Tanging Yaman (2000)

Tanging Yaman (Laurice Guillen, 2000)

English Title: A Change of Heart

After several years away from the Philippines and her already illustrious career as a filmmaker, Laurice Guillen returned with Tanging Yaman (A Change of Heart), a tearjerker that unabashedly showcases Catholic faith not only as an underlying theme but as a narrative conceit. The film was both a commercial and critical success. Perhaps more than a decade worth of films that delighted in sex and naked bodies has given the Filipino audience a thirst for something more spiritual.

Guillen’s crafts her most religious film not from the point of view of one who is holier than thou, but from the eyes of an ordinary person who has most likely dabbled in various sins. Her characters are less than perfect. Loleng (Gloria Romero), the family matriarch, is a devout Catholic and spends her days hearing mass and communing with her fellow faithful. Danny (Johnny Delgado), her eldest son who stays in the family home to take care of her, seems satisfied of his modest position in life. Art (Edu Manzano), the middle child and clearly the most successful and financially capable of the siblings, is quietly jealous of his older brother who has always been the favored child despite his lack of any real successes in life. Grace (Dina Bonnevie), the only daughter who migrated to the United States, is too concerned of her family’s finances that she has neglected the real needs of her family.

When an opportunity to sell the farm, the family’s remaining asset, arose, repressed anger and other emotions start to surface, threatening the already fractured family to crumble further. This pushes Loleng, in a desperate attempt to rescue her family, to sacrifice herself, leading the characters in Guillen’s well-orchestrated melodrama to reconcile and live the rest of their lives like true Catholics.

As with all films that are inspired with overly good intentions, Tanging Yaman is enveloped by an atmosphere that predictably directs the narrative towards its amiable conclusion. From the light effects that drown the face of Romero during her moment of self-sacrifice that has been done and redone in various films for comedic effect to the use of mass songs to provide a sense of overt religiosity in the plot, the film is too littered with significant details that nearly push the film from being merely a portrait of a family nearly torn to pieces by greed and envy into a proselytizing sermon that seeks for its audience a result that is more likely achievable in a sharing session than inside the darkened halls of a movie theater.

Thankfully, the film is balanced enough to be enjoyed even from the perspective of a viewer who has no intention of being pulled into religious didactics. It is exquisitely put together. Guillen, who has always laced her films with a certain sensuality that can only be fleshed out by a feminine mind, only subtly suggests that kind of sensuality here. In one scene, Hilda Koronel’s character talks of her dreams of travelling to the United States to her humble husband, dancing with her husband to the romantic song from the radio. The scene by itself seems very ordinary, but as framed by Guillen, and as acted by both Koronel and Delgado with enough levels of playfulness and domestic mischief, it results in something subtly sweet and tender.

Films with religious motivations are often criticized for being too disconnected with the realities of human imperfections to be of real effect. They cater mostly to those who are already religious, reconfirming for them the faith they have sworn to uphold. Fortunately, Guillen is too much a humanist to overestimate the Catholic faith. Tanging Yaman has for characters men and women who dream, sin, fight, lie, love, hate, forgive, cry, and laugh for all the correct reasons and aren’t judged negatively precisely because of these very human acts. Without the miracles and the preaching that the film relies so much on, the film is just simply a well-crafted, brilliantly-acted, and elegantly directed family drama.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)

Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000)
Thai Title: Dokfa nai meuman

In Syndromes and a Century (2006), Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul inserts a scene of a tube sucking the mist that has covered the hospital which is so abrupt and compelling that it instantly reorients your senses and prepares you for what's to come, an epilogue that transports the film entirely from the hospital and its hushed affairs to an outdoor park of a possible future time where the populace are doing aerobics and a group of Buddhist monks are playing with a toy UFO in what feels like an atmosphere of tranquil celebration. It is abrupt in a way that the film's normally measured and sedative pace and its calming and earthy aesthetics composed of captivating greens and sunlit exteriors and interiors are suddenly replaced with something distinctly mechanical and perspectively jarring with its cold, blue and alien-looking visuals and the exhausting although gripping sound that accompanies it.

Weerasethakul's debut feature Mysterious Object at Noon has a similar sequence, although not as visually and aurally apparent. An elegant string of dolly shots of empty spaces accompanies the story of a school kid about a Witch Tiger before completely concluding the longer half of the film. "At noon," the subtitle declares as it opens once again to scenes of school children playing soccer or swimming at a nearby waterhole or playing with chickens and dogs. The sequence of dolly shots has the same reorienting effect as the metal pipe scene in Syndromes and a Century. The tendency of Mysterious Object at Noon is to completely humanize the storytelling process by putting human faces and experiences behind the evolution of a tale but suddenly at that instance, Weerasethakul withdraws as if to enjoy a restful breath from his gargantuan experiment, and allows his camera to just mechanically capture images of blank and normally insignificant space, through the predictably horizontal movement of the dolly before stopping at a view from the window, sunlit and rejuvinating. That is perhaps the most amazing part of Weerasethakul's mesmerizing debut, the part wherein he branches off from his cinematic experiment to just watch and become passive observer to the lives he has documented. It reinforces the punctuated malleability of his cinema as it transforms, transports and disappears without abandoning the themes and feelings it has consciously invested in.

The film starts with the camera resting inside a vendor truck, capturing the highways, the alleyways and the buildings being passed by as a radio melodrama plays in the background. The experiment officially begins when a teary-eyed interviewee, a fish sauce vendor, tells her heartbreaking story about how she was sold by her parents to her uncle. The interviewer interrupts her and asks her to tell another story whether real or not, and the story she initiates concerns a crippled boy and his teacher named Dogfahr. At once, Weerasethakul blurs fact from fiction as he favors imagined stories to those that are based from real life experiences. Moreover, he cuts to a dramatized version of the fictional tale, often incorporating real footages to forward the more traditionally directed narrative, as a helpful accessory to his narrative experiment, supposedly to accommodate his viewers with a visual and surreptitiously mystical representation of his subjects' manufactured tales. In another of Weerasethakul's curious yet mysteriously compelling decisions, he abandons this dramatization by including in the film a portion wherein these characters convert back into their real selves, paid actors who are having their lunch break. It's a hilarious turn, one that infinitely keeps the film tiptoeing from fiction to documentary, documentary to fiction, and so on.

The central story of the crippled kid and Dogfahr mutates every time it is continued by another interviewee and by film's end, the tale of the boy and his teacher becomes so outrageously ridiculous that it becomes irrelevant. Instead, what stays with you is an intriguing glimpse at a national state of mind, a communal psychology, from what has been minutely gleaned from their connected contributions to the fiction-making. Weerasethakul selects his subjects from a wide demographic from repentant sauce vendors, drunken grandmothers, traveling performers, mute and deaf children and rowdy school kids, all of which contribute little yet gleaming aspects of their lives and ways of living as they steer the narrative to surprising directions ranging from a ball turning into a lonely alien child (from a group of young men), a romantic conquest filled with pangs of jealousy and envy (as performed by the traveling performers), a hard tale of social and economic trials (from the mute and deaf ladies), to a juvenile conclusion that involves revenge, swords, and killer tigers (from the rowdy school kids).

Aside from the vast demographic of his subjects, Weerasethakul keeps the film in a continuous state of transit. The invented story itself takes place in both rural and urban Thailand and Weerasethakul seems obliged to insert footages of transit, from the introductory travelogue in urban Thailand to the scenes that happen within a passenger train. This is a subconscious concern that is dictated by the communal mind scape of a nation that is infatuated with the concept of progress, most commonly represented by migration from the rural areas to the urbanized city of Bangkok. It is both unsurprising yet very much revealing how this conceptual need to move makes itself apparent in the fiction created by the film's subjects since it has been a consistent preoccupation, at least by the masses of the countryside, to equate progress with urbanity. Such is a preoccupation shared by Thailand with most of its Southeast Asian neighbors which is perhaps a by-product of its indelible attraction with Western ideals and so-called virtues.

Weerasethakul has crafted what arguably is the most daring first film of any recent director. In a national cinema that has long survived churning out populist melodramas, horror pictures, trite comedic and action films, and its many derivatives, Weerasethakul defiantly branches out with a film that is drastically confident and unique in form, style, and substance. Draped as a low budget documentary, shot on 16mm in black and white, before morphing into a completely different creature, a fascinating shapeshifter of a film that peeks into a population's historically-induced psychological and possible spiritual landscape through one of humanity's most inherent qualities, the ability to make and tell a story.

101 Reykjavik (2000)

101 Reykjavik (Baltasar Kormákur, 2000)

Hlynur (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) is in his late-twenties yet he hasn't worked a day in his life. He lives with his mother (Hanna María Karlsdóttir), who still purchases his underwear for him. He rationalizes his voluntary unemployment by saying that at 16, he loses child support but gains unemployment benefits which will accrue until he is old enough to collect welfare. He is not only physically near-sighted, but also adopts that with his philosophy in living life. He has no plans exceeding the weekend, which is mostly spent with friends inside a crowded bar wherein patrons exchange kisses, hugs, and bodily fluids in careless abandon.

That is Reykjavik, the capital to Europe's disattached offspring. Hlynur claims that no one wants to live in Reykjavik and its only residents are those who were born and unfortunately stuck there. The streets are empty and covered daily with inches of piled-up snow. The only thing worse than the city is the country wherein the upper middle crust fancifully brag about their sofa sets, Toyotas, and china imported from Glasgow. It's a city frozen by its fated geographic location, and the residents of the address of 101 Reykjavik are its prime specimens of victims of the city's inflicted ennui.

Hlynur's on-and-off girlfriend Hófí (Þrúður Vilhjálmsdóttir) desperately longs for him to return her consistent advances; yet as Hlynur adamantly narrates, he is sexually dysfunctional. That doesn't stop him from doing the rounds of a bumming bachelor in snowy Iceland. The film's start which, with admirable persistence, gives us a drastic overview of routinary Reykjavik living, may be a little bit too tedious --- with Hlynur's witty and sometimes politically incorrect voice-over quips to do the lone job of keeping me strangled with the city residents' curse of perpetual boredom.

When flamenco dancer Lola (Victoria Abril) suddenly enters Hlynur's life through his mother who decides to come out and express her affections for the lesbian Spaniard, things start to change. There's a metaphoric thawing of everything that has been frozen --- life, sex, plans, and maturity. The boredom of Icelandic day-to-day living has reached its end, and Hlynur is forced to re-think and re-assess the way he has been living.

101 Reykjavik is supposedly based on factual events, yet the contrivances in the film are far too fantastically convenient for cinematic exploitation, that I certainly think there's a bit of tweaking done to maximize the story. However, through the film's open-minded utilization of expanded sketches of Icelandic living, director Baltasar Kormákur was able to adequately address the concerns of the direction-less, with the added bonus of making the entire exercise farcical, funny and very entertaining.

Think about it, the plot of 101 Reykjavik could've served its purpose as a downer drama. However, in the hands of Kormákur, depression is prevented and what's left is a comical (probably a bit sitcom-ish) and light-hearted confection, which is much-suited for the tastes of its audiences in these trying times.

Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (2000)

Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-soo, 2000)
Korean Title: Oh! Soo-jung

I remember my first time, my metaphorical devirginization, into Hong Sang-soo's cinema. It was nowhere near the portrayed deflowering in this feature, wherein Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju) uncomfortably lies in bed and is assisted into the perfect position by her boyfriend Young-soo (Mun Seong-kun). She cries and pleads to her boyfriend that he be gentle; and when the first thrust is done, pain, pleasure and resolution coincides to make her face slightly smiling, slightly grimacing, and slightly tearful. It was nowhere near that dramatic when I saw my first Hong film, Woman is the Future of Man (2004). My deflowering was uneventful, droll, and quite fittingly numb; the second, third and fourth times were much more pleasurable, wherein the little details, the intelligent framings and editing, the cerebral form, the voluntary lack of music to incorporate the depth of the background noise heighten the experience to near climactic satisfaction.

Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors is Hong's third feature film. It is his only film in black and white --- he accuses color of giving "viewers more than they need." It is also very formal --- call cards of questionable intentions separate episodes; which are further separated by numbers. It's a cognitive illusion that Hong guides you in a step-by-step like manner; the film is structured like a masterplan, opening with a curious dilemma of the sexually persistent guy being stood up by his girlfriend inside a hotel room. Hong then methodically dissects the problem by narratively detailing the history of their relationship; he then traces the missteps and possible errors in mnemonic assessment or emotional understanding, before indulging us with the surprising yet inevitable outcome of devirginization. The process is dehumanizing yet quite understandable in this queer scenario.

The plot is concentrated on that single act: to have Soo-jung devirginized. It's been said that virginity is a state of mind; Soo-jung's elusive treasure is not innocence or purity (those virtues, we know, are not part of her mental picture), but physiological virginity. It's that knowledge that brought a twinkle in Young-soo's eyes and would lead him to endlessly torture himself to just witness and experience such breaking. It is also Hong's biggest joke, amidst the numerous subtle observational ticklers (Young-soo, in the beginning, examines every corner of his hotel room for hidden cameras; perpetually interrupted acts of lovemaking). Hong pushes us to take part in believing the seriousness of the act, which, if placed in a rational perspective, is a mere anatomical illusion of womanhood, and nothing more. The extent and gravity society and its participating characters, including the ever-cerebral Hong, attributes the first time provides for the hugest chuckle of them all.

And it's all the same for Hong. He accomplishes the feat with tender precision. Each frame, each sequence, each scene is composed lovingly that it's easy to get lost in the black and white timeless feel of modern Korea where street lamps and headlights glare with muted and romantic intensity. The exchanges of dialogue, the misplaced and dubious scenes that somewhat came out of nowhere (the sideplot involving Soo-jung's brother leaves a dry taste in one's cinephiliac palette), the confusing or complicated temporal or imaginary stretches in narrative structure --- all these merely point out the vaporous style of Hong's cinema, wherein characters move, talk, and feel like real men and women do, although they are carefully observed through an obtrusive filmic magnifying glass.

Beautiful, complex, arrestingly humorous, and numbing in its anti-romanticism, Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors also criticizes the Korean male as servants of a mutated mixture of their heart and gonads. They easily swoon under the temptations of the pheromones of an easy, unvirtuous yet virginal female; the swooning lets them forget about friendships, professionalism, family, and respect. In the end, like that abruptly stopped cable car Soo-jung rides to finally let go of that fool's gold she jealously guards with her hands and panties, they are left hanging with the normalcy of a relationship that is not colored by that fetishistic attraction with hymen. The somewhat sweet ending where the two lovers embrace inside a well-lit hotel room will inevitably betrayed when both are left hanging, not with tight loving hugs and kisses, but with the cries and whimpers of family life.

******
This post is my contribution to Hell on Frisco Bay's Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors The Blog-A-Thon.

The Isle (2000)

The Isle (Kim Ki-duk, 2000)
Korean Title: Seom

It was The Isle that elevated Kim Ki-duk to international acclaim. The Isle is Kim's fifth entry to a filmography that consists primarily of films which may be bluntly be considered misogynist and cruel. The Isle tops almost everything that Kim showed in previous efforts such as Bad Guy (2001) and Birdcage Inn (1998), with an almost silent-tale of a weird romantic interlude between a mute proprietress (Jung Suh) of a fishing resort and one of the guests, a criminal (Kim Yoo-suk) being hunted down by the police.

Perhaps more shocking than the entire pic are the individual images and scenes that made the film achieve its art cult status. There's an array of scenes that seems to gratuitously show cruelty to animals: a fish is caught and its fleshed made into fresh sashimi and then thrown back to the lake as it swims its bloody body to safety, several fishes are mashed and haphazardly chopped to death, a frog is caught and brutally skinned and fed to a bird, the same bird is then drowned, a dog is beaten without any reason.

However, more shocking are the individual scenes that concern the actions of the two main characters. In an effort to evade police patrolmen searching the floating houses for escaped criminals, the guest swallows four fishing hooks and hides inside a hole which serves as the house's lavatory. The same way, in an effort to call the attention of the guest who suddenly left the floating house one morning, the proprietress inserts fishing hooks inside her vagina. The scenes are shocking and instantly calls for attention and interpretation. Kim's shock cinema isn't clearly meant for gratuitous entertainment nor plot movement, but for symbolism and deep interpretation.

As cryptic as the scenes of cruelty is the ending. The floating house drifts from the lake to what seems like a vast ocean. Then cuts the concluding image of the man entering a solitary isle of lake grass and disappears therein. Kim zooms out the image, revealing the naked body of the proprietress and the same grassy isle in the place where the vagina (or more accurately, the pubic area) should be. It's an excruciatingly open-ended conclusion that is pregnant with many interpretations. Is Kim trying to wash away his misogynistic artistry by telling his audience that men are the weaker sex and that they merely hide their weakness using the female body? More far-fetched but more interesting is the idea that the final scene shows an exact opposite of a woman giving birth --- with the male entering the uterus, it's a skewed imagery of motherhood but the setting (the proprietress, naked and submerged in water) suggests the validity of the theory.

In the end, The Isle is indeed a compelling yet misguided romance. The boy and the girl spend more time away from each other, using the glare of the sunlight being thrown by a mirror to communicate. Kim's direction suggests an outward alienation. The proprietress is mostly seen from outside a glass window, or when she is interacting with other human beings, she is mostly mute, and blank faced. Even when she's paid for sex, it's automatic and slightly cruel. More interesting is the fact that when the two find themselves together, it usually erupts in violence.

It's an unsettling relationship that developed from an understanding that the two or more different than they are similar. Both of them are manipulative but they jive because there is an understanding that their relationship requires that they both use each other, for sex, for survival, for escape. Kim suggests that within that lake resort where men seek solitude or an escape from the world, the most basic and most accurate of sexual politics between the man and the woman can be derived, as emphasized by the imperfect and mutated relationship between the proprietress and the man who is hiding from his past.