Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring at ang Kuk-ok (1995)

Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring at Kuk-ok (Auraeus Solito, 1995)

English Title: The Brief Lifespan of Fire, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring and Kuk-ok

With only the entire nine minute-running time of Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring at ang Kuk-ok (The Brief Lifespan of Fire, Act 2, Scene 2: Suring and Kuk-ok), filmmaker Auraeus Solito was able to convey the components of Palaw’an culture that ensured its survival amidst the allure of modern culture. Solito, whose mother was one of the few descendants of the shaman-kings of Palawan who were sent to Manila for education following the efforts of the government to reach out to indigenous tribes in the Philippines, was gifted with stories from his wealthy heritage. The short film, which is merely an excerpt from Solito’s own play, is but one of the thousands of tales transmitted aurally from generation to generation. With the power and reach of cinema, Solito has ascertained the preservation of his treasured culture, along with it, the virtues and values his own culture holds dear.

The short film tells the myth of Suring, who casts a spell of immense beauty but is still judged by humanity. She retreats to the forests where she is far from the prying eyes of humans, and there, she befriends the Kuk-ok, a creature who can transform into any form. Solito, acknowledging the essence of the stories conveyed by his mother to be the act of telling and listening, withholds from turning the film into merely a package of visual pleasures founded on the supernatural foundations of the story. The myth is actually told by Suring, relaying with precise emotions her very own tale to the film’s audience. In a way, the audience becomes the direct heirs of the Palaw’an oral tradition, inheriting the knowledge of such tale straight from the being.

The sacred act of storytelling is preserved in the film. Solito only adds visual inflections. Using very crude stop-motion animation which turns Suring’s environment into a troupe of swirling and spinning performers that enunciate the highs and lows of the plot, Solito evokes a definite stance of enchantment in his recreation of how the legend was imparted to him. Leaves conspire to form a magnificent headdress for Suring, turning her into a terrifying presence. Tattoos are magically painted on her face, beautiful blues and yellows to represent her relationship with nature, and black and red to express the corruption dealt by humanity’s cynicism. Seashells, flowers, twigs and branches are turned into delicate brushstrokes and punctuation marks, tools in imparting the subtle complexities of the seemingly simple creation story.

Because of the dazzling colors and movements in the film, one can only surmise Solito’s wonderment when his mother tells him the story when he was a child. In a very mundane city such as Manila, these stories, especially to a boy whose imagination is not limited by the browns and greys of the metropolis, are sure to be sudden bursts of colors and textures. The film is successful in turning Solito’s very personal and private joys as a child astounded by his mother’s beautiful stories into something universal, where anyone can find himself trapped in the pleasures of being transported in a different place and era with only the power of voice and practical cinematic effects, without need of the excesses provided by computer-generated fakery.

Solito has always been a filmmaker who mines his unique circumstance in the world to etch his life as an artist. Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005), although based on a lovely screenplay written by Michiko Yamamoto, is grounded on Solito’s own childhood experiences in his Manila neighborhood. Pisay (Philippine Science, 2007) on the other hand, situates his creativity within his own academic and political coming-of-age in a peculiar science high school. Boy (2009) is a peek into his sexual awakening. Basal Banar (Sacred Ritual of Truth, 2002), a documentary that dutifully details his rediscovery of his Palaw’an roots, lays the groundwork for his narrative films on the bevy of stories he has learned through the years. Busong (Palawan Fate, 2011), the first of the several narrative films he plans, finds Solito in that situation where he returns to Palaw’an, not as a child fascinated by that missing link, or a traveller searching for that missing link, but as an advocate, tasked to perpetuate, the same way his mother and his ascendants did, their heritage through the art of storytelling.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Busong (2011)

Busong (Auraeus Solito, 2011)

English Title: Palawan Fate

Busong (Palawan Fate) is the summation of Auraeus Solito’s artistic life, so far. Its devotion to folklore and its insistence on it being told through the usage of practical effects as opposed to sleeker and more popular digital effects is owed to the dazzling stop animation that was the source of absolute wonder in Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy, Act 2 Scene 2, Suring at ang Kuk-ok (The Brief Lifespan of Fire, Act 2 Scene 2, Suring and the Kuk-ok, 1995). Its reliance on romanticizing the struggle of the marginalized and the underrepresented is owed to the famous love story of the young gay boy and a police officer in Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005) and the struggles of various genius high school students in Pisay (Philippine Science, 2007). Its homoerotic gaze is owed to his sincere re-telling of his own homosexual coming-of-age in Boy (2009).

The film’s most direct precedent however is Basal Banar (Sacred Ritual of Truth, 2002), a documentary that compiled very real stories of land-grabbing and other oppression in by the outsiders towards the native people of Palawan. Much like Basal Banar, Busong is a collection of stories that focus on the issues concerning Palawan. While it is the sense of community, of a common struggle, that connects the stories of Basal Banar together, in Busong, fate is the thread that ties the tales. Busong retells the stories of Solito’s childhood and the stories he documented while making Basal Banar as one narrative, made endlessly elaborate and poignantly poetic.

Busong tells the story Punay (Alessandra de Rossi) who is suffering from a mysterious illness that rendered her helpless and perpetually wounded. Angkarang (Rodrigo Santikan), Punay’s brother, carries her on an ornate hammock, searching the land for a cure to his sister’s suffering. Their search would lead them to meet several strangers --- the widow (Bonivie Budao), of a logger, a fisherman (Dax Alejandro), and the descendant (Clifford Banagale) of Palawan’s healers.

Spells are spoken to pacify wildlife. Butterflies fly from healed wounds. At the same place and time these magical events happen, foreign capitalists bully the island’s impoverished natives. Traditions are slowly being forgotten, salvaged primarily by sung stories recorded on tape and played in the radio. The film is not grounded on logic. It is more than anachronistic. The film exists in some abstract plane, where past, present, and future converge, tradition and technology are not at odds with each other, and myth and reality intertwine.

From the dreamy episodes set in the beaches and forests of the island to the erstwhile but gorgeous underwater sequences, Busong is undoubtedly visually sumptuous. However, like postcards sold in the gift shop of a luxurious tourist’s resort, the images that cinematographer Louie Quirino conjures are framed and lighted predictably to enunciate the natural allure of the island. Shot and projected in high definition video, Busong runs the risk of being too beautiful, too defined, and too welcoming. A film that grieves for a dying tradition and cautions of the masked repercussions of forced modernization is deserving of a tinge of grit, a hint of ugliness, and a possible serving of anger.

There is no denying that the film is a product of Solito’s love for his cinematically-neglected homeland, which he visualizes to near-perfection. During those moments and sequences where the film becomes incomprehensible story-wise, it is that love which is communicated with absolute ease. Each frame bursts with that unabashed adulation for his cultural heritage. Busong is essentially Solito’s ode to himself, his past and the many pasts of his people that contributed to who he is as an artist.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Basal Banar (2002)

Basal Banar (Auraeus Solito, 2002)

English Title: Sacred Ritual of Truth

The most unique of sunsets opens Auraeus Solito’s Basal Banar (Sacred Ritual of Truth). The distant coast and the clouds are but shadows to the mysterious red, blue, and white of the darkening sky. There can never be a more appropriate introduction. In a single visual, Solito introduces Palawan as this land that is mysterious, grandiose, and sadly, much burdened by problems any paradise may expect but should never deserve. From that otherworldly view of Palawan from the sea and through rivers and thick jungles, the film elegantly takes its viewers into the heart of the land, its people.

Solito has the advantage of capturing Palawan not from the vantage point of an absolute stranger but of a returning son. Instead of depicting Palawan’s people with the coldness and distance of an uninvolved documentarian, he positions himself as equally affected, giving the documentary a sense of reverence when depicting the more intimate details of the island’s culture and urgency when forwarding an advocacy.

Solito, schooled in Manila, prides himself of his Palaw’an heritage, a heritage that would guide him through several of his narrative features, all of which would give ample light to the unknown and marginalized, from the gay youths of Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005) and Boy (2009) to the rare geniuses of Pisay (Philippine Science, 2007). It is only with Busong (Palawan Fate, 2011) that Solito was able to give his beloved Palawan undivided attention. In the film, he drapes his adulation with high definition images of a timeless paradise that curiously mingles with the very real and the infinitely current, creating something of a beautiful anachronism that is a more than apt summary of the situation in Palawan.

Basal Banar is an essential precursor and companion piece to Busong. Where Busong is dreamlike and artistic in its imagery, Basal Banar is organic and unrehearsed. Its aesthetics is borrowed directly from nature and the people that partake of nature.

Even the music and the sound design are essential facets of what is seen. The songs sung by the natives are little stories by themselves, tackling everything from sacred rituals to mundane domestic dilemmas. There are also songs heard from the radio, transmitted straight from Malaysia, the closest neighbor to the island. The songs heard in the film are essential to the story it tells, efficiently painting the island’s demographic as not comprised solely of the natives who have resided first in the island but also the newcomers. Solito, by encompassing the entire wealth of humanity that resides in Palawan, enlarges the scope of the struggle, deepens the pains caused by modernization and the inequity of the concept of property, a concept that is incongruous to the concept of community that has kept peace in the island, a concept that has displaced an entire people from a land they and their ancestors have considered home for centuries.

The documentary climaxes with a journey by Solito and other men and women to plot the ancestral domain that is supposedly protected by law. Hundreds of kilometers and several hours of arduous travel are reduced to several key minutes through time lapse. The effect is tremendous. It is in equal portions a campaign that would supposedly end the injustices caused by government-sponsored land-grabbing and a celebration of unity among people of various ethnic groups, educational attainments, professions, and personal histories. Basal Banar, in turn, becomes that rare documentary that forgoes dwelling in the evils humanity can be capable of by concluding in a note of triumphant hope.

Boy (2009)

Boy (Auraeus Solito, 2009)

A boy (Aeious Asin) enters a gay nightclub one lazy Sunday night. The nightclub is empty except for its usual denizens: the overzealous yet mysteriously wise floor manager, his gang of overdressed transvestite performers, and the club's featured attractions, a harem of near-naked macho dancers gyrating to songs that echo everlasting love. The boy is a newbie to these affairs, unaware of the codes of the trade inside the dimly lit halls of the club, and needy of a an elementary guide into a lifestyle that he was born to live with, which the floor manager is more than willing to provide. Another love song sets the mood as an eighteen year old performer stage-named Aries (Aries Pena), clad only in suggestive underwear, dances on stage. The boy is clearly beholden. Is it love that explains why the way his gaze seems to only long for this macho dancer, to the exclusion of the club's other performers? Is it lust that rationalizes why his loving gaze results in his uncontrollable hard-on? Is there really a difference, or the two are so intertwined that it is frankly impossible to discern?

After the success of Lino Brocka's Macho Dancer (1988), a genre of the macho dancer film was born. These films were created in a society that while tolerant to the gay community, is unforgiving toward its presumably hedonistic characteristics. In fact, Brocka's Macho Dancer, Mel Chionglo's Sibak (Midnight Dancers, 1994), Burlesk King (1999), and Twilight Dancers (2006), and Joel Lamangan's Walang Kawala (No Way Out, 2008) and Heavenly Touch (2009), and all the other features that have exploited the overused narrative angle of the poor straight macho dancer exploited by their rich gay patrons, are all borne out of a heterosexual mindset. These films, while careless in its exposition of male flesh, are too careful to suggest even a slightest tinge of love among its superfluous invitations for carnal indulgence. This is perhaps to protect certain antiquated codes: that homosexual love and lovemaking is abnormal and the only way a man can engage in it is by abusing the victims of the most abnormal yet prevalent of occurrences in the Philippine setting: poverty.

Aureaus Solito's Boy is the ideal macho dancer film, one that maintains the unhindered erotic possibilities of gazing at naked bodies in the safety and privacy of a darkened cinema, without the implicated guilt of doing so and more importantly, absent the always useless and hypocritical social pedagogy that has become synonymous with the abused genre. Boy refuses to apologize for all the homoerotic images on display. It does not urge you to develop pity or even sympathy on Aries despite his unflattering profession. In one scene, as the boy feels through the poverty of Aries' meager shanty in the heart of the slums, Aries suddenly starts gyrating in front of the boy, declaring that he dances because he loves the attention he gets while performing. The social gap between the boy and Aries, while apparent, is not exploited to push an antiquated post-Brocka advocacy. Instead, the film only points out the gap to emphasize that in the affairs of the heart and other burgeoning emotions, capitalist conditions such as wealth and social status have no pertinence. There are no exploiters or victims, just lovers on the verge of a beautiful self-discovery.

Absent any forced social implication, the film focuses on exploring the gay psyche, lyrically exposing the mysteries of homosexual attraction and the path to self-discovery. Solito lays down the fundamentals of gay love, picturing it with the normalcy that is attributed to heterosexual love: the way the two are fueled by exactly the same elements, only marked by the gargantuan difference in the way society regards or tolerates gay relationships as opposed to straight ones. Solito satisfyingly keeps the narrative within the intimate circumstances of the boy's path to self-discovery, limiting the characters to those who actually matter in their lives: the boy's mother (Madeleine Nicolas), a heartfelt creation who is lovingly mum about his son's homosexuality while struggling with her husband's lack of time for them; and Aries' father (Noni Buencamino), who is similarly situated with the boy's mother in silently tolerating his son's sexual affinity (as defined by his profession) while desperately clinging to being a father figure despite unbearable financial hardships. While Solito makes use of poetry recited throughout the film, gay attraction is still defined by an indubitable normalcy in the way that it is humanized not by the intoxicating poetic recitations but by the simplicity of its unfrazzled existence in the lives of the boy and his macho dancer, whose attraction to each other is derived from interacting pheromones and sweat, the primal stuff that drives them to first lust then love.

When the boy and Aries make love in the boy's room, Solito's camera captures them through the glass, the water, and the floating silt of the aquarium that the boy collects in his room. He talks of his collection of aquariums as approximations of his fish's natural ecosystem. Cinema has been to tasked to approximate truth with filmmakers struggling to create an illusion of reality with stories that partake a semblance of living. In a way, cinema, more specifically Philippine cinema, has betrayed its homosexual patrons, portraying them as voracious predators whose concept of love is always intertwined with capitalist oppression or a sinful lifestyle that is exclusively driven by hedonistic and animalistic tendencies. As we watch the boy and Aries in passionate lovemaking through the aquarium, we come to understand what essentially gives life to homosexual love. Without any pretenses of having the two characters find that perfect love (a concept that the film consciously avoided) or pushing the boundaries of such love to touch on socio-political worries, the film arrives at the core of homosexuality: that the two boys make love simply because they are at that point of their lives, in love.

Pisay (2007)

Pisay (Auraeus Solito, 2007)
English Title: Philippine Science

Two years after the debut of Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005), director Auraeus Solito returns to the Cinemalaya Film Festival with Pisay (Philippine Science). The film's title is culled from the term of endearment of most Filipinos to the Philippine Science High School, a government-funded educational institution whose curriculum is geared into training young minds, filtered from the rest by a rigorous examination process, for careers in science.

The highly specialized academic training breeds a curious and unique culture among its students. Characterized by vicious competition, contained social lives, and harsh predestination, the Philippine Science culture feels very much like a tribal unit, separated from the suggested norm of those outside the cemented walls of the institution, but still operating a reflex against any extraneous stimuli that comes its way.

It is a culture Solito completely understands, being an alumnus of the high school. He drapes his film with astute details like the hall board that shows the regularly updated rankings of all its students, the crowded dormitories, the infallible accents of its selfless teachers, the quizzes and the examinations. Above the facile details however, is the frank sentimentality that pervades the four short dramas that constitute the film. The four years that the students slave away for a high school diploma also serves as the chapters of the film.

The freshman year fancies a budding romance between one of the high school's most gifted students and a wealthy girl. The romance turns out to be an unwanted distraction that the physics teacher (Eugene Domingo) finds ways to dissolve. The sophomore year tells the story of a homesick student who struggles through the rigors of his daily classes and nightly stays in his dorm room which he poetically refers to as his cage. The third year introduces a stratified system of dividing bright students and weak students for the maximization of government funds. Despite the system, a socially-aware girl from the weak class finds a spark of hope in a boy from the bright class. The final year is semi-autobiographical for Solito. It tells the story of a boy who is about to make the biggest decision of his life: to continue his science education or to find resolution in his heart by pursuing a college degree in the arts.

Solito's sentimentality is forgiveable; he has earned enough brownie points to indulge us with something much more personal than his previous efforts. Moreover, the film's sentimentality is evenly sprinkled into the picture to completely denounce the oft-used tropes that pervade the genre. Much more interesting is how there's an authentic feeling of growing up in the film; the initial needs of romance and stipends are quickly replaced by political awareness which inadvertently transforms to activism.

Solito again breaks the boundaries of a condensed social unit (the same way he turned the gay-friendly family of petty criminals in Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros and the forest-bound lesbian love affairs in Tuli (Circumcision, 2005) into endearing elements that showcase very universal theme). Solito understands the power of his medium; that it's not enough to dwell in the gorgeous memories of a happily spent past and to entertain, there has to be something much more pertinent to be told in his accurate dioramas of high school living. The vivid transformation of his characters is not only touching, it is also moving.

******
This film is in competition for the 3rd Cinemalaya Film Festival.

Tuli (2005)

Tuli (Auraeus Solito, 2005)
English Title: Circumcision

After the introduction of Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005) to appreciative crowds during the 1st Cinamalaya Film Festival, director Auraeus Solito would release Tuli (Circumcision), his first time working under a studio (Viva Films, under its digital filmmaking branch), a mere few months after in competition in the Cinemanila Film Festival. The film would win the top prize, but would be banned from public consumption by the mercurial local censors board. While Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros is wowing critics and audiences worldwide, Tuli is left unseen, underappreciated, and almost forgotten. Released locally on DVD (which brandishes the infamous censoring and its lesbian love angle as advertising come-on's), Tuli would later on follow the footsteps of its fabulous elder brother. The film has since been screened in Sundance, Berlin (where it won the NETPAC prize), and other festival cities.

It's completely different from Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros. It is situated in an unnamed forest village wherein a mixture of Catholicism and native mysticism is still strong. It withdraws from the urban realism of Manila slums, and instead develops a folkloric touch to the narrative. It's also less colorful, due to the fact that first, Solito chose to shoot the film in an old sepia look which further enunciates the timelessness or the removal from modernist reality, and second, there's a lot less humor --- no Maxie and friends sashaying in beauty pageant costumes.
Tuli has a marvelous opening: the village circumciser (Bembol Roco) prepares a group of kids to their circumcision rituals. He asks these kids to jump into the stream, supposedly to soften their foreskins. Solito captures these innocent kids like botticelli angels floating underwater; with special loving attention to their manhoods --- presumably the last they'll see them in that particular state. The circumciser, with the help of his daughter, one by one, circumcises each kid. The ritual is interesting: he asks for their names, makes them chew on guava leaves before hitting the foreskin with a handmade instrument, then forces them to spit the mixture of saliva and guava leaves on the fresh wounds.

The film proceeds years after, Daisy (Desiree del Valle), the circumciser's daugher, has grown up to be a beautiful lady. The same group of kids who got circumcized during the film's opening have become men; one (Luis Alandy) dutifully serenades Daisy nightly (giving the circumciser the idea of marrying the two) while another (Ping Medina) impregnates local lass Botchok (Vanna Garcia) before leaving her permanently. Nanding (Carlo Aquino), the grandson of the local shaman, is the only man in town who is uncircumcized --- causing him to be the point of jokes of his peers. In that village of traditional customs and patriarchal norms, Daisy seeks to rebel, first from her father's daily fits of drunken anger, and lastly from that village's own state of hypocritical contentedness.

The screenplay, written by Jimmy Flores (Solito' batchmate during his Mowelfund days), won first prize in a local screenwriting contest. It is considerably complex with its detailed implications of relationships within the village (the circumciser being forcedly married thus have very little or no love for his daughter; the close-knitedness links of each family). Yet, I cannot grasp any psychological maturity among the characters. Some of the characters inhabit a deluded state (for instance Nanding, whose goals in achieving his grandfather's agimat seems to be a mere afterthought rather than an actual plotpoint), with reasonings of questionable integrity (Botchok suddenly comes up with the idea of having a baby to ease Daisy's mother's sufferings). The screenplay's complexity is its downfall; it addresses too many issues that much needed humor, or even essential sprinkles of possibly humanity, are foregone.

While Flores struggles to balance his tale, Solito lends a helping hand in adding credibility to such. Solito's style inflicts a hint of mysticism to the familiar melodramatic ordeals. Instead of mere nipa huts and traditional passion plays, he adds interestingly placed mosquito nettings (to make the light pass through with a lot more sensual flair) or zealously crafted materials (observe the backgrounds, or even the costumes) that would presumably be unavailable to any typical villae. In Solito's eyes, Flores' village is no ordinary village --- it is that imaginary village of sexual aches that try to rebel in a very traditional Filipino context of what should and what should not be.

The film's plot flutters like a forgettable excuse to tell Solito's story --- of confrontation to tradition, and of the many possibilities of love within any cultural context. It is with that mindset that I see Tuli as a worthy successor to Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros' accolades. Although largely different in style, in mood, and in setting, there's that undeniable link that connects the two films together.

Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (2005)

Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, 2005)
English Title: The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros

A pink orchid is salvaged by twelve year old Maximo Oliveros (Nathal Lopez) from a dirty canal. That delicate act by Maximo opens Auraeus Solito's Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros). Maximo, lovingly referred to by his neighbors as Maxi, is gay. Despite his traditionally unaccepted gender, he is doted by his father (Soliman Cruz) and two older brothers. Maxi's family is engaged in a life of petty crime, ranging from the peddling illegal drugs to snatching cellular phones.

Despite this shady means of livelihood of the Oliveros family, the father keeps a code of discipline that each of the family members should follow: that while it is true that they are thieves, they are not murderers. The father has maintained a reputation within the community, earning the respect of the local police chief who gives him some sort of leeway to conduct his shady activities. Similar to orchid he plucks from the garbage, Maxi is the singly innocent person in that community that thrives in crime and poverty. He relishes in spending nights with his other gay friends, reenacting beauty pageants, or watching movies in the neighborhood DVD shop. One day, while walking alone at night, he is harassed by a couple of neighborhood thugs, only to be rescued by Victor Perez (JR Valentin), an idealistic cop who was just reassigned in the area.

The film is beautiful, carefully addressing the delicate coming-of-age of this atypical gay kid who is living in a world of complete disarray. There are no formal rites of passages, no overly elaborate plot that push him to grow up. Maxi's metaphoric blossoming results from what essentially is an innocent crush that curiously develops into an ambiguous attraction. Maxi's unabashed admiration for the upright policeman slowly changes Victor's officer-like and stoic predisposition, melting into a charming friendship. The friendship causes Maxi to unwittingly shove himself in a tug-of-war where his loyalty to his family is on one side and his immense admiration to the righteous cop on the other.

Solito tells the story in a tender yet assured fashion. There is no notion of exploitation despite the several instances where Maxi's admiration for the cop slowly erupt into a sort of sexual longing. Both humor and innocent romance are at work as Solito quietly puts into music Maxi's almost maternal tending to Victor's needs, especially when Victor falls victim to Maxi's family's rage, rendering the cop disabled for a few days. It's undeniably heartbreaking that despite that Maxi's homosexuality being almost a non-issue in the entire film, poverty, tradition-dictated morality, social and street justice, have impeded his search for true happiness, which at that point, cannot be achieved with relative ease. Maxi's dilemma seems easy as most gays in intolerant societies would imagine the slums area in the film as a Utopian paradise wherein homosexuality is exposed and is ultimately treasured.

Like all coming-of-age stories, Maxi's tale is eventually climaxed by a heartwrenching tragedy that forces that twelve year old to turn into an adult in a matter of days. Michiko Yamamoto's story and screenplay bursts with memorable anecdotes that proves her growth as a screenwriter since her amazing debut in Maryo J. delos Reyes' Magnifico (2003). She blends into the story a side plot of former rivals finally meeting again to rekindle and inevitably end, with fatal results. This side plot culminates in one of the film's most riveting scene, draped in a mixture of urban illumination and shadows by Nap Jamir's admirable digital cinematography, enunciated in the way the policeman and the new sergeant appear from complete darkness. The scene involves the new sergeant (Bodgie Pascua), who turns out to be Maxi's father's former bane. The father initially wanted to negotiate his son's arrest using words at first, then his gun, but upon meeting his equal, succumbs to become the victim of a long-planned vengeance.

Despite its meager roots and with a budget that would be microscopic if compared to Hollywood movies of the same theme, Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros triumphs with its built-in sincerity and its refreshing emotional depth. The film does not wallow in melodramatics, or cheat itself and turn itself into an angsty and anger-ridden gay film. Instead, the film treads the more difficult path by putting a spotlight on the heartbreaking involuntary puncturing of the innocence of the only person that is pure and beautiful in the dirty slums of that Manila neighborhood. The gay boy we see picking up the flower from the canal in the beginning is completely different from the gay boy we later see walking past a longing policeman, stops, and eventually walks forward. Upon witnessing the events that ensued in his fateful blossoming, one can't help but feel a slight remorse knowing that there's a crack in Maxi's precious innocence. That Maxi has been pushed by a need to grow up faster than his peers.