La Paloma: Ang Kalapating Ligaw (1974)

La Paloma: Ang Kalapating Ligaw (Joey Gosiengfiao, 1974)
English Title: La Paloma: The Lost Dove

In La Paloma: Ang Kalapating Ligaw (La Paloma: The Lost Dove), Joey Gosiengfiao stages a three-way war for the estate left behind by Don Lorenzo, who died supposedly by suicide. Anida (Vina Cansino), the pious and righteous widow, Paloma (Celia Rodriguez), actress and paramour of the deceased, and Soledad (Mona Lisa), Lorenzo's mother. They all have their reasons: Anida, to get what she thinks she deserves as suffering wife to a philandering husband; Paloma, to concretize the amor in her love affair with Don Lorenzo; and Soledad, for mere survival since her stay in the estate was merely tolerated by Anida.

It's quite an elegant picture, still hilariously funny but succumbing to vaporous wit and indulgent humor. It offers a satirical stab at the hypocricy of high society (at those times, very much coinciding with fervent religiosity). The moment Paloma steps into the mansion, tensions rise. Anida finally finds a formidable competitor (probably tired of pushing Soledad around with her mean gazes and vicious remarks). The rest of the mourners are even more shocked that a scandalous paramour has the guts to invade on a familial ritual, and probably scared that a woman of ill-repute (Paloma is an actress in Manila, and was rumored to be involved in several illicit affairs) would pollute the religiosity and purity of their town. Soledad, on the other hand, finds her trump card and cements her bargaining position.

Gosiengfiao has always been compared to foreign camp-master such as Pedro Almodovar or John Waters, but this early Gosiengfiao proves that his canvass is far more richer. La Paloma has Gosiengfiao playing with Buñuelian surrealism --- when Paloma walks at night to find Lorenzo's garden crawling with cockroaches and toads (elaborate statues and fountains are desecrated by those creepy crawlers), you know that Gosiengfiao is working at another level. Even the interiors of the mansion, with its high ceilings and staircases, have a sense of depleted morality --- empty, cold, and on the verge of both physical and moral deterioration.

Joel (Orestes Ojeda), a traveling gardener and guitarist arrives one day and offers his services to the embattled household. Anida's test is rather simple: make one flower bloom in the doomed garden. Joel instead turns his attention on Paloma, exhausted in defending her love for Lorenzo, and on the verge of a conversion to piety orchestrated by Anida, which practically consumes the life out of the free-spirited Paloma. Paloma is in the middle of that tug-of-war between Anida's persistent exorcism of Paloma's past and Joel's manly and amorous serenades.

The heat of the war culminates in court (there is literal heat as there's a lot of perspiring, fanning, and jeering crowds) where Paloma defends her stake in Lorenzo's estate and heart, and Anida uses her state as grieving widow to a philandering husband as a plea to the sentiments of the righteous mob. The several testimonies are all defiantly delivered pieces of oratory; which makes the entire judicial exercise exciting. Themes are weeded out from the film's extrinsic kitsch and humor --- we become aware that there's more to Paloma's character than a clawing and greedy diva; that she hides an emotional void that only the men she loved can fill. Gosiengfiao climaxes the film with a well-executed twist, ending the film with appropriate murderous intentions from the battle's rotting participants.

I make it sound like La Paloma is serious art. I don't think it is. It is however distinctly Gosiengfiao (and the numerous exchanges of elitistly witty and funny pieces of dialouge between the widow and the paramour (or at times, the mother) would make any audience rolling with laughter; or Joel's seductive poses (complete with suspenders and a guitar on his back, and a badly-rendered song to boot --- all preceding the Latino gardeners of Desperate Housewives)) --- commercial fare but surpasses the limits of being an object of commodity by the director's cinematic flair.

Bedspacers (1980)

Bedspacers (Joey Gosiengfiao, 1980)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temptation Island (1981)

Temptation Island (Joey Gosiengfiao, 1981)

Joey Gosiengfiao's cult classic Temptation Island has often been compared by local critics to the Pedro Almodova's early works. The comparisons maybe due to the fact that Temptation Island is a bizarre and absurd sexual romp where genre elements merge into a hodgepodge that is surprisingly effective and hilarious. Temptation Island is pure unadulterated fun. Even with all its technical faults, one can sense that what may be regarded as a cinematic hiccup by the uninformed critic is actually something more, a delightful embellishment to the film's inherent camp.

The story is simple. Four girls, each for their own reasons and aspirations, join a beauty pageant where they are observed while socializing in a cruise ship to determine who among the contestants are deserving of the beauty title. The ship bursts into flame, forcing everyone to abandon ship. The four girls, a gay millionaire, one of the contestant's maid, and two men are then marooned in a desert island where social and sexual politics are prime, and erotic energies, class struggles, and personalities whirlwind while all of them are satisfying that animalistic need to simply survive.

As mentioned above, the haphazard execution of the film has added a rustic, if not entirely humorous, dimension into the already absurd scenario. The production cannot afford a real ship to burn and sink; in fact, the budget cannot even make room for decent special effects. Instead, flames are cut and then superimposed into the windows of the cruise, as the delegates jump for their dear lives. The other sets are much more ingeniously crafted. A paper mache giant fried chicken turn into an opportunity for the lady survivors to pose and flirt amidst the lifeless desert. Gosiengfiao achieves perfection despite the restraints of low-budget studio filmmaking. Exploitation, social commentary, and escapist entertainment mix in what seems like a senseless romp, but in time, has been discovered to be one of the real gems of Philippine mainstream cinema.

One can just watch the film and enjoy the fact that everything happening onscreen is utterly ridiculous. The helicopter spreading flyers for the upcoming beauty pageant, the disdain between social climbing aspirant and the impossibly rich spoiled brat, the romance angle between one of the virginal ladies and her love partner, these elements meld to form a coherent but essentially playful mix of the absurd and the more glaring social anomalies of its period. Gosiengfiao then injects homosexual politics in the map, with the character of millionaire pageant director whose object of admiration, his hunky laborer-turned-life partner, has become infatuated with one of the pageant competitors. The gay man's tale is tragic, alluding to a life that seems disposable in a culture that idolizes female beauty.

The gay man's life might have ended in tragedy, but Gosiengfiao imposes that his demise be draped in the same absurd air that pervades the picture. The survivors consider the gay man's suicide as an act of generosity, cooks the meat from his corpse so that they may survive. Minutes later, they are rescued. While the gay man's suicide was converted into a selfless sacrifice, this sacrifice was then converted into an unnecessary act of depravity, where human eat fellow human only to learn that had they waited a few more minutes, they would not have inflicted upon themselves that act of cannibalism. History has trained humanity for civilized comforts to the point that society has become an instrument for wastage. Gosiengfiao ends his masterpiece with this candid observation, which would probably be drowned by the endless laughter that precedes and proceeds from this realization.