film with Kubrador, and this meditative observation of these humans is more watchable than tired contrivances that dominate Philippine mainstream cinema.

Yet one can critique Kubrador as pointless, without a political or a social bite. However, such would denote a lack of perspective on the critic. Kubrador is not merely a "slice of life" film. It does not sit idly as a film that is satisfied in documenting a bet collector's life in its truest sense. The film is after all a narrative, and in a way, Jeturian cooks up a fantastic angle wherein Amy's dead soldier son occasionally visits her as a ghost. The device may be perceptively be seen as old and tired but I disagree. The ghost merely shows Amy's life as a life that is constantly in the claws of death. She literally walks with death beside her. Whenever she collects bets, the police might just suddenly rush in and arrest her. Whenever she attends a grand draw, a dangerous raid might ensue. Her abode cannot be accurately described as a safe haven: kids run around, criminal elements abound, and the alleyways twist and turn like an impossible labyrinth. The film ends in a powerful note where we find Amy visiting her son's grave. She witnesses two men arguing over a vehicular accident. The man grabs his gun and shoots at the other driver but misses. The bullet scrapes a little bit of Amy's shoulder (a mere hand away from her heart) but kills a man behind her. Jeturian ends the film with Amy's realization that she is living life dangerously and that she is traversing a dangerous road where her life can be taken away almost immediately. Logic dictates that that might not be the first time Amy has realized that, but Jeturian directs the scene with power that has cumulated from the contemplative scenes that came before, that the audience might take the final scene as an impetus for change, or a mere eventuality of life that Amy will shrug off and merely continue her pathetic existence as the bottom dweller, a mere bet collector who earns a mere 52 pesos ($1) per day. I suspect Amy will opt for the latter, as Kubrador is not a film of sudden miracles and instantaneous changes, but of grim realism.