Sana Dati (2013)

Sana Dati (Jerrold Tarog, 2013)

English Title: If Only

Jerrold Tarog has been exposing the hard truths behind the Philippines’ greatest preoccupations, politics and family. Through characters whose jobs are related to cameras, Tarog destroys myths that have misled Filipinos into a distorted sense of comfort. In Confessional (2007), a documentary filmmaker accidentally stumbles upon a corrupt mayor. The mayor then confesses all his sins on video, lecturing the filmmaker of the fallacy of the Philippines so-called nationhood. In Mangatyanan (The Blood Trail, 2009), an awarded photographer struggles with the nagging influence of her father, who is also an esteemed photographer. In her attempt to take pictures of a rare ritual of a dying tribe, she learns to accept the sins her father has committed against her which effectively ripped their family apart.

Tarog caps his Camera Trilogy with Sana Dati (If Only). Love, probably the most potent diversion for Filipinos, is Tarog’s target. With an appetite for movies that extol the triumph of love and songs that glorify the sacrifices for true love, Filipinos have found the perfect escape for their everyday troubles. Amidst enduring concerns about the state of the nation and the needs of the family, love, corny as it sounds, will keep us alive. However, the love that is celebrated by Filipinos is one that has been defined by winners, by those who have found their happy endings, by those who have lived or died intoxicated by romance’s distinct pleasures. Love, in the form that most the nation appreciates it, is nothing more than a hallucinogenic drug.

The cameraman in Sana Dati is Dennis (Paulo Avelino), a novice wedding videographer serendipitously hired to cover the wedding of Andrea (Lovi Poe), the last love of his older brother Andrew (Benjamin Alves). Andrea wed Robert (TJ Trinidad), a failed politician-turned-businessman she met during an election campaign. Through Andrea, Dennis finally understands the reason behind his brother’s sudden decision to leave their family. Through Dennis, Andrea discovers another way to relive the perfect love that was abruptly terminated by fate’s cruelty.

Love has always been defined by winners. The greatest lovers are those who lived content with it or died inspired by it. Sana Dati is not a film about winners. It is not about the fictional poet, named after Spanish director Julio Medem, who wrote the most beautiful verses about the feeling of being in love prior to dying. It is not about Andrew, who like fictional Medem, died with a heart overflowing with love. The heart of Sana Dati lies with the losers, the ones we tend to forget when the most intense statements about love have already been declared. It is about Andrea, whose life goes on despite the tragedy of her one true love perishing. It is about Dennis, who is about to marry a girl who does not love him. It is about Andrew, who stirs trouble in somebody else’s romantic affairs.

Sana Dati, on its surface, is a very affecting romance. Tarog, who not only directed but also wrote, edited, and scored the film, is obviously in control. Although seemingly unburdened by any need to be relevant, Tarog nevertheless experiments with structure, not for the sake of needlessly complicating his story but to inject into the film a certain rhythm that effortlessly enunciates emotions.

Opening with an ingenious proposal by Andrew to Andrea, the film immediately cuts to the day of a wedding. Dennis is introduced, carrying into the hotel various camera equipment he barely knows how to use. He finally arrives in Andrea’s room, where he proceeds to interview her, throwing questions about her love for Robert. Andrea directly answers the questions, her eyes avoiding the camera. Dennis does the same for Robert. Robert answers the questions, with his eyes directly upon the camera. Tarog peppers Sana Dati with these details that invite interpretation.

The gestures of his characters are never empty. A cigarette butt absentmindedly thrown by Dennis from the hotel’s window lands on Robert’s collar. Andrea’s wedding vows is swept by the wind, creating a shadow for Robert to be signalled of her presence in the rooftop. Fate, the primary cause for lovers to have their happy endings in many unforgettable romances, is also an active participant here. The only difference is that in Sana Dati, fate intervenes for sobriety from what essentially is an unrealistic perspective on love.

Sana Dati ends in consolation. There are no grand tragedies, except perhaps the tragedy of having to spend a lifetime with someone you still have to learn to love. There are no dignified exclamations about the power of love, except perhaps the proclamation that moving on and settling for are also valid love stories. Tarog gently shatters the myth of love with subtle sentiment. With his completed trilogy, he sends us back to Earth, armed not with illusions and aphrodisiacs but with grounding realities, as can only be seen and recorded through the unbiased lens of a camera.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 (2011)

Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 (Richard Somes, Jerrold Tarog & Chris Martinez, 2011)

In Chris Martinez’s Rain, Rain, Go Away, the final episode of Shake, Rattle and Roll 13 which was touted by its producing studio as the last and the best of the horror franchise, water, more than the predictable ghosts that appear every now and then, is the main source of chills. Martinez, who is probably the cleverest writer and director actively working for the mainstream today, mines the collective paranoia of floods brought about by the horrific experiences during recent rain-related calamities the country barely survived from.

In the episode, reliable comedienne Eugene Domingo plays the wife of Jay Manalo’s businessman whose plastics business moved from its former flood-prone factory to a safer location. Brought about by experiences from the onslaught of typhoon Ondoy which caused her a miscarriage, among other traumas, the littlest instance of abnormal weather causes her to wilt in terror, forcing her to fear even the most unlikely and ordinary of objects.

Martinez’s episode is most likely to be the most relatable, considering that while it still deals with supernatural elements and relies heavily on the easy shocks of sudden apparitions of stock ghosts, it stems from a horror that is very close to home. Martinez has a knack for creating stories around very real experiences in the screenplays he writes like in Chito Roño’s Sukob (The Wedding Curse, 2006) where the sordid entanglements caused by marital infidelity is the actual curse. With Rain, Rain, Go Away, Martinez has crafted a predictable but effective ghost story that has greed and guilt in the midst of calamity as its heart.

Dealing also with greed, not by the upper-middle class businesspeople of Martinez’s morality tale but by people who are desperate for survival, is Richard Somes’ Tamawo. Somes’ episode, which opens the film with the type of otherworldly fantasy that usually dictates the franchise, is inspired from the Hiligaynon myth of elf-like creatures that inhabit strange places. Somes masterfully creates a rural landscape that serves the setting of both the coming of age of a young boy (a very expressive Bugoy Cariño) who struggles to win the affection of his stepfather (Zanjoe Marudo) while taking care of his blind mother (Maricar Reyes) and the horror tale of the titular creatures who would do anything to take back what the human occupants of their town have taken from them.

Irresistibly pretty at times, with sequences that are intelligently shot and directed, the episode shows a master craftsman at work. There are certain scenes, such as when the blind mother is being stalked in her house by the tamawo and Somes only reveals the monsters’ eerily white faces and menacing bodies partially, that emphasize the very raw horror of being absolutely vulnerable. And the episode is really about vulnerability, of the young boy who only wishes to belong to a family, of the mother whose lack of sight makes her more prone to danger, of the stepfather whose desire to provide for his family forces him to make questionable decisions, of the tamawo whose existence is being threatened by humanity’s interference.

Jerrold Tarog’s Parola (Lighthouse), the middle episode in this triptych, is also about vulnerability brought about by adolescence. Lucy (Kathryn Bernardo) and Shane (Louise de los Reyes) are best friends whose friendship is suddenly threatened when during their school trip to an abandoned lighthouse, two rival witches (Julia Clarete and Dimples Romana) decide to use their bodies to continue their feud. The plot, while admittedly convoluted, is thankfully just a frame for an otherwise atmospheric and moody exploration of teenage paranoia.

Tarog, through telling scenes that are remarkably observant of juvenile conflict, creates an atmosphere of subtle disturbance that is only enunciated by the premeditated acts of cruelty that the witches’ interference allowed the young girls to do. Tarog successfully turns what essentially is the normalcy of high school life into something seductively sinister, like a Freudian nightmare. Immature infatuations, corridor-set insults, chemistry experiments, menstruation, and friendship bracelets are fascinatingly turned into threatening objects and occurrences.

Sparingly paced and ominously quiet, Parola weaves the commercial intentions of the franchise’s shrewd producers with Tarog’s creative integrity and exquisite craftsmanship to create what possibly could be the entire franchise’s crowning achievement --- a truly harmonious mix of all the bad (the hackneyed storylines and stretches in logic) and all the good (the surprising invention some of the intrepid directors manage to sneak into their films) that Shake, Rattle and Roll is most known and loved for.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Senior Year (2010)

Senior Year (Jerrold Tarog, 2010)

While Confessional (2007) and Mangatyanan (The Blood Trail, 2009) are all very well made films, introducing director Jerrold Tarog as a very able and promising filmmaker, Carpool (2006), a short film that is mostly set inside a car where friends are rambling about a recent break-up, indicated Tarog’s ability to capture youth’s virtues and vices, from its loose sense of camaraderie to its abject frivolities. Senior Year, although it is the supposed sequel to Faculty (2010), a short film that featured a debate regarding social activism in schools, shares more of its moods and devices with Carpool than any of Tarog’s previous works. The film, drowning its melancholic overview of adulthood with charm and gratifying levity, is simply irresistibly delightful.

The film is very modest in scope. Mostly limiting itself with the few months in the final year in high school of several students of a private school, the film feels like it is circling on dangerously familiar grounds, risking redundancy for the sake of convenient storytelling. However, the film, without burdening itself with pretenses of pertinence or relevance, communicates the universal truth of what really happens decades after the highs of high school, when the lows of the real world has consumed the optimism that youth can only fuel for so long.

The film starts with a man, bespectacled and in an obvious state of nervousness, sitting inside his car which is parked outside a high school where a homecoming of its alumni is about to happen. Self-deprecating quips, defensive remarks, and rationalizing witticisms prevent him from stepping out of his car, registering his name, and enjoying the homecoming. The man, several years ago, is the expected valedictorian, beaming with promise, which has not gone unnoticed by his teachers, one of whom instructs him to prepare a valedictory speech that would both inspire and incite social concern among his peers.

While it is happiness, depicted through moments of lighthearted banter and expressions of youthful love, that makes reminiscence pleasurable, it is disappointment and pleasurable that marks the past with utility to endure the banality of what lies ahead. Tarog thankfully details the high school experience with equal amounts of joy and pain. All of the film’s characters are carved from stereotype. Tarog seems to acknowledge this, but instead of relying on the narrative crutches that working with a bevy of stereotypes provides, he concocts stories that are hardly complicated but fluently communicates the simple pleasures and hardships of that stage in life.

Senior Year is most enjoyable when the stories of the characters intertwine and erupt into a chorus of emotions that seem so distant now that we’ve preoccupied ourselves with more pertinent matters. Tarog, much more than delighting by reveling in the affairs of the youth, processes such delights to elicit a more spirited sense of nostalgia, one that is not only concerned with the past but as to how the past relates to the present. While the film is brimming with poignant moments, it is the unseen but certainly felt sense of regret that the alumni express, through casual jokes and remarks, while reminiscing that carries the film from being just another high school flick into a heartfelt portrait of our inevitable ordinariness in the midst of a world that is far bigger than any high school campus.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Shake Rattle and Roll 12 (2010)

Shake Rattle and Roll 12 (Zoren Legaspi, Topel Lee & Jerrold Tarog, 2010)

Something has to be said about how Regal Films treats its films. Shot digitally, the films are haphazardly transferred to film to be projected in theaters. As seen in theaters, the films look absolutely abominable, with its already muted colors bleeding into each other and digital artifacts scattered throughout the unsatisfactory images. In other words, far from the usual gloss that has been part and parcel of mainstream filmmaking, all the recent films of the historic film studio, in its attempt to churn out movies within a budget by utilizing digital filmmaking, are horrid manifestations of the ills of technology in the service of filmmaking for convenience and profit rather than artistry and integrity.

Shake Rattle and Roll 12 exemplifies this blatant bastardization of film that seemed to have ripened into practice for Regal. The fact that it is the twelfth in the series of three-part horror/horror-comedy anthologies that started in 1984 is enough proof that these films exist as cash-cows and that any artistic merit that can be derived from them are mere byproducts of their commercial goals. The series has never been a bastion of originality. However, either by sheer luck or actual inspiration, several episodes like Ishmael Bernal’s Fridyider (1984), Richard Somes’ Ang Lihim ng San Joaquin (2005), and Topel Lee’s Yaya (2006) have surpassed their borrowed beginnings and can be regarded as contemporary classics in Filipino horror filmmaking. That said, the fact that included in the series’ twelfth installment is an episode that justifies the series’ continuing existence despite the strong evidence that the series is nearing creative depletion makes the aforementioned lack of respect by Regal for its filmmakers and their films more painful.

Shake Rattle and Roll 12’s first two episodes, Mamanyika (Mama Doll), directed by Zoren Legaspi, about a murderous doll that purports to be the mother of a little kid who lost her mother, and Topel Lee’s Isla Engkanto (Enchanted Island), directed by Topel Lee, about a group of friends who become victims of engkantos in an island, are slightly entertaining but hardly memorable additions to the franchise. Jerrold Tarog’s Punerarya (Funeral Parlor), however, is something else. It is that rare deliberately graceful horror short that is made even more special by the fact that it seems to be a piece of treasure in a sea of junk.

Punerarya starts inside a funeral parlor where a young teacher (Carla Abellana, who magnificently avoids all clichés in horror film acting to deliver a refreshingly relaxed but intense performance) is introduced by the funeral parlor’s owner (Sid Lucero) to her children, her new students --- a morose girl and her friendly brother who are curiously sensitive to light. What follows is a slow yet delicious unraveling of mysteries closeted within the confines of a morbid but otherwise normal business operation.

Tarog has mastery over the time and thematic limitations of his medium. He withholds telling too much plot to the disservice of creating an atmosphere that accommodates the episode’s mix of the real and the bizarre. The episode seamlessly shifts tones and modes, incorporating Tarog’s own musical score that delights in what is overtly fanciful and subtly sinister, making most of the carefully mapped visuals.

Punerarya is a near-perfect use of the thirty-or-so minutes of its running time. Like Bernal before him who in Fridyider created a wildly horrific view of Philippine suburbia with his newly relocated family who gets terrorized by a murderous refrigerator, Tarog eschews the built-in thrills of his already strange subject matter, a family of aswangs who hide behind their business for survival, to create something more intelligent, something more horrifying. Sadly, the episode exists as a washed-out and perhaps shortened version of what it should have been, thanks solely to the indomitable power of the purse who regard what could be a future masterpiece as just another Christmastime commodity.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Mangatyanan (2009)

Mangatyanan (Jerrold Tarog, 2009)
English Title: The Blood Trail

Jerrold Tarog's Mangatyanan (The Blood Trail) tells the story of Laya (Che Ramos), the daughter of a legendary photographer. While she has grown up to be a very able photographer herself, she is consistently hounded by her father's reputation and more pertinently, memories of her father taking advantage of her while she was growing up. Thus, Laya seems emotionally impenetrable, adamantly refusing to visit her father on his deathbed, despite being indefatigably persuaded by Luzviminda (Irma Adlawan), her mother who left her when she was still very young, oblivious to the fact that her only daughter is being sexually abused by her husband at home. Instead of personally taking care of her dying father, she accepts a job to travel to Isabela province to photograph a rare ritual called mangatyanan by the Labwanans, a tribe whose numbers have been dwindling because its youth have been losing interest in its old ways.

Mangatyanan is definitely easy to admire. The cinematography is exquisite, with cinematographer Mackie Galvez giving both urban and rural landscapes sun-drenched yet melancholic hues. The musical score, composed also by Tarog who utilizes gentle melodies and rhythms to accompany the impressively evocative visuals, enunciates the emotional deadlock that consumes the film. The plot, while simple and straightforward, holds considerable depth, most especially in the way it portrays such sensitive matters like incest, rape, and forgiveness with both comfortable distance and ample sensitivity. The acting is mostly superb, especially Ramos, whose Laya is externally an emotionally guarded character with enough acuteness to make her adequately personable, and Adlawan, whose Luzviminda is all at once pathetic, because of her persistence in reaching out to her unwilling daughter, and sympathetic, because of her quiet acknowledgment of the difficulties of her daughter. Mangatyanan is undoubtedly masterfully made, with each minute of the film crafted with the meticulousness that one can normally expect from an experienced filmmaker.

It is important to note that Mangatyanan is only Tarog's sophomore feature. Tarog declares Mangatyanan as the middle part of his Camera Trilogy, the first part of which is Confessional (2007), about a wedding videographer who travels to Cebu to document the famous Sinulog Festival but instead, gets involved in the attempt of a local politician (Publio Briones, III, who plays the Labwanan chief in Mangatyanan) at redemption through his video camera. It is therefore inevitable and normal that Mangatyanan is assessed with heightened expectations from those whose interests were aroused by Confessional's endearing wit and social satire. It is also very understandable why Mangatyanan was met mostly with admiration, because replacing the playfulness that lifts Confessional from its social and political commentary is an unattractive seriousness that pervades the entirety of Mangatyanan, and instead of the organic feel of Confessional which plays like an ordinary vacation video (the one that you'd usually catch during family reunions) that went absolutely wrong, Mangatyanan indulges in a deliberately concocted storyline, directed with hardly any humor. In other words, Mangatyanan, probably because of its technical proficiency and Tarog's near-perfect direction, turns out to be an opaque film. It suffices to digest it at surface level: a well-made melodrama about a woman who needs to forgive.

However, Mangatyanan is a film that deserves more than just surface level viewing. As middle part of Tarog's Camera Trilogy, the viewer is instructed to view the film with more astute perception. Where Confessional utilizes the camera as an instrument to reveal truth, Mangatyanan uses the camera as an instrument to hide truth. The camera becomes Laya's device for pretended normalcy, as it induces other people to perceive her as her father's daughter, notwithstanding the abuses which are known only to her, because she has inherited his talent and profession, the same way a good lawyer would have children who would be lawyers, a doctor, children who would be doctors, and so on. The camera produces pictures, like the ones taken by Laya's father that are hanging on the Labwanan chief's room, that are on surface level pertaining to the mangatyanan, but upon further investigation, actually pertains to a device created by the Labwanans to attract tourists and their money. The photography project which Laya embarks on seeks to preserve the culture of a dying tribe, but beyond the seemingly lofty goal of these pictures are the unvisualized ills that infest the tribe itself, from the unwillingness of the chief's only son (Bor Ocampo) to continue the tribe's legacy to the familial troubles that result out of the tribe's impending natural death because of the allure of modernity.

Even Tarog's camera becomes a tool of falsity, as he skillfully and deviously weaves his invented tribe and its rituals and fluently spoken dialect into momentary reality. Fortunately, Tarog does not burden the film with a moral stance, portraying perpetrator and victim with as much humanity (although fractured) as possible. To force a moral stance would only muddle the lofty intent and cheat the narrative of its emotional and thematic complexity. Finally, Mangatyanan does not differentiate between truth and lies since in its cinematic language, the two are purposely indistinguishable. The film ends reasonably, like the well-crafted melodrama that it was meant to be with Laya reunited with her mother, who is forgiven without her faults absolutely forgotten. As both well-made melodrama and middle part of Tarog's self-imposed Camera Trilogy, what Mangatyanan does effectively is to modulate redemption through forgiveness (Confessional forwards redemption through confession), notwithstanding the extent of the sin, the gravity of the harm, and the length of the hurt.

Confessional (2007)

Confessional (Jerrold Tarog & Ruel Dahis Antipuesto, 2007)
(Spoiler Alert: Please be warned that the plot is discussed in detail)

"We're not a country. We are scattered tribes of insecure liars, except for me," proudly declares Lito Caliso (Publio Briones III), ex-mayor of an unnamed Mindanao town who relocates to Cebu, as he guides Ryan Pastor (David Barril), editor-turned-documentary filmmaker who is obsessed with the truth, to an undisclosed location where he will be taught how to do his craft. Lito is of course referring to the Philippines, an uneasy group of islands glued together by a flimsy sense of nationalism. Lito prides himself of seeing through the colonially-established concept (or fiction, a more-suited word) of nationhood, and declares himself the most truthful of these so-called "Filipinos." Truth, we find out by then, is a virtue that cannot be equated with goodness. The harbinger of truth in the film is an overweight, hedonistic and unflinchingly murderous politician. Through the conversations and the encounters, Ryan finds out that truth is in fact very overrated, if not a totally negligible and worthless idealism.

Confessional is Jerrold Tarog (an acclaimed music scorer, who also writes, edits, and directs) and Ruel Antipuesto's first try in directing a full feature film. Interestingly though, the film does not show any sign of first-time jitters, whether it be in the technical or the creative side (eventually winning for its makers the top prize in CinemaOne's film festival). For a film budgeted at around one million pesos (or around $23,000) sourced from CinemaOne's yearly grants to deserving independent features, it is handsomely made, surprisingly sleek and very entertaining. Considering that the story spans from Manila to Cebu City (with a pertinent sideplot set in Mindanao) and involves currently sensitive topics such as government corruption, election fraud, and almost everything that continue to ail the nation, the film does not belabor (except for the occasional breaks to social-and-political-philosophical oratorical suggestions) but instead functions sufficiently with a very informal structure of an amateur documentary, complete with pseudo-realistic sequences depicting relationship quips (girlfriend-boyfriend jealousies) and sudden breaks to computer-animated visual embellishments (like in the lopsided badminton game between Ryan and his girlfriend).

Confessional is of course a mockumentary; or more accurately, fictional character Ryan Pastor's documentary on the Sinulog Festival that fortuitously morphs into an extended video-opportunity for a politico to confess his sins to humanity before he is sent to the afterlife by opponents who want him dead. Because of its genre and structure, the film, all at the same time, mocks, criticizes, and also celebrates cinema as messenger of truth. Ryan, as editor for films, has mastered the medium as a means of twisting reality, as expressed in a way he edits a wedding video where emotions are emphasized by incorporating a scene not originally part of; it's a mere white lie in the arena of cinematographic lie-crafting (as opposed to Michael Moore and other documentary filmmaker's guiltless provocations crafted from expertly edited footages) but builds into a frustration and a blind of obsession for truth.

"Lies + Lies = Truth," the equation is in itself a glaring fallacy but the thesis statement summarizes the film's rollercoasting barrage of small and large inconsistencies, from the innocent lies made to save a volatile romantic relationship to a history built upon on piles and piles of inaccuracies (like the Sinulog, which evolved from its Christian-colonial roots into a very commercial endeavor, forever twisting the event's meaning). It is no longer surprising that when Ryan is faced with truth, his reaction reeks of uncertainty and discomfort, like truth has a reputation of a mere urban legend or an extinct species of ideal in a country that thrives and celebrates without it.

Tarog and Antipuesto's first film has an undoubtedly cynical world-view, presented so matter-of-factly that the pessimism seems to breeze through (or perhaps, the country is such in a low point of its history that the brazen suggestions of Confessional no longer feel pressing but still very relevant). However, they not only tackle the moral depletion of Philippine society through the camera of a fictional filmmaker, they also eschew the supposed journalistic role of cinema, how such is eventually inexistent in a determination of collective corruption. Recorded in front of our eyes is a man shot in the head. Death is the truest thing in the world as one is either alive or not. How should one feel about it? Shocked, scared, or alarmed? The film ends with an answer to that question and the viewer can interpret it in any way he wants. I saw the ending as Ryan's eventual cure of his unhealthy obsession with the truth, after a coarse and chance encounter that left him dismayed.

******
This review is also published in The Oblation.