Short Subjects

Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig
Directed by Jun Cabreira, Luciano Carlos, and Artemio Marquez
Written by Artemio Marquez and Jose Javier Reyes

3 Mukha ng Pag-ibig
Directed by Emmanuel H. Borlaza, Lino Brocka, and Leroy Salvador
Written by Roy C. Iglesias, Jose Javier Reyes, and Loida T. Viriña

Something positive should be said about the omnibus movie. For a medium that’s too expensive for full-length failure, and an audience that doesn’t pay any attention to screening schedules, it might be a good idea to have more film shorts compiled to run the two-hour theatrical maximum, instead of the stretched-out stories that only wind up fragmented and episodic anyway. Even the sheer statistical possibility of increasing the chances of success by adding more films to a single presentation ought to be enough encouragement for everyone involved. Why worry about perfecting a project when you can get by with a fraction or two? Moreover, given the humbler dimensions of the short format, ultimate earthshaking statements better not get in the way of the medium’s proper priority – entertainment.

11011For this reason omnibus film entries are almost always either failed ambitions or successful amusements; barely is there room for sustained inadequacies or grandiose achievements – both of which require the leisure of normal viewing time to attain. Valentine’s 1989 saw this observation being played out in typical industry overkill. Not one but two omnibus films by not one but two of our major local studios provided a veritable festival-total of six film titles for less than a third of normal screening time! Going by the admittedly friendly-critic principle that one good entry would validate an entire package, neither Regal nor Viva really lost; the issue in fact would rather revolve on who won more.

11011Regal Films’ Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig had, in order of presentation, Artemio Marquez’s “Halimuyak,” Luciano B. Carlos’s “Ginto’t Pilak, Namumulaklak,” and Jun Cabreira’s “Liwanag”; all three were written by Jose Javier Reyes, with the first co-written with the director. Viva’s 3 Mukha ng Pag-ibig had Leroy Salvador’s “I Love You Moomoo,” Lino Brocka’s “Ang Silid,” and Emmanuel H. Borlaza’s “Katumbas ng Kahapon,” all with Sharon Cuneta in common. Both productions shared Reyes, who wrote the Borlaza entry; the other Viva writers were Loida T. Viriña (Salvador’s episode) and Roy C. Iglesias (Brocka’s). With decent entertainment as minimum criterion, both films turned out an above-average (contemporary local industrial output as base) percentage division of 50-50, or three passable ones out of six. Most sensible viewers would have gone to see 3 Mukha on the basis of Lino Brocka’s credit alone; that plus Sharon Cuneta’s box-office draw would perhaps tilt the critical odds toward the Viva bet.

11011As it turned out, more viewers did patronize 3 Mukha, and rare as the occasion may seem, this was one instance wherein the better movie, even if only in slightly more favorable terms, drew in the support it deserved. Brocka’s “Ang Silid” surprisingly pales in relation to the other good episodes from either film. It’s a thriller where the moral issues are drawn as soon as all the protagonists are presented, and the plot twists that have been so injudiciously appropriated by local melodramas are sorely missed here. All “Ang Silid” ever really makes worthy of attention is the consistent competence of the performances – a rarity for even the most casual observation of Philippines movies – plus a moving self-play by what seems to be an authentic person with Down syndrome.

11011Regal’s “Ginto’t Pilak, Namumulaklak” would have been Brocka’s expected material, although the treatment is something else. And what a treatment! Luciano B. Carlos and Jose Javier Reyes take the story of a “class”-conscious slum-dweller to the outer limits of camp, then turn the whole thing inside out with a fabular happy ending. Lead performers Maricel Soriano and Joey Marquez ride along in the spirit of the undertaking, but the places they get to – a people-power uprising, a blatantly lewd courtship, the intervention of a female-but-fairy godmother, the intrigues and insecurities of the filthy rich – amount to a dizzying combination of the worst traditions of local comedy (toilet humor, cheap visual puns, improvised jokes, excessive campiness) presented in the best possible manner. In effect “Ginto’t Pilak” suggests that such elements seem contemptible mainly because of our familiarity with them. In a manner of speaking, this is what makes British film and Japanese television humor difficult for Filipinos to take: given the social stratifications and adherence to rituals that we expect of these nationals, it requires a form of logical somersault to appreciate the desperation of their amusements.

11011The best of the short-subject lot, Viva’s Borlaza entry “Katumbas ng Kahapon,” serves to confirm this notion, but from the opposite direction. “Katumbas” is a compendium of all our martyr-wife melodrama conventions, but the execution doesn’t require intellectualization to prove the point. This may have been because the time limit could not allow the overdevelopment characteristic of melodrama, and so the filmmaker finally had to rely on the strength of his performers. The final product contains an emotionally wrenching delivery by the grotesquely effective Christopher de Leon, matched highlight for highlight by Cuneta, who outdoes even herself in one of local cinema’s most satisfactory long-take endings ever. All the other potentially embarrassing moments in “Katumbas,” primarily comprising confrontation scenes between any of the leads and lesser-equipped performers, are outshone by the fireworks between Cuneta and de Leon. Much as we could conceive of more possible complexities (and therefore more pleasure) in the medium of film, such simple delights could do no harm and in fact could serve as springboard for more ambitious and longer attempts. Here’s to more shorts, in the theaters if not on the streets.

[First published May 10, 1989, in National Midweek]

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Triumph in 16mm.

Damortis
Directed and written by Briccio Santos

It was bound to happen, sooner than later. Having been an active participant, as either coordinator or juror, in recent but now-defunct short-film festivals, and at the same time a privileged observer of the mainstream movie industry through my membership in the local film critics’ circle, I could not help but fear, if only vicariously, the arrival of the day when the two forms of film practice – one essentially a sub-industry of the other – would confront each other in a non-negotiable bid for mutually exclusive supremacy. After barely three years since the sensational debut of a number of artists in super-8mm., we now have, with the simultaneous shift of some practitioners to video, a situation in which the truly outstanding items of cinema so far this year are alternative in nature, in terms of either format or venue.

11011The big-time outfits immediately prior to the February political upheaval have all managed to resume commercial activity, but owing perhaps to the trauma of the temporary decline in box-office patronage, none has been able to come up with a critically acceptable output. Sure, Regal Films released some of the major directors’ also-rans, but its last competition-caliber productions were Ishmael Bernal’s Hinugot sa Langit and Peque Gallaga’s Virgin Forest – both over a year old. Better bets would comprise Sixto Kayko’s Private Show and William Pascual’s Takaw Tukso, plus also-rans by Gallaga (Unfaithful Wife) and Mario O’Hara (Bagong Hari). Among this year’s releases in alternative formats I’d place strong commendations on one in video – Mike de Leon’s Bilanggo sa Dilim – and another in 16mm., Briccio Santos’ Damortis.

Poster layout of Briccio Santos’s 16mm. Damortis (1986).

11011But first a few words of clarification about 16mm.: this is the midway format between the affordable (and therefore, some sometimes wrongly conclude, amateurish) super-8mm. and the commercial-gauge 35mm.; somewhere in distant lands lies the promise of an authentic roadshow presentation in 70mm., but short of engaging on equal terms in a co-production venture with a foreign outfit (a dream almost impossible in itself at the moment), we may have to content ourselves with a Third-World designation in the area of film-as-culture, as in all our other concerns. Because of its halfway nature, 16mm. could sometimes obscure – but never, as the more desperate artists maintain, negate – the distinction between what is alternative and what is mainstream. For just as 16mm. may be used to reproduce super-8mm. by allowing those produced in the standard speed of 24 frames per second to be enlarged, 16mm. may also be and is in fact more commonly used to reduce commercial 35mm. movies for various purposes, usually archival preservation or television broadcasting.

11011Which simply means that, in a strictly classificatory sense, films reduced from commercial format to 16mm., even were the 35mm. prints to be permanently damaged or lost, should not be considered in the same category as those produced originally in 16mm. or blown up from super-8mm. In this regard I can so far claim to having seen the alternative 16mm. features that matter, not to mention the commercial films that exist only in the reduced format, and this is where I stake my assertion, circuitous as the route has been, that among the former kind, Damortis is the best of the lot. After having been screened for free in several venues, the film was shown to a half-full house during the Wave festival, where I first saw it, and where it turned out to be the dark horse in the race for superiority among a number of well-chosen fiction-film entries. Having begun with such a casual attempt at comparison, I might as well take pursuit in a more pretentious vein by asserting that Damortis – exceeded as it was on the technical level by its less fully developed double bill, Carlos Siguion-Reyna’s Patas Lang – would pass muster if only on the plastics level of commercial releases.

11011The opening frames provide an impression of dramatic restraint, in the Franco-German or middle (Indian) cinema manner; takes are long-drawn-out, the filmmaker reliant more on in-depth composition to make his points. Toward the end the attentive viewer will have noticed that the filmic strategy has shifted toward the employment of montage, sometimes to the extent of documentary lyricism, dangerously close to but never quite within the realm of editorial indulgence. This is because the filmmaker does not let go of his initial attack in storytelling, in which he harnesses obliquity to pull forward a linear narrative: a seminarian returns to his hometown, Damortis, upon learning of the death of his father; he discovers he has occult healing powers and sets up a clinic, from which he and his wife profit unexpectedly even as they neglect an assistant, a childhood acquaintance of theirs. When the assistant’s father dies, the faith healer teaches him some basic rituals, after which the assistant’s healing powers surpass those of his master. He succeeds in ruining the master’s practice and in ravishing the wife, but is upended in the end by the avenging woman.

11011Various themes – the ones I can remember are occultism, lust (for sex and power), exploitation, and sexual politics – crisscross the tale, but refuse to come to a head in the end. Not one is in fact satisfactorily developed beyond the presentation of conflicts, but the essence is in the telling rather than in the message: everything gets drawn into a flux that indicates the meaningless repetition of ordinary existence, which may admit the raising of issues that provoke transitions to heroism, only to thwart the necessary culminations in order to uphold the cycle of survival. A recurrent strain in Damortis is that of religious rituals, repetitive and endless. For every act that the protagonists take outside of the ordinary, a ritual plows them back into the town’s earthy existence; the climax of the story may be initially seen as a liberating exception, until we realize that the very act of the rape victim in setting fire to herself and her transgressor is in itself a consummation of the protagonists’ rebellion against the life force – a metaphysical warning that those who dare counter this course will cancel out one another to the point of extinction.

11011Some other observers may accuse me of having read too much into the film, and they could be correct as far as the weak ability of Damortis in purveying popular staples, beyond the occasional gore or epidermal exposure, is concerned. I for one do not imagine myself re-viewing Damortis with the same appreciation I held when I first saw it: my admiration for its offbeat storytelling and extra-cinematic daring will have been replaced by a more proper reaction to its visionary coldness. More to the point, I can imagine other filmmakers, if not Briccio Santos himself, undertaking less defeatist yet even more experimentally successful approaches within the format. In a sense, Damortis is the urbanite’s reaction to the rustic’s condemnation of the city; I can see the film taking the con side in a debate on the desirability of a return to rural values – the other side of which has already been articulated, perhaps unwittingly but still injuriously, by our typical slum films.

11011I may be succumbing to the lure of Damortis the town, but I don’t see any more appropriate way of ending this review by referring back to the mainstream-vs.-alternative industry conflict. Quo vadis, mainstreamers? The only possible opportunity to rally forth with a one last ticket for the awards sweepstakes would be the Christmas season’s Metro Manila Film Festival, but then again that couldn’t be considered a normal industrial period, could it? Somewhere in the back of my mind the prospect of alternative artists challenging and eventually dominating the moviemaking establishment becomes less fearful, more desirable even.

[First published October 20, 1986, in New Day]

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Movie(?) of the Year

Ang Lungsod ng Tao Ay Nasa Puso
[Originally titled Film Trilogy on the Theme of Poverty and Prostitution]
Directed and written by Nick Deocampo (a.k.a. Rosa ng Maynila)

Three films with the too-formal title Film Trilogy on the Theme of Poverty and Prostitution comprise nearly three hours’ worth of viewing time in super-8mm. format. The prospect of watching the individual entries in succession – “Oliver” at 45 minutes, “Mga Anak ng Lansangan” at 50, and “Revolutions Happen Like Refrains in a Song” at 75 – might be akin to sitting through a long-winded discourse by a brilliant speaker: his genius will endure, your patience may not. I had the understatedly more relaxed option of watching the short-film entries as they came along, in two-year intervals over a period of five years, plus the benefit of some intense exchanges along the way with the trilogy’s filmmaker, Nick Deocampo. “Oliver,” the first installment, introduced itself as the first in a series of works on what was then ironically being heralded as the City of Man. “Mga Anak ng Lansangan” provided a more technically assured but dramatically deficient presentation on the eve of the February 1986 upheaval, while “Revolutions Happen Like Refrains in a Song,” which came out this year, acknowledged the primacy of far-reaching sociopolitical concerns over technical finesse and went one step further than either of its predecessors in allowing its creator to finally take center stage and admit his role and motives in the making of the entire work thus far.

11011Local reception to these titles has tended to match their seeming unpredictability of direction. Acclaim came fairly and easily for “Oliver,” too easily for “Mga Anak,” and unfairly hard for “Revolutions.” As these stand, “Oliver” is the most perfectly wrought among the three, its focus having been provided by its sensational character-subject Reynaldo Villarama, who uses the alias in the title for his graphic gay live shows. Successive re-viewings confirm the classicality of its contributions to short filmmaking in the Philippines, or even in avant-garde independent-cinema circles elsewhere, which is generally characterized by an obsession with plastic experimentation at the expense of more permanent values.

11011In “Oliver” the choice of subject complements the medium’s propensity for surface exploitations: Villarama’s story may be sordid even for those familiar to the point of cynicism with the goings-on in the local gay underworld, but the guy himself lives in and loves the limelight. He comes alive with the essentially exploitative nature of documentary filmmaking, in effect ensuring the audience that not only does he not mind baring his soul (or close to what remains of it), he’d even be grateful for any sort of reaction, be it positive or negative, to his desperate attempts at exhibitionism. Deocampo, then going by the nom de camera Rosa ng Maynila, thus discovered and preserved for cultural posterity the proper sort of documentary subject in Villarama, a real-life counterpart of the effective screen actor, who after all is just another performer craving for public adulation.

Reynaldo Villarama (b. 1959), more famously known as Oliver, in Nick Deocampo’s super-8mm. Ang Lungsod ng Tao Ay Nasa Puso (1983-88).

11011In this regard “Mga Anak ng Lansangan” squanders this precious insight into documentary film craft. Here Deocampo surrenders, as it were, to the preoccupation with the so-called fine visual principles typical of alternative and academic film circles: standard light sources, carefully calculated lens openings, well-planned camera placements and movements, matched cuts, and all the other excess baggage assumed by short-filmmakers who can’t seem to discard the siren call of mainstream commercial practice despite their routine condemnation of the system. It isn’t so much Deocampo’s inadequacies with this sort of cock-eyed approach to the woefully inappropriate super-8mm. format that undoes him as much as the demands of his subject themselves. In “Mga Anak” he has trained his camera on child prostitutes, and they’re either as naïve or as reluctant about the opportunity of exposure in film as Villarama was neither. Interviews with adults who concern themselves with the kids’ plight only serve to heighten this awareness of how unforgiving the film medium can be, how unsparingly it exposes the limits of its performers’ understanding of the roles that they set out for themselves to play.

11011“Revolutions Happen Like Refrains in a Song” could therefore only be the inevitable result, although I wonder if Deocampo’s sense of hindsight resembles my own. A sprawling, exasperating, but nevertheless impressive mélange of personal memorabilia, outtakes from the earlier two films, and documentations of historical events in the interregnum, the film comes close to redefining documentary presentation as observed by its predecessors, and in fact already contains the potential for doing so. Only those who’ve done some careful thinking and tinkering with super-8mm. will appreciate this sort of achievement – which I suspect is the reason why local short-film festival judges, affiliated as they tend to be with the mainstream, accorded “Mga Anak” a recognition at par with that of “Oliver,” but gave nothing whatsoever to “Revolutions.” How could one used to commercial gauges even begin to take seriously any film print that deliberately contains mismatched overlit or underlit shots, defective celluloid surfaces, jerky home-movie camerawork, or downright bad takes strung together over the filmmaker’s first-person narration of how this particular work came about?

11011Of course this entire question has been answered in part by the proponents of personal cinema – and I’d emphasize “in part” because the personal-cinema movement has rarely been as intimate as “Revolutions” purports to be. To be sure, and as Deocampo himself has admitted, the movie tends to repeat itself in some parts: overall, however, the daring and the honesty coupled with the surface crudeness begin to assume a measure of charm, if not admirability. Moments like Villarama fumbling over his infamous Spiderman act (which served as “Oliver’s” finale) or gay live-sex performers arousing each other in near-absurd desperation (absent in the sanitized presentations of “Mga Anak”) provide enough theatrical distance to be almost funny in themselves, while the shots of the February 1986 revolution-in-progress instill a sense of relief, however false or fleeting, through the hope that the trilogy’s theme of poverty and prostitution may get caught up the sweep of farther-reaching social changes.

11011If we take “Oliver” as is, “Mga Anak” as a necessary step in the development of its maker’s understanding of his medium’s particular format, and “Revolutions” as a work-in-progress nearing completion, then Nick Deocampo’s trilogy is the fulfillment of a long-standing threat by alternative filmmakers to finally overrun the mainstream. What an honor that a foreign festival should give its highest prize to this work, and what a shame that we couldn’t have any similar means of formally providing the recognition it deserves.

[First published January 27, 1988, in National Midweek]

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Perils of Politics

A Dangerous Life
Directed by Robert Markowitz
Written by David Williamson

Finally, an audiovisual event that will surely figure prominently in everyone’s comprehensive yearend listings. Ironically for film observers, A Dangerous Life isn’t even, strictly speaking, a movie: it’s a multi-installment and big-budget video production. And ironically for nationalists, A Dangerous Life may not even be Filipino, if we consider sources of either capital or creative control. Whatever its merits and demerits, A Dangerous Life will remain the year’s most discussed, er, film, and people who have something to say or write about it would have done so by now. There won’t be a dearth of issues to raise: its perspective may be non-American but nevertheless remains Western (producers and creators are Australian); it has apparently served to further the claim to legitimacy of the current regime, not to mention the station that aired it nonstop save for the usual breaks; most important, it deals with the most significant event of our generation, the 1986 February revolution that resulted in the ouster of Ferdinand E. Marcos and the installation of Corazon C. Aquino in his stead.

Mendiola protest performance, a sampling of the anti-dictatorship uprising covered by Robert Markowitz’s TV movie A Dangerous Life (1988).

11011How to place this kind of work in the context of the local mainstream? To begin with, A Dangerous Life is not the first attempt at reconstructing the upheaval that began with the assassination of Benigno S. Aquino and ended with the people-power phenomenon. A number of documentaries by both local and foreign filmmakers are relatively easy to access, and the events themselves occasionally figure, if only in passing, in full-length feature productions. Nothing of feature-length scale has ever yet been accomplished, however, obviously owing to the sheer logistical and budgetary resources that such an undertaking will require. This makes of A Dangerous Life something like an ultimate, and a less-than-satisfactory one at that. Various quarters have questioned the disparities between perceived reality and the filmic version of it, even in details as dismissible as prosthetics. Of course the reconstruction of anything with the scope and magnitude attempted by A Dangerous Life is a heroic thing in itself, but I think its basic problem lies in the foundation on which it built the story of a nation and its people.

11011Take out the documentary footage and re-stagings of what supposedly transpired in actuality, and what’s left is a love story that assumes a triangular dimension at a certain point, but never becomes momentous or profound enough to require a corresponding historical background. Sure, you could voice exactly the same criticism about Gone with the Wind, and you’d be correct, except that GWTW had all the advantages of superior film technology and a desperate romantic conviction that surely derived from its makers’ confidence in themselves and in their ownership of the source material. In the case of A Dangerous Life, an unnecessary sort of tension results from the alternations between the love angle(s) and historically significant developments. It seems the filmmakers were reluctant to allow the concerns of the central characters, who were both foreign and fictional, from overwhelming the more impressive business of restoring democracy in a beleaguered Third-World country.

11011More serious is the oversight that resulted from such excessive carefulness. Philippine history suddenly became a morality play, with the forces of good clearly aligned against those of evil. Anyone who went through that period with any amount of intensity, myself included, will be able to contend that at most points it did feel that way, at least while it lasted. The trouble is that, even from the short perspective of the present, the entire situation never could have been as simple as it seemed then. It doesn’t help to assert, as the movie does, that Aquino was driven to a certain extent by vindictiveness, or that the Marcoses did have some amount of affection for each other after all. I suppose the major problem confronting a production like A Dangerous Life is that the real-life events it happens to be dealing with are not yet over; history too can be capable of the reversals and ambiguities that we normally associate with good drama. Yet if things remain as predictable as the movie suggests, what’s to keep creators from making the most of license? A Dangerous Life may have begun with this ideal in mind, when it sought to intersperse fiction with fact; but early on it decided to steer clear of possible controversies in historical interpretation, rather than pursue the more liberating option of turning fact inside out to make it more truthful, if not more real.

11011Thus it consigned itself to suffer the discontent of those who wanted more credibility in its depiction of historical reality on the one hand, and those who expected a more dramatically valid fictional framework on the other. In short, what we’ve got here is the classic case of someone setting out to please everybody and winding up pleasing no one, except maybe … himself? In the final analysis, such an account as A Dangerous Life provides will still have a place in our cultural setup, and not just from the politicized perspective either. Before our own creative artists make their own “ultimate” statements about the 1986 “revolution” (quotes are optional and may be removed by those who disagree), they’ll first have to see how far and how deeply the subject can sustain itself, given a particular medium as sample. And even before that, they’ll need to see if it can be done with any measure of success. A Dangerous Life, by the very act of letting down great expectations, will prove indispensable in raising these challenges.

[Submitted in November 1988 to National Midweek; unpublished]

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High-Flying

Imelda: Paru-Parung Bakal
Directed by Chito Roño
Written by Cesar Buendia

The demise of the hard-hitting television show Isip Pinoy could serve as marker for the waning of the public’s interest in politics; the more cynical among us would even go as far as saying that the cause was actually politicians, rather than politics itself. The distinction may prove to be more than semantic, once the new version of Isip Pinoy, now called Isyung Pinoy, gets under way. The pilot episode, slated to run for two hours (commercials included), features the former First Lady and makes bold claims, in both treatment and content, that the former series, for all its awards and distinctions, barely attempted before.

11011“Imelda: Paru-Parung Bakal” actually succeeds in some form of political sacrilege: it turns every Filipino’s favorite villainess into a highly sympathetic subject of study. In doing so it upholds the literary potential of video – the medium’s most vital aspect, so often neglected in the drive to exploit its journalistic capabilities. This reluctance to explore video’s dramatic potential had been primarily due to the inevitable comparisons with the more technologically developed medium of film on the one hand, and with the more aesthetically significant medium of theater on the other. Hence the most that video had done for itself in common practice so far was to approximate the storytelling function of film, reckoning with its technical limitations by appropriating the dependency on dialogue of theater.

11011Add to this program for survival the mostly financial advantages of issuing a product in installments, and what we get is A Dangerous Life – the surface characteristics of the epic minus the requisites of dramatic innovation that made classic examples more than just tolerable. The only other possible recourse, which to my mind is truer to the nature of video, is to regard it as lying not between film and theater, but rather on the other extreme of theater, with film in between. In practice all this simply means is that possibilities for dramatic presentation should be worked out according to the function that we have come to take for granted in video: that of audiovisual journalism or, in more faithful medium-based jargon, documentation.

11011By this account it should come as no surprise to discover that what A Dangerous Life barely attains in a more direct narrative manner, Isyung Pinoy’s “Imelda” manages in less than a fourth of the longer work’s total running time. The procedure can hardly be called chronological, much less filmic. Perhaps the seemingly extraneous formulations being imposed on film by more recent theorists will apply with unqualified success in the case of video. For where discourses on the relationship of the medium with the circumstances of its production become only so much ado about nothing if it eventually becomes capable of self-sustainment (as is the case with film), in video, or at least in “Imelda,” where the entire undertaking depends on the availability of effective historical footage, the circumstances of production are all but dispensable in arriving at a proper appreciation of the work.

11011In this instance we have a near-perfect choice of subject matter. No other prominent contemporary Filipino citizen, not even Imelda Marcos’s husband or his political successor, has such a confluence of contradictions operating on several levels of modern existence. “Imelda” reveals a woman ignorant of history but clever in her manipulation of it, allowing herself to be used by her master politician of a husband so as to be able to use him in return, sincere in her employment of pretense to surmount her early deprivations, committed to the end to a cause – her own, essentially – that she could never really attain on her own. One of the final images in “Imelda” is her interview on her arraignment in New York. It is something that should have been impressed on us, her former subjects, as closely as possible to its real-time delivery, rather than having been qualified by the news accounts that preceded (and thereby affected our perception of) it. “Imelda” restores the footage to a disturbing, heartbreaking, more, well, Filipino context, in which by virtue of the foregoing accumulation of the woman’s characteristics, what we find is our familiar conception of the earth mother: resilient and dangerously touching.

11011Some of the other aspects of the episode, notably the insinuation that Imelda Marcos lives on as a political syndrome among us, have apparently been intended for the former audiences of Isip Pinoy. The creation of “Imelda’s” central character is the more lasting achievement though, and the question of how the real thing corresponds with her video counterpart should be accorded a status at the most secondary to the issue of whether this sort of exercise should be encouraged in the first place. I doubt if the old (pre-1986 revolution) Imelda would agree with what she would find therein, and that in itself should constitute sufficient commendation for the product, if not the lady.

[First published March 15, 1989, in National Midweek]

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An Update

As recently as less than half a century ago, who would have imagined any Filipino’s gratitude for our proximity to the Land of the Rising Sun? Of course, super-8mm. wasn’t around then, but if it weren’t for Tokyo up north and the United States way across the Pacific, the format wouldn’t be around at all anymore. The first and most successful imperialistically introduced medium of the current century will surely be enjoying a renewed proliferation of 16mm., but not in the inexpensive black-and-white that characterized early television practice; formal film training will be making its mark on industrial practice sooner or later, and those in the know will agree with the wisdom of dabbling in a relatively cheap format that still approximates commercial-gauge procedures. No one seems to be interested at the moment in the 16mm.-to-35mm. blowup strategy, as well as the omnibus presentation, but these may accompany the onslaught of the local version of Hollywood Brats – or will it be the French New Wave? As for video, more and more people will be able to afford and appreciate equipment in this format (or medium – the distinction’s hazy here), which means, if we’re lucky, we could wind up having a nationwide filmmaking explosion. Or, at the very least, an audience who appreciates the process of film inside and out. Laser technology, which is currently proving indispensable to film preservation even in local cases, may yet provide radical options for filmmaking in video, though further miniaturization might first have to be realized.

[First published October 24, 1990, in National Midweek]

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Where Has All the Horror Gone?

Those who condemn the vengeful comeback of fantasy films might in all hastiness overlook the merits of a related but surprisingly rarer genre, the horror movie. Now of course the average Filipino film release, especially in these times, can be a frightening experience in itself, but redundancy would probably be an incidental reason for the scarcity of genuine horror items in contemporary local cinema. The more logical route begins with the sorry state that obtains for films that are serious per se; if realistic or at least naturalistic works that do not contain any potential for erotica, violence, or humor find difficulty in acquiring acceptance among the movie-going masses, what more the sober treatment of supernatural issues? Presuming that the typical film viewer would first have to be either convinced or coerced into watching an artistic presentation, she would then have to be further academically prepared to be able to understand the significance of social, physical, or psychological ramifications within a dramatic framework. To demand that she carry this understanding into the realm of the abstract, which is what the best among horror movies enable the competent viewer to do, would be asking for too much as it already is.

11011Hence lovers of the horrific, if ever they do exist among our film practitioners, may have just given up the ghost in the meantime that proponents of realism attempted to resurrect the local audience’s appreciation of or at least tolerance for “seriousness.” When a tendency toward naturalism surfaced, notably because of the art-for-art’s sake orientation of practitioners who emerged during the eighties, supernaturalism in cinema eventually took hold – but only according to the strict commercialist terms of fantasy. Nevertheless there have been noteworthy samples of horror films that are still available, and therefore viewable, on video if not in the original celluloid. Because of the absence of centralized institutional film preservation, most of the gory – er, glory-day productions during the sixties will just have to be run through. Titles like Gabi ng Lagim and Maruja indicate how fertile that period has been for the horror genre, and in fact these two specific works are still subjects for remakes and sequels today.

11011But as in the experience of other Westernized cultures, the decline in horror movies was brought about by a laxity in film censorship – in our case, the late chairman Guillermo de Vega’s experiment in libertarian permissiveness during the early seventies that eventually became known as the bomba era. The connection between sex and horror is more than just skin-deep. With the British Hammer studio case as model, horror films used to provide opportunities to present carnal elements that would normally be disallowed by the establishment (and therefore powerful but not too imaginative) censor: the bite may be taken to mean the act of love, the initiation into a supernatural state may signify the acknowledgment of desire, and death may inarguably be seen as the ultimate orgasm, with the usually long and pointed killing instrument a phallic symbol – one need not be aFreud or too Jung to realize this.

11011With the emancipation of sex as a valid concern in cinema, horror, the fear of what may be real but unknown, has had to own up to its own given terms. The advantage here is that the genre could now discourse with the more abstractified perspective pointed out earlier, but the disadvantage, also already pointed out, is that the loss of innocence would also entail a fall from grace: no longer could the genre count on the commercial attraction of eroticism, since the audience would expect and demand that the latter be treated similarly on its own terms this time.

11011This mixed blessing has concrete evidence within the Filipino context to support it. Before the bomba era only the late Gerardo de Leon, among the serious directors, made a noteworthy (perhaps the worthiest for the period) contribution to horror filmmaking with the vampire movie Ibulong Mo sa Hangin, although another late master, Manuel Conde, had earlier succeeded with out-and-out and even way-out (of local folklore) fantasy treats.

11011During the seventies, horror films were fewer and farther between – some years in fact had no horror entries whatsoever – but what occasionally turned up was more often than not a commendable attempt. Celso Ad. Castillo, who in terms of visual proficiency was being touted as heir apparent to de Leon, has been the most prolific among our living major movie directors, with ironically a mere three titles – Kung Bakit Dugo ang Kulay ng Gabi, Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara, and Maligno – all done during the middle part of the seventies. Lino Brocka did a Maruja film during the same period, but it was debuting directors who since then made must-see Pinoy horror items: Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara with Magandang Gabi sa Inyong Lahat, Mike de Leon with Itim, Mario O’Hara with Mortal, Butch Perez with Haplos, Briccio Santos (in his first 16mm. work) with Damortis.

11011To this list we could add Tata Esteban’s experimental Alapaap, plus specific portions of Peque Gallaga’s Oro, Plata, Mata, but more important would be the observation of the phenomenon of several of the post-bomba era’s major directors introducing themselves to the public in such a manner. Several explanations may be ventured, but all of them more likely lead to and from one another, in the process serving as a collective of causes. The audience may have been regarded as more receptive to works on the supernatural by first-timers rather than by veterans, since the former wouldn’t have any pretensions or self-consciousness brought about by success within the industry. The producers, risking as they do their investment in newcomers, figure that they would do well to avoid the genres dominated by established personages in the industry, and go for a type that used to enjoy a substantial following, in the hope that the awareness of pleasurable horror viewing had merely been dormant in the public’s consciousness. The directors would then appreciate this compromise between the commercial imperative of fantasy and their cherished desire to be serious, and so regard projects as artistic rather than commercial challenges.

11011Final proof that horror filmmaking is such a basic and appealing form of exercise in the medium lies in the fact that the future’s promising directors, who unlike their forerunners do not need to conduct their practice training in the expensive commercial format, are virtually turning alternative film (super-8mm., 16mm., and video) into frontiers for the exploration of the unknown. Would this mean they’d stand more than the ghost of a chance come their day of reckoning with the gods of big-time production? Vive l’esprit de corps!

[First published November 3, 1986, in New Day]

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Causes for Cerebration

Tiyanak
Directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes
Written by Don Escudero, Peque Gallaga, and Lore Reyes

Babaing Hampaslupa
Directed by Mel Chionglo
Written by Ricardo Lee

Two recent releases by the country’s most successful production outfit way before and ever since the 1986 revolution indicate the strategy by which our major filmmakers aim to recover their pre-revolution notions of dignity and self-respect. Whether or not these individuals are aware of what they’re doing, the formula seems expedient enough to be applied to the larger problems posed by video entertainment as an alternative to movie-going. The prevailing line of action is also sensible enough to be implemented with a minimum of logistical complications: just get the crowds back into the theaters first, then do what you want while giving them what they like. As a corollary, if they don’t like what you’re doing, either forget it or go ahead anyway, but at your own risk.

11011This might seem like something so logical that it must have been done before already, but as far as I can recall or surmise (into my own and the industry’s prehistory), our audiences have been so generally congenial toward the medium of movies that they always took to it even during periods of crises as serious as, for one, the imposition of martial rule during the early seventies. The only other period when Filipinos may have avoided the movie-houses en masse would be during the Japanese occupation; but then the occupation forces didn’t seem to worry too much about this decline in indulgence in a national pastime (they never took steps toward a full-scale revivification of the local industry) and besides, the people’s rejection of anything officially endorsed by the Japanese extended to all other forms of media as well.

11011If the invaders knew any better they would have been worried sick: for a fiesta-loving populace to forgo its usual entertainment could presage a darkening of the national temper; in the face of the expulsion of the Americans and their influence, this could only, and did, mean war. In contrast, the panic occasioned among film producers during the almost year-long dead stretch right after February 1986 was just a case of overreaction, fueled by good old-fashioned business greed. True, there was a decline in movie attendance worldwide, but this was because of a far less political upheaval, the video revolution. Locally the reasons could not be more threatening than a post-crisis sobering up, a taking stock of the complex moral issues involved in the ouster of a strongman who represented a generation of accepted values and attitudes.

11011The hindsight afforded by close to three years of observation allows me the audacity of remarking that the public’s movie-going habit would have resumed once its euphoria had subsided, but the futility of this sort of speculation is obvious. Meanwhile we’ve had a quite maddening succession of reoriented outputs, calculated to lure back moviegoers in numbers comfortable enough to warrant the maintenance of what remains a major national industry. With Tiyanak and Babaing Hampaslupa, the items attempt to go a step beyond the ordinary, but without outwardly distinguishing themselves. Where it seems to matter (the box office, of course), the camouflage has been successful. Moviegoers attended as usual, were treated to more than the average rehash of commercial viabilities, but without losing their minimum share of generic entertainment.

Janice de Belen, as an infertile mother, with her demon foundling in Peque Gallaga & Lore Reyes’s Tiyanak (1988).

11011On a more articulatory level, Tiyanak and Hampaslupa work by taking their makers’ cerebrations into current standardized formats, instead of forcing the formats to adapt to content (as would have been the ante-revolutionary case), or merely doing an excellent job with the givens (post-revolutionary, until about now). It should also be pointed out that, perhaps due to the halfway nature of such products, these kinds of films were commercially far riskier to make, before 1986, than out-and-out successful formula or artistic works. Would it be timely now to rejoice in the bridging of this crucial gap between film commerce and, uhm, art? I’d nurture my misgivings first, minor as they may appear within this sociopolitical context. Tiyanak serves its ecological punch early on, then holds it for some impressive special effects display and not-so-impressive hysterics, until it could let go with a closing follow-up. Hampaslupa does better in infusing its class concerns all the way to the lachrymal end, but at the expense of simplifying the other class extreme.

11011The filmmakers of both titles have been active in the exploration of the art-and-commerce options I outlined earlier, and whichever between their two approaches is more effective depends on your preference in entertainment. Tiyanak would appeal to those who like their serious and fancy stances clearly delineated from each other, while Hampaslupa is made for those who go for fusion. Hollywoodish vs. Europeanesque would be the pedantries one could put to use in pointing out the differences between the two. Not bad for items that could make you scream or cry as you realize these more discussible points, and not so bad for an industry that used to churn out highly innovative films with admirable regularity a couple of years back. This ought to be one way for us not to take such strokes of luck and talent for granted, from hereon.

[First published December 21, 1988, in National Midweek]

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Down but Not Out

Nektar
Directed by Francis Posadas
Written by Eric and Susan Kelly Posadas

Tubusin Mo ng Dugo
Directed by Pepe Marcos
Written by Jose Carreon

This year’s first local entries classifiable under the troublesome categories of bold and action indicate some bright spots ahead for post-revolution Philippine cinema. To review recent cultural developments, bold and action films used to be the closest that our serious filmmakers utilized in working out compromises with their financiers; comedy and melodrama were simply considered incapable of presenting “messages,” and therefore generally unworthy of aesthetic attention. I recall how, in a period of only occasional filmic achievement (which was most of the time, then as now), I would go to a name director’s bold or action entry in the hope of encountering sensible discourse, but would disabuse myself of such a notion when it came to comedies and melodramas.

11011Then came 1986, and notwithstanding pessimists’ claims, things did change, even in the local film scene. Comedy and melodrama took the forefront in both box-office and artistic terms, while bold films permutated into the hard-core quickies reminiscent of pre-martial law times, and action movies ventured in the opposite direction – real-life stories done with the ultimate in production costs. Nektar and Tubusin Mo ng Dugo, bold and action films respectively, seem to point toward a return to the median, as it were, for these temporarily lost film types. I’ll readily own that I might be too optimistic about the first title, but the second can be taken as a case for generic survival: instead of breaking as far away as possible from the films that seem to be doing well, why not figure out how best to adopt the factors that excite the mass viewership about them?

11011Hence, the spectacle of witnessing some form of industrial osmosis, with a bold film attempting to take on the plot complications and technical competence of melodrama, and an action film spiced (spiked, even) with comic routines. I’d like to be kind enough, at least in print, in pointing out that, the way most current bold films go, Nektar could have been worse. It’s bad enough as it is, but you could sense an aspiration toward, well, making sense. The story’s our well-worn odyssey of the Virginal Barrio Lass getting corrupted by the Big City, with the melodramatic, or at least komiks-influenced, twist of Morality Triumphing in the End. Before you start groaning in your creaky theater seats, let me remind you that this material has proved remarkably resilient through the decades, with each movie generation having its own claim to posterity in a least one such topical example: Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag honors the moviemakers of the seventies in this way, although of course Nektar could only hope to distinguish its own specific period in time, and no more.

11011There’s an even more painful aspect to the movie, and that’s the care, believe it or not, with which it was executed. Nektar must be the most carefully made bold film since Takaw Tukso two years ago – but one must be careful to take this in the context of the common run of such films, rather than the quality of the specific titles being compared. The difference, and this is where Nektar fails, is that its makers have just not been up to the challenge, meaning the effort shows in the final product. It becomes almost embarrassing to see a movie so sincere yet nevertheless substandard in all respects. A few portions do stand as set pieces, specifically the heroine wandering in the Luneta by night, and then much later discovering how her supposed savior betrayed her.

11011Of course this only makes the rest of the movie almost unbearable in its pursuit of a reasonable but overworked story framework. I guess in the final analysis, a little figuring out about the specific nature of filmwork could have helped: Maynila, although it resembles Nektar on paper, salvaged itself by opting for a semi-documentary approach; in the other direction, melodrama films contain the potential for degenerating into camp, which though not as promising at least provides a provocative element of fun. How sad to fall in between, losing the interest of both serious observers and escapists – unless a hard-core version exists somewhere; but then that takes the fun out of knowing you did a good movie and showing it to friends and potential acquaintances. In which case how sad again, etc.

11011After Nektar, Tubusin Mo ng Dugo emerges as a minor cause for celebration. Pepe Marcos, a former editor (who also doubles for the same function in his films) who turned director four years ago, first came up with a passable debut, also a Rudy Fernandez starrer, in Sumuko Ka … Ronquillo! Neither practitioner has come up with totally execrable work since, but in Tubusin I’m happy to report a rarity of sorts – their best individual work so far. The qualifications should not be far behind though. Tubusin’s still a customary product, made for no greater shakes than the usual action entertainment contained in its main plotline. Normally I’d say it suffers from an imbalance in story development, but in fact this is where its strong point emerges. Instead of the usual establishment of good guys being lined up against bad guys, Tubusin takes an expository detour and provides a picaresque description of the lead character’s misadventures within a shrewdly observed social milieu.

11011Yessir, your average martyr of a mother happens to be a nag, your friendly neighborhood police chief resorts to third-degree, and your noble working-class savage gambles and drinks when he can, and even sets himself up for an occasional hustle! I was bewildered, to put it mildly, and then I started to wonder how long such a good thing could last. My worries were answered as soon as they occurred to me. Turned out that the mother feared for her son’s future, ditto the police chief, and though the hero-son gets to sire a family of his own, his involvement – unwilling, of course – in a big-time crime syndicate leaves him without much choice, were it not for the long, long arm of the law, yawn, yawn. I should have suspected something amiss after the hero rapes his best friend, a butch lesbian, and she forthwith disappears; what do you know, she reemerges much later, converted by her heterosexual encounter and therefore happily married to a poor unsuspecting atmosphere person.

11011Meanwhile a few instances of the early part’s humor, coupled with some really fierce action sequences, manage to pull the reluctant viewer through; the mass audience will of course be more forgiving, so I guess I ought to be honest about my admiration of how perceptive the filmmakers of Tubusin have been in their appropriation of current commercial preferences in a film genre that would otherwise have been as good as obsolete. In the end, Tubusin will be remembered mainly for just that – revitalizing a film type to conform to the mood of the times. Like Nektar, it will have acquired the box-office profits it intended to make in the first place, although with much less outrage about competence and entertainment appeal. We should all be so glad Armageddon might somehow take longer than tomorrow.

[First published February 17, 1988, in National Midweek]

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Moments of Truth

Anak ng Cabron
Directed by Wilfredo Milan
Written by Conrad Galang

Afuang: Bounty Hunter
Directed by Mike Relon Makiling
Written by Amado Lacuesta Jr. and Tony Tacorda

Would it be precipitate to claim that the action movie as a function of social realities – an activity that obtained during the early years of the sixties and eighties – is once more coming into its own? The outputs so far this year seem to promise as much, what with an appropriate adaptation to the concerns of the times. During the late fifties and early sixties, with the likes of Cesar Gallardo and the late Gerardo de Leon leading the way, local action films undertook the depiction of underworld characters with the requisite tragic comeuppance; the attempts succeeded so well that the legal and physical mechanisms of film censorship were expanded to effectively outlaw such so-called gangster movies. The result? A spate of imitations of Western and superspy stories, complete with wholly incongruous production values (American Indians and formal wear in the tropical Orient) and performers (Caucasian blondes servicing not-so-appealing locals).

11011Similar political strictures during the seventies added a relatively closer but still alien form, the martial-arts movie. Suddenly Filipino film actors became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves, those on the mainland at least. Only during the latter part of the decade did both filmmakers and audience develop an understanding between them sufficient to codify (in the actual, not the semiotic, sense) martial-law situations into metaphorical setups such as prisons, slums, and urban-to-rural transitions. The problem for the Pinoy action movie since the two-year-old political “revolution” is this time more a matter of entertainment appeal rather than the old dilemma of getting social themes through a too-touchy censorship system. This is where the genre’s strength and weakness lies: on the one hand, the extremes of realities necessary to initiate an action, whether a chase, flight, or vendetta, presume an awareness of current social situations; on the other hand, this selfsame seriousness of purpose can prove (and has often done so) to be too high-handed for commercial comfort.

Phillip Salvador as Arsenio Cayanan, a mixed-race American mestizo who became known for a life of crime, in Pepe Marcos’s Boy Negro (1988).

11011A few weeks ago a Rudy Fernandez-starrer, Tubusin Mo ng Dugo, went a long way, in box-office terms, in taking cues from the recent successes of comedy entries. This time two other titles, Anak ng Cabron and Afuang: Bounty Hunter, try to introduce innovations of their own, and seem to be reaping rewards for the mere act of doing so. Between the two, Anak ng Cabron seems to be the more conscientious effort but winds up the less appreciable, precisely because of the aforementioned dangers of dissimulation. The premise – a society with a completely anarchic law-and-order arrangement – is attractive, and the execution even more so: the level of utter technical competence displayed herein is what all local films should strive for, at the very least; perhaps with enough international markets opened, the surface polish that characterizes Anak ng Cabron can be more willingly accomplished by the rest of the industry.

11011Unfortunately a lesser proportion of care was extended the movie narrative’s basic essentials. It would sound patently unfair, not to mention pedantic, to point out that an Aeschylean potential in the theme of a son inheriting his father’s personality defects remains undeveloped – but that’s only because the movie on the whole managed to evade the issue of ideas through a reliance on comic touches and an admirable expansion of geography. These of course are still backup devices that don’t really address questions of internal logic – like why should the women in this film hate so intensely someone who projects himself better than they do? At least Rudy Fernandez in Tubusin Mo ng Dugo was provided the self-awareness of using his physical charm to his advantage, even if only in the limited context of hustling. I could understand a neurotic mother and a dumb leading-lady character rejecting a movie-goon type, but Ace Vergel?! Perhaps a more psychologically provocative explanation for meanness than mere heredity (which was the achievement-of-sorts of another Vergel-starrer, Carlo J. Caparas’s Pieta) could have helped some.

11011Afuang: Bounty Hunter commits exactly the same things Anak ng Cabron does, but performs one over the latter through the application of a clever strategy. Where Anak ng Cabron sought to convey a vision of peace-and-order breakdown by simply assuming that it exists in the here and now, Afuang situates itself in an actual time frame – the period of transition between the past and present political dispensation. Production limitations aside, the notion of vicariously reliving those days with someone who actually went through the process still manages to evoke the minimal interest required for paying proper attention. Afuang then manages to be crafty enough to engage the viewer in a game of wondering how much of the onscreen resolution matches the real-life exploits of its lead character. Before you know it you’ll have gotten over the tension of hoping the Afuang you’ve identified with would make it through the change of regimes, largely because of the catharsis of his vengeance on the wrongdoers who may or may not have actually crossed his path the way they did in the movie.

11011The inevitable problem with character presentations in true-to-life stories still holds true in the case of Afuang: the way the guy talks, you’d suspect that it was this sermonizing, rather than his rectitude, that did him in during the latter period of Marcos rule. And as in Anak ng Cabron the women, the Mrs. Afuang especially, are converted into provocations for the lead character to enunciate, albeit hesitantly (as befits a real man, hah!), his philosophical stance; in short you don’t expect to find ladies here, you get gentlemen burdened with social ills and nags, not necessarily in that order.Between this given and the otherworldly solutions explored by Western cinema (Raging Bull et al.), there remains a number of minor points that should still be raised for commendation in the movie: the usual reliability of Phillip Salvador, the discovery of action-star potential in the actor playing his sidekick (Mon Godiz), and the casual implication of five-star hoodlum (now international fugitive) Fabian Ver in the dognapping racket that turned into the dreaded carnapping syndicate of not-so-long-ago.

11011Enterprises like Afuang are in danger of catching flak from still-present and ever-sensitive sources; sadly their appeal rests on this factor, rather than merits that don’t depend on extra-filmic developments. Nevertheless we could do worse with our entertainment, and meanwhile we need to accumulate anew an appreciation of social insights that the audience can share according to its level of maturity. If the outputs are at least as entertaining as what we’ve been getting lately, then who’s to complain?

[First published March 23, 1988, in National Midweek]

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Bioflicks

Operation: Get Victor Corpus, the Rebel Soldier
Directed by Pablo Santiago
Written by Jose F. Lacaba

Balweg: The Rebel Priest
Directed by Butch Perez
Written by Amado Lacuesta Jr.

Kumander Dante
Directed by Ben (M-7) Yalung
Written by Ricardo Lee

With the release of Kumander Dante, a unique cycle of the depiction on film of local political rebels has been completed. It would take another complex of factors – the 1986 political upheaval and the differences that accompanied it – to enable us to witness another series of purportedly biographical treatments of the stories of bigger-than-life outlaws. More’s the pity then, since at this stage we have neither reached the cultural maturity to appreciate experimentalist deviations form avowed fact, nor acquired the political confidence to remain above the run of discourses about significant contemporary personalities. As far as current industry standards go, the trio of titles dealing with military renegade Victor Corpus, rebel maverick Conrado Balweg, and former underground leader Bernabe Buscayno (a.k.a. Commander Dante) are actually superior entries. They have been produced by major outfits with fittingly above-average budgets, and the concern for industrial legitimacy can be seen in both the production values as well as the large casting these projects exhibit.

11011The reason for such carefulness, however, is the same factor that accounts for ultimate disappointments about these works, once the extremes of film ideals are applied. We still consider people newly returned from beyond the pale of the law as possessing an admirable amount of physical vulnerability; they may be visibly present among us, but are still hounded by the conflicts they’re supposed to have left behind. This makes them intriguing enough to warrant features in a popular medium or two, but at the same time provides the makers with the fear of possible retaliation by the subjects’ enemies as well as discrediting by the subject themselves.[1] Proof of this split-level approach lies in the creative credit listings for each project: name writers were commissioned to write the first-draft scripts – the blueprint, as it were – but commercially oriented (and therefore industrially safe) directors were called in to execute the final products; in the instance of Kumander Dante, the producer himself opted to do the film. In this regard the most conscientious filmmaker would naturally manage to come up with the most acceptable output of all, and not surprisingly Butch Perez pulls off a near-coup of sorts with Balweg: The Rebel Priest.

Phillip Salvador as Conrado Balweg, a former reverend who founded and led the the Cordillera People’s Liberation Army, in consultation with director Butch Perez.

11011The achievement, however, is strictly technical, and in fact at certain moments I was just as overwhelmed at the epic excesses of Operation: Get Victor Corpus, the Rebel Soldier and the historical parallelisms of Kumander Dante. The latter, in addition, provides the clearest indication of art-and-life cross-purposes: it isn’t so much the approximation of the real-life occurrences that gives the necessary jolt to these works, but rather the afterthought that reality could be more dynamic and enduring in the long run. Sure, Corpus, Balweg, and Buscayno may not look as perfect as their screen counterparts do, but at least they possess the means to pursue, redirect, or even negate their own objectives, whereas those contained in the filmic representations of their lives will remain as is for all time, or at least as long as the stocks can be preserved. It’s a no-win situation actually. The only way to correct the impressions of the originals, should Corpus et al. decide to change courses in midstream, would be to update their stories via new film projects. In this sense Corpus himself or, to be more accurate, his screen character, enjoys the benefit of an open ending; any sequel to his story could still reasonably proceed from the original.

11011Yet there may be a more feasible option – one that upholds the integrity of the medium even, if necessary, at the expense of the subjects concerned. Early this year I made what seemed like a hyperbolic statement at the time, to the effect that a late 1987 release, Kumander Gringa, was in most ways the best political Filipino film since the revolution. If anything, the completion of the serious political-rebels cycle confirms this assertion, without necessarily sacrificing the requisites of box-office appeal and the star system. Of course, no one in his right mind would ever make the mistake of identifying Gringo Honasan with the character(s) portrayed by Roderick Paulate, but then this is precisely what makes Kumander Gringa more film than documentation. Political rebels in themselves provide enough real-life issues to last more than a mere couple of movies; on the other hand, a one-project affair, a do-or-die proposition, need not always prostrate itself on the altar of verisimilitude, especially when other options could be just as entertaining, if not more, and thereby possibly truer to the purposes of the medium.

[First published October 26, 1988, in National Midweek]

Note

[1] At the end of the published version of the review, three disclaimers by the story consultants (Monico Atienza, Bonifacio Ilagan, and Marvyn Benaning) of Kumander Dante, the scriptwriter also of Kumander Dante, and the scriptwriter of Victor Corpus were printed. Each statement, in effect, said that the story or script that these individuals had written was not observed by the director of the finished film.

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An Update

The resurgence of horror in local films proved about us fleeting as post-1986 prosperity. This lends some credence to the psychoanalytic view that audiences would look for horrifying experiences in fictional works if they didn’t have enough of it real life; the corollary – audiences deriving their quota of horror from real life – can and should only be regarded with sadness and outrage.

11011The move toward down-to-earth explicitness in turn-of-the-revolution sex films proved no match for the heavenward turn of officiated (and legislated, as may be seen in the new Constitution) morality; the new repression, however, may help induce a new round of creative, well, gap-searching, similar to that of the Marcos era’s bold trend.

11011Action films have been called to reprise their historically contingent function of reflecting their audience’s experiences and aspirations. The heroes this time are younger, less reluctant about emotional displays, and more attentive to women; and some villains are of an entirely new breed – heroes of yesteryears, actually, including Americans and elected government officials. Once this last genre moves beyond articulating current conditions, to clarifying them for the benefit of the audience and prescribing possible courses of action, people (those in power, especially) better start worrying. Fortunately for the forces of reaction, our local film practitioners still have to prove their expertise in propaganda, and so do our audiences, in terms of their capability of responding to such efforts.

[First published October 24, 1990, in National Midweek]

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Censorship and Other Compromises

A curious aspect in the local experience of film censorship is the fact that, in the rare instance of libertarian restraint on the part of government, the eventual clamor by the influential members of society has been for more censorship, not less.[1] This contrasts dramatically with historical developments in other media of expression, in which at least one side – the so-called progressive segment of society – welcomes the granting of freedom and strategizes whenever possible for the institutionalization of newly acquired benefits. The differences can be perceived from concrete examples of recent origin: where the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines exists only in ignominy, castigated toward the end by the very same concerned artists who helped set it up, the “alternative” elements in print and broadcasting today dominate their respective media, rising from the status of glamorized underdogs by waging and then winning their wars on the circulation and advertising fronts.

Film & theater activist director/actor Behn Cervantes (1938-2013) in an anti-censorship rally.

11011The salient distinction arises from the fact that film, more than any other form of mass media, is an industrial product, notwithstanding the assertions of a number of enlightened filmmakers. For indeed, who is the filmmaker? The director (as pronounced in occasionally mystifying foreign critical terms) is generally regarded in artist circles as the central intelligence, but she usually merely interprets an earlier work, that of the scriptwriter – who in turn may have derived more than just ideas from another source, but for simplification’s sake let us stop here. The writer’s ideas would be almost always embodied in, if not argued by, a character or group of characters, which in industrial parlance translates to actors. The actors, unlike the director, do more than interpret: they provide the motive for the movie to advance to production by assuring, through their box-office draws, returns on investment. And where would a movie project be without investment in the first place? If producers were concerned more with credits than with profits, one wonders if the politics of auteurism (a movement which ascribed final credit for a film to its director) would ever have prospered. The authentic auteur – a producer-director-writer-performer, rarely found even in alternative formats – is the exception who proves the rule.

11011This industrial nature does not prevail as strongly in print, broadcasting, or theater, which are generally conceded to be writers’ domains. Where a singular source of responsibility can be pinpointed, it becomes easier to enforce ideals from within the community of artists. Hence the tendency among writers (in print, especially) toward censoriousness – a creature totally different from the monstrosity of censorship – toward one another, particularly the ones perceived as abusive. Filmmakers, or more accurately the makers of film, on the other hand, tend to exculpate themselves by pointing to one another, or if it becomes unprofitable or too late to do so, then perversely they turn on the hapless moviegoing masses on whom they rely to patronize their products.

11011The issue in basic law should therefore be modified, more so at present when that same law is being redrafted, to whether industrial expressions should be given the same status as individual expressions when it comes to the enjoyment of constitutional rights. Of prime importance here is the consideration that industrial output presumes a profit motive and results from several possible compromises, responsibility residing in a collective of individuals that breaks up as soon as the industrial process is completed (i.e., after the money has poured in). The previous regime’s schizoid approach in exercising film censorship and at the same time exempting an official entity on the one hand, and endorsing film classification and exempting taxation on the basis of quality on the other hand, may in retrospect seem too scatterbrained to be effective. But waste not the lessons of history, as the sage said, or else be doomed to repeat it. Already becoming evident is the imposition of a parochial (Catholic aristocratic big-business) stringency in film censorship, being challenged by or challenging a resort to alternative circuits (countryside moviehouses, replacing the Manila Film Center) by film practitioners desperate for easy profits.

11011If anything, Marcos-era government control over the film industry indicated that a reliance on extremes – total censorship and total freedom at the same time – promoted excesses on both sides. Of more instructive value are the well-received, though not entirely officialized, innovations in the toleration of film classification and the granting of incentives to quality output. And herein may lie an even more profound lesson for dealing with larger sociopolitical issues: the solution to a compromise-laden problem (represented in our discussion by film as an industrial product) may be found, not in the extremes applied to uncompromised challenges (censorship or exemption from it as in the case for written works), but in the best available compromise as well (classification and incentives for quality in film). Now if our national problems could be just as easily simplified….

[First published September 15 1986, in New Day]

Note

[1] In a subsequent study, Lynn Hunt pointed out that the concept of obscenity, the elimination of which is the state’s motive for exercising censorship, became part of Western legal discourse after the propagation of printing technology – see “Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800,” The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone, 1996): 9-45. Prior to this way of thinking, graphic sexual descriptions, access to which was then-confined to aristocrats and church officials, was described without the need to call in state control mechanisms – e.g. erotica.

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Film Reviewing and Criticism

Film students’ faces are almost always wide-eyed and expectant, understandably because of the stimulating nature of their subject matter. The few occasions they predictably go blank are when I’d drop a French-derived theoretical terminology, or when I make my standard assertion that film criticism, as it’s been known elsewhere, doesn’t really exist in the country. Why so? the questions begin. The entertainment sections of dailies and magazines feature comments on current and forthcoming titles – maybe not regularly but often enough to convince even disinterested observers of their presence.

11011The confusion over the differences between the reviewing and the criticism of films had been taken up and resolved in international circles some decades back, but for certain cultural and circumstantial reasons, we find ourselves with the impression that film criticism goes on as is where is, and suffices for purposes of appreciation of the medium. Said reasons operate as a complex, but I guess one could make the effort of disentangling them for easier scrutiny. Taking the typical nationalist reflex of finding others to blame first, one could come up with enough of an argument with which to exculpate fellow practitioners. The state of medium-specific film theory, which is in a proper sense the purest form of film criticism, arrived at a dead end a long time ago with the practical perfection of the medium, and to ensure that formal film studies would still benefit from the momentum of dynamic film theorizing, the academicians took over.

11011Now certain intensively intellectual disciplines, mathematics and philosophy for instance, benefit greatly from what has come to be known as ivory-tower activity. But film happened to be fun to study yet correspondent with real life at the same time: it’s an art form with a sociopsychological dimension, true, but it also has technological, industrial, and political aspects no less essential to its development. So when the era of real interaction between the theory and practice of film reached its maximum, with the admirable collaboration of critics and filmmakers (and at least one instance of a combinative genius in Sergei Eisenstein), filmmakers branched off into collecting their moral and financial dues for their years of risky experimentation, while critics sought refuge in churning out propositions for the medium that couldn’t find productive applications beyond the self-promotion of their proponents.

11011The more practicable methodologies include auteurism, structuralism (currently trying to make a comeback under Marxist guises), semiotics, and so-called Third World film criticism, which is actually a rehash of phenomenological propositions. I label these “practicable” because they could (and did) prove to be useful for film classification and a certain though often irrelevant type of evaluation; but heaven knows how many more filmmakers steeped in these schools of thought will be venturing forth with at first the conceit of holding the key to the next phase of the evolution of cinema and finally winding up with a body of pretentious, at best inoffensive, but never really vital, work.

11011How then does one determine if a theory deserves a status of serious consideration not just in film study but in practice as well? Simply put (though difficult to propagate), when it can be formulated as a proposition for a creative strategy, and when the application in turn yields insights into the original formulation and suggests further directions in speculation within and without the theory’s framework. Hence Eisenstein’s reflections on montage resulted in his Battleship Potemkin, and in the other direction Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game aided André Bazin in spelling out the whys and wherefores of deep focus.

11011On the other hand, the Cahiers du Cinéma school of auteurism (ironically associated with Bazin) resulted in a movement of wonderful personal films from the proponents themselves – no big deal but then again this reflects more the sincerity of the New-Wave critics-turned-directors rather than the soundness of their fury; in their wake, all the way to the present, came a glut of aspiring filmmakers whose notions of personal import derived from imposing on their audience a “mark” of some sort or other – a prop here, a stylistic device there – in the hope that the accumulation of these little quirks would amount to something more than indulgence, which of course rarely became the case. You can imagine how much more impossible it becomes for a pro-structuralist or -semiologist to come up with the Next Leap Forward in film theory, just by marveling at the inordinate complexities and near-obscurity of the basic texts.

11011And now Filipino film scholars have all this to contend with – a list of readings sounding terribly erudite but rarely with the disclaimers of their failure in practice; this plus the fact that the local industry has hardly progressed beyond the basic montage-vs.-mise en scène debate in cinema, and most probably never will, because of the characteristics of technology and market. And we haven’t even begun to consider the dynamics of writing on film in the Philippines.[1]

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State of Local Criticism

Much as we love to deplore the current state of poverty in film criticism, the Philippine situation isn’t really all that unique. Of course advertisers resent it when the pages they run their layouts in publish negative notices of their products. Of course readers burdened with elementary-school grammatical capabilities (observed for local newspaper writing) wouldn’t bother to read polysyllabic and syntactically playful analyses of what in the first place they regard as entertainment. Of course editors need to protect their advertisers and please their readers. And of course film writers will be lucky to find a way out, if not through, all this, dealing along the way with various impositions and influences peculiar to their status as members of intelligentsia.

11011Most people hereabouts seem to agree that film commentary is largely a matter of endorsing a worthy product and repudiating a worthless one. In fact the local reviewers’ group, the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, points up this consumerist thrust in its organizational documents, and then some: in cases where film elements attain similar levels of competence, the members are expected to prefer titles with more “social” orientations.[2] As to how this has reflected on the group’s current claim to significance – the Urian awards for achievements in film – a highly specific case inquiry has to be done first.

11011The inadequacies of film commentary for consumerist purposes reveal themselves through time and practice, and the fact that the Manunuris still have to own up to this reveals how much of their time they have wasted and their practice neglected. The industry turns out only so many films a year, each intended to recoup investments from an audience of the impossible maximum of sixty million, the newborn, handicapped, and aged included. To tell readers who care to pay attention that a certain product isn’t worth patronizing is tantamount to telling off an entire system that wouldn’t have any other way of recovering losses and therefore alerts itself to offensive moves from any front, regardless of the purity of motivations.

11011Then we come around to the vicious cycle where most moviegoers couldn’t care less about aesthetics to begin with, only with entertainment values, and so the film reactor committed to working within a journalistic grind gets reduced to selectively evaluating films (only the praiseworthy ones), or compromising her criteria to conform to the less antagonistic aspects of film appreciation. This presumes that the film critic-aspirant possesses the minimum of an academically acceptable sensibility to begin with, but in practice the entire setup is so pervasive and aggravating that beginners in the craft of writing on film rarely even acquire insights on possible areas of exploration and development.

11011Hence the sorry state of film criticism extends to not just the circumstances surrounding the practitioners, but the condition of the practitioners themselves. One defense, as seen in the Manunuri stipulation of criteria, lies in the distortion of consumerist prerogatives to the point where film is perceived as something that’s intended to further the welfare of its patrons: not only is film comment supposed to distinguish the products to be patronized from those to be shunned, the highest form of recognition is also reserved for the title that keeps the best interests of society in mind, as if the obverse (society keeping in mind the best interests of its art forms) could be placed in subordination. Another and more insidious corollary from the ranks of the self-proclaimed critics, at least the organized ones, is based on the assertion that the filmmakers themselves don’t come up with discussible films often enough anyway; this attitude has served to justify the perpetuation of the Urian awards despite the well-known divisive effects it promotes in the community of film artists. The Manunuri’s arrogance in this regard has attained a height of sorts with the group’s cancellation of this year’s ceremonies because of the supposed paucity of instances of quality in film output during the previous year.

11011Lost in this enumeration of excuses is the purpose itself of film criticism: to provide for the development of film through refinements, if not advancements, in film theory and aesthetics. In practical purposes, the biggest losers aren’t really the financiers, who have found ways and means of either buying out or arm-twisting disobliging commentators; nor are the so-called critics either, given the facility and the mechanisms at their disposal to present rationalizations for accusations against their performances. It’s the film practitioners who in the final analysis are left without any means of critical support, eternally in peril at both ends of filmmaking activity: from the producers on the one hand and prospective film commentators on the other. If any substantial discourse about film has to be done, it can only be accomplished largely from within the ranks of the filmmakers – and such has already been the case, in the instances of individual artists so far. The body of work of the likes of Ishmael Bernal and Ricardo Lee, to name two, reveals a clear progression in working out approaches to the medium; a competent, eager, but naïve film researcher, however, might manage to search high and low for parallel discussions in print regarding the directions these individuals have taken and might take, but will never come up with an accurate articulation of their concerns beyond what they or the evidence of their works will be able to state.

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Reviewing vs. Criticism

A major instance of inadequacy that still has to be pointed out was how, in the case of Ishmael Bernal, local film critics never really managed to pinpoint, even within a wide latitude of accuracy, the director’s actual intentions for the use of the medium in his 1976 film Nunal sa Tubig. The material answer arrived four years later, too powerful for anyone to ignore – in the masterpiece that was Manila by Night. Issues on Nunal sa Tubig then centered on the validity of adopting devices perceived as Western to treat what was alleged to be non-Western material. The debate may have carried some weight in politicized discussions, but hardly merited attention within a strictly pro-artist approach, wherein devices necessarily possess neutral significance and are intended to be measured by how effectively they lend themselves to dramatic exploitation.

11011In hindsight, however, this deficiency in analysis ironically assumes a positive import, stemming from the fact that a controversy ever occurred at all, even if only regarding a peripheral aspect of film. Today the attitude among the more serious film commentators seems to presume that the medium deserves no further figuring out apart from what can already be acquired from available references – a viewpoint antithetical to what a practitioner like Bernal, for all his professed indifference on this score, is undeniably occupied with, on the basis of his continuing output.

11011Most urgently a call needs to be sounded out for an awareness of the relative worth of film criticism vis-à-vis reviewing.[3] The formation of the Manunuri can be credited with having elevated the status of reviewing over public relations work, but then the next stage has been long overdue. Commentaries on film need not always conform to the journalistic expediencies of outscooping competitors, providing the latest on every film output that comes along, and taking stock of space and market limitations at the expense of ideational progress. It should go without saying that such an approach will still have its place in our cultural setup, just as film publicity still finds excuses for being; but criticism of film – essential, learned, and forward-looking – cannot be delayed just because current conditions don’t seem to warrant it: no one expected film reviewing to gain public acknowledgment either, until the Manunuri came along.

11011By way of starting out, it would help to reiterate the differences between film reviewing and criticism by drawing from the more advanced discipline of literature: reviewing would involve the articulation of the writer’s reactions to a particular work or number of works, with a popular aim in mind such as endorsing or condemning the work, encouraging or disparaging the filmmaker, or even merely expressing a personal opinion; criticism, on the other hand, requires a more advanced treatment, with the objective of discussing, from a philosophical perspective, problems pertaining to the potentials or limitations of the medium, whether as art form or industry. A particular work or number of works may be employed as springboard in criticism, although a hypothetical question may serve just as well. For where in film reviewing validity is dependent upon the work under discussion, criticism does not require comparison with any title mentioned in the course of discussion to determine the strength of the points being raised: the primary test lies in the logical acceptability of the relationships established among the ideas in question, as well as the applicability of the said ideas in basic film practice.

11011I’d also like to point out the way in which film criticism will eventually get the state of local film commentary out of the rut it finds itself in at the moment. From the critic’s point of view, any movie is worth criticizing because of the industrial nature of filmmaking; no film can ever be finished without its having raised an issue relevant to modern existence, whether aesthetic, technical, moral, social, financial, political, psychological, etc. But then any piece of criticism demands further discussion, and so any film being subjected to criticism will, or at least should, always be worth watching. The challenge for the essentially subjective individual is to arrive as closely as possible to this objective analysis. A simple or simplistic film, a failure in terms of innovation in any way, will be easier to evaluate than a more complex one, which could go on providing insights even decades after its initial presentation; with criticism firmly in place, film commentators will be able to reserve for themselves the prerogative of subjecting their initial perceptions to revaluations.

[First published January-March 1989 in National Midweek]

Notes

[1] The situation described from this paragraph onward obtained before the emergence of so-called new media, i.e. the internet era. For a more recent explication of the concerns of this essay, see “Pinoy Film Criticism: A Lover’s Polemic” in Manila Review 4 (February 2014): 49-32.

[2] This elaboration of a presumably progressive adjustment of New Criticism’s form-vs.-content criteria for significance may be found in all texts by the organization that describe its annual movie awards – mainly brochures and the decadal “Urian” anthologies (the first, for ex., was titled The Urian Anthology 1970-1979, with the rest adopting this pattern).

[3] Most of the points raised here echo the writings, directly or otherwise, on the differences between reviewing and criticism, as elucidated in the output of practitioners during the so-called “Golden Age of Movie Criticism: The 1950s through the ’70s” in American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 2006): 207-504.

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Niño’s Comeback

Kontra Bandido
Directed by J. Erastheo Navoa
Written by Ruben de Guzman

Disclaimers from the participants’ publicity machinery notwithstanding, the 1986 Metro Manila Film Festival raised expectations of more substantial film fare than what was available to the public just before the event. From the foregoing any hack psychologist could infer that I’ve conducted at least a casual survey of what was showing then, and more than that … all right, so I slummed around some. And all right again, so I enjoyed the item in question – a two-hours’ wonder called Kontra Bandido. The trouble with this kind of experience is that no amount of aesthetic defense can justify even the mere act of paying attention to such a slim, inconsequential product. Film critics, when they feel like critics, fall back on social-scientific constructs to discuss what after all would be typical industrial output; but then again, expertise in the dynamics of society is supposed to take secondary place to an understanding of the nature and purpose of beauty, as far as the critic is concerned.

11011Hence our dissatisfactory condition of having film critics either lacking for titles to subject to proper scrutiny or, as is more often the case, lacking in the skills with which to approach works with artistic merit, because the very dearth of worthy titles has prevented what growth they may be capable of. The cleverer ones revert to what aspires to be social criticism, but only wind up at best halfway toward science and nowhere near art. Needless to add, the effect on a so-far passive audience would be miseducational; the small consolation we derive from the observation is that this passivity obtains only in the case of art criticism.

11011So my two-centavos’ worth on Kontra Bandido (the other ₱7.98 went to making the government and theater owner and producer happy) runneth thus: Niño Muhlach’s comeback picture did well in providing ample acting support to offset the star’s deficient appeal, coming as he does midway between cute kid and marketable teenybopper. The genre’s a tricky one, combining action with comedy, but succeeded, at least according to my vulnerable sensibility when I saw it, because of several departures from local convention. The outsiders who take over the requisite Everytown are not identified as political rebels (their leader is addressed with “Ka” or comrade, which is forgivable considering the lengths to which propaganda movies will condescend), although they wear fatigue uniforms. They’re more like paramilitary protection racketeers, especially when toward the end a benevolent father figure turns out to have two-timed the outsiders’ leader. Although said leader fails to appropriate this disclosure to provide himself with decent motivation, the father is not consigned to the oblivion of guilt, but is instead set up for sacrifice.

11011In the end, all who have indulged in violence, including our boy wonder and his well-meaning cohort, are wiped out by the same principle with which they attempted to attain justice – nearly all, that is, since the Muhlach character is provided, apparently as an afterthought, with a playmate more acceptable than the catechism teacher he has been lusting after. Aside from Janice Jurado, who plays the teacher with amusive hypocrisy, comic relief is provided by Bernardo Bernardo, whose nth portrayal of a gutsy queen in a presumably man’s world may be able to sustain a more diverting (and longer, if we throw in Roderick Paulate) discourse on the emergent gay phenomenon in Philippine cinema.

11011Not much, I’ll admit, but at least the significances (or significations, just to show how much I know) therein may prove useful for some future chronicler of pop history. Unlike – sigh – this review.

[First published February 11, 1987, in National Midweek]

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Gross, Gaudy, & Gay

Ako si Kiko, Ako si Kikay
Directed by Mike Relon Makiling
Written by Jake Cocadiz

The evolution of the gay persona in cinema has been a rather strange one, and not just because of the nature of the subject matter. To begin with, active artistic (or even just artsy) enterprises have been known to be relatively tolerant of the queer predilection – in fact, one area of debate rages as to whether the milieu causes the condition, or the condition defines the milieu. Lost in the brouhaha is the essential observation that artists, who after all may just be craftspeople who want to do good, need to keep in touch with the dual forms of sexual persuasions within themselves to be able to represent both sides in the war between the sexes. In the process, and to the occasional consternation of either sex, a distinct form – more accurately, a complex of several distinct forms – of sex-based characteristics has emerged.

11011The situation, of course, can be threatening, especially within the strictures of the Judeo-Christian tradition predominant in Western and Westernized civilization. But after the long and painful dismantling of institutionalized oppression against certain creeds, races, and sexes (women specifically), gay liberation promises to constitute the wave of the near future – with a downright effective propaganda potential in the community of artists. Beyond social context, film, as the most active art form of the times, has reflected the shifts in the portrayal of the gay condition in a manner which can be described as doubly realistic: for not only is the medium itself the most effective reflector of reality known to man (the generic, not the sexual, creature), the delineation of homosexuality in it can be considered a matter of the filmic and sexual practitioner’s portrayal of herself or (forget not gay males) himself.

11011And so where were we? Ah yes, Ako si Kiko, Ako si Kikay: gay Filipino movie characters, numerous enough to constitute a menagerie all to their fabulous selves, have definitely come a long way since the exploitative presentations of Dolphy some decades back. The conflict, if we were to take this kind of output seriously, was literally evident in the last Dolphy movie, the Facifica Falayfay sequel, in which the gay junior was developed according to updated stereotypical logic and then given the traditional resolution of going straight in the end; I wonder how many of the mass viewers got the point, much less appreciated it. The crucial turnabout was attempted by a ten-year-old Dolphy entry, Ang Tatay Kong Nanay, but the lead star’s persona could not break away from the box-office expectation of having the gay-male character seek solutions to his problem apart from the conventional options of going straight, celibate, crazy, or dead.

Dolphy and Roderick Paulate, as father and son (and real-life predecessor and successor as straight actors portraying gay characters) in Romy S. Villaflor’s Mga Anak ni Facifica Falayfay (1987).

11011A more likely watershed has been Manila by Night, which was revolutionary in several other senses as well. Conveniently released at the turn of the current decade, it has helped mark the era of a new type of approach to gay portrayals, with the characters being at the very least logical (Kaya Kong Abutin ang Langit), at the most humane and endearing (Palipat-Lipat, Papalit-Palit, Moral, and Scorpio Nights). The gay characters in these subsequent titles, however, essay supporting roles only, and here is where the hitch obtains: the compromise so far for having a lead gay-male character is providing the same with comic treatment.

11011In a sense this isn’t as bad as it sounds, since this approach makes the, er, guys easier to appreciate (especially when portrayed by purportedly straight, and therefore open-minded, performers), and more fun to behold besides. The obvious limitation is in the number of types available for depiction: quiet, unassuming ones, who’ve distinguished the movies earlier mentioned, lose out to loud screaming clowns – Mahinhin vs. Mahinhin, Paru-parung Buking, Lalake Ako!, and now Ako si Kiko, Ako si Kikay. Granting the entire scenario as a given framework, the best one can say of Ako si Kiko is that, well, lead performer Roderick Paulate is well on his way to developing an accomplished persona in his own right. His (pardon the term) faggotry is technically impressive, a welcome result of extensive training in the craft, comparable to Nora Aunor’s underdog – minus the potential for serious acting afforded by roles for the latter. The project itself is the sort of fluff, lighthearted and lightheaded, that enables any well-honed craftsperson to run away with the action, and Paulate doesn’t waste whatever opportunity has been made available to him.

11011On the whole the accomplishment doesn’t amount to much, particularly when one considers the dramatic potential in two supporting characters: the first is the domineering aunt, a reincarnation of the mother in the original Facifica Falayfay, who engineers and defends the upbringing of the gay character. The other’s the kookily flirtatious female, the realization of Kikay’s fantasies, implausible in herself (derived as she was, Nutty Professor-style, from a chemistry genius’s successful experimentations), but spiritually embodying the ultimate aspirations of the transvestic queen. The movie attempts a parallel by having Kiko similarly imbibe the potion and turn into a macho-bagets counterpart, but the resultant commentary is beside the point; I suppose, the commercial consideration of providing the authentic female with an authentic male partner aside, the filmmakers must have lost a crucial amount of courage, rather than imagination, in pursuing the contrast in sensibilities between femininity and gayness. Not to despair, though: in Paru-parung Buking, the queen (played by Paulate’s only other real competitor, Bernardo Bernardo), backs out of a sex-change operation after his conscience, in a fittingly campy Garden of Eden setting, quite simplistically warns him of the immorality of tampering with inborn essences.

11011This notion of the gay condition as being a compromise between two sexual orientations is in itself inaccurate and inadequate, so unfair as it may sound, one begins hoping for another Manila by Night or at least a character-intensive project for the likes of Paulate. Otherwise we may find genuine talent going the way of industrial dictates – by way of Kikay in succeeding Dolphy, or of Kiko in having a place among several other straight comic roles. For plurality’s sake let’s hope something turns up, aside from Paulate’s penciled eyebrow.

[First published September 30, 1987, in National Midweek]

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Chauvinist’s Nightmare

Kumander Gringa
Directed and written by Mike Relon Makiling

One cultural paradox of our current national existence is the fact that at this point, close to the second anniversary of the February 1986 revolution, our favorite mass medium still has to yield an unqualified triumph in political discourse. Once in a while, or sometimes too often, the movie industry would come up with an alleged true-to-life depiction of a still-living and militaristically significant political personality. The samples so far have proved to be viable for box-office business, but understandably self-serving for their respective subjects; in short, bad for the spirit in the long run. I hope this sufficies to demonstrate the minimum of cynicism in my appreciation of Kumander Gringa as our most successful post-revolution political movie so far. True-la-la, as the lead character (or more accurately one of two) would say: the item, like its subject matter, is far cleverer than what it would have us believe.

Roderick Paulate as the triumphant gay doppelgänger in Kumander Gringa.

11011To begin with, Kumander Gringa arrives on the (high) heels of Ako si Kiko, Ako si Kikay, which features not only the same director, Mike Relon Makiling, and performer, Roderick Paulate, but also the same comic premise – that of two characters identical in physical appearance but worlds (well, sexes actually) apart in orientation. Notice the twin defensive measures resorted to here, in terms of intention: not only is the undertaking a comedy, it also features the least offensive of Pinoy stock comic characters. And just in case this still couldn’t serve to appease the moralists in our midst, it further halves the lead character in two, the better to drive home the contrast between sexual differences, playing as it does the comic gay against his straight and serious counterpart.

11011But where Ako si Kiko was content to exploit this condition for strictly commercial comedic ends, Kumander Gringa pursues a far more ambitious and ultimately more appreciable, if not actually radical, course. Where the aforementioned biopictures were content to simplify political arguments by reformulating the left-vs.-right conflict into a center-vs.-extreme argument, Kumander Gringa provides sex-based embodiments for each side of the debate. Instead of the good-guy peace-lover caught between the bad-guy war-freaks on both sides of the political fence, we’ve got the gay lead straddling the contradictions between the more realizable concepts of civism and militarism, as represented by traditionally defined women on the one hand and similarly self-imposed men on the other. For the first time in any major local movie, both sides are made to succumb to the camp aspects of the gay option.[1]

11011The limitation of this sort of approach should be obvious to any perceptive social observer. It’s still too schematic to allow for innovation within specific sexual orientations, whether conventional or queer. Where our current biopictures attempt one over run-of-the-mill action movies by imbuing the psychologically motivated protagonists with political significations, the likes of Kumander Gringa in turn transform these political valuations into sexual differences. The approach is actually more analytical than dramatic, and in the final reckoning all these titles share the common property of editorializing in the wrong medium. They strive for the attention-getting appurtenance of thematic novelty without having fine-tuned (and as a consequence they cover up) the essential mechanisms of character and plot development. Using rhetoric metaphor, the machine looks new and therefore potentially workable, but it could never run itself into the long-term required for classical stature.

11011That would of course be tantamount to expecting Dostoyevskian rewards from a Mills & Boon paperback, and in fact I’d go as far as conceding that a Mad magazine feature would be closer to the nature of Kumander Gringa. But the mere fact that the discussion could initiate this level of polemics indicates that Mike Relon Makiling and Roderick Paulate, and by association contemporary Philippine motion-picture comedy, might be going somewhere. Kumander Gringa will also offer some slight film-educational, or more appropriately performing-arts, insights, particularly on the cruciality of the comic performer’s contribution. Again this carries on where Ako si Kiko, Ako si Kikay had left off, this time with the lesson more pronounced. What I mean is that, compared with most of Roderick Paulate’s previous gay-persona outings, Kumander Gringa to begin with has dangerously weak histrionic support: no Nida Blanca, Tessie Tomas, Nova Villa, not even a Maricel Soriano in close range, just a bunch of well-meaning and congenial talents eager to do their best but whose capabilities definitely fall outside the lead star’s caliber.

Roderick Paulate as a gay military recruit forced to act as a deep-penetration agent impersonating a macho rebel leader in Mike Relon Makiling’s Kumander Gringa (1987).

11011The risk Makiling took in response to this limitation has paid off in most parts, of which the financial aspect isn’t yet the least. In Kumander Gringa Paulate comes into his own in a definitive manner, proving for all practical purposes that he’s the prime comedian of the day, fully capable and confident in getting away with even the worst conventions his specialized kind of craft can proffer. Shrewdly, as it turned out, Makiling built the movie’s highlights on scenes intended to be carried by one, the other, or both of Paulate’s characters, and in fact allowed his star the bravura opportunity of creating a character-within-a-character, with the gay lead barely though riotously managing to impersonate his macho counterpart.

11011But instead of leaving Paulate to assume the burden of taking the movie to climax in this one-upmanship manner, Makiling eased the project itself onto parodic territory. I wonder how aware the filmmakers were of how close to radical the movie’s climax was, wherein the gay survivor delivers the lines and actions so far reserved for our most revered male movie personae. The incongruity is downright outrageous, but no one who has ever been moved, as I’d sometimes been, with all those mythologizing endings in our action movies will fail to feel that almost-reflexive swell of emotion. On the other hand, if everything were deliberately done, at least as much as would be enough to hold up under this sort of scrutiny, then the movie couldn’t have been as casual, as disarming even, as it turned out to be.

11011Then again on further thought the literal notion of disarmament is made a vital part of Kumander Gringa’s denouement. I guess clever’s the word, and I mean it as a compliment, true-la-la, but somehow I couldn’t help suspecting that there might be more where this came from.

[First published January 13, 1988, in National Midweek]

Note

[1] One of the films made in the wake of the groundbreaking success of Mar S. Torres’s 1954 Dolphy starrer, Jack en Jill, was Tony Cayado’s 1962 Kaming mga Talyada, where seven effeminate brothers are transformed into masculine heterosexuals via army training coupled with the endangerment of their potential objects of desire; the very last shot, however, depicts their hyper-masculine commanding officer as having been “infected” with the effeminacy that he had sought so desperately to eliminate in his charges, as he follows the now-normativized couples with a distinctly waddling gait. That it took a quarter of a century before this (for want of a better term) condition could be acknowledged as vital enough to induce its proponent to undertake heroic action and transform an entire army camp into happy campers may be read in two ways: as merely a reaction to the recent spate of (again pun incidental) straight-faced people-power heroicizing biofilms; or, on a broader scale, as an expression of relief that the masculinist nightmare of martial rule has finally been dispelled.

11011A further development must also be brought up here: the final doppelgänger roles essayed by Roderick Paulate was in Maryo J. de los Reyes’s Bala at Lipistik in 1994. This takes a step back from political discourse and focuses on the several comic predicaments that may be the stock-in-trade of the action film set-up, notably the abduction of the gay twin after being mistaken for his long-lost toxic-masculine gangster brother. Where it compensates is in the crucial aspect absent in the Makiling films: the beauty-parlor proprietor is partnered with a gay-for-pay stud, who proves chivalrous enough in upholding his sugar parent’s social respectability, despite the standard resolution where he has to settle for the best biological female who comes his way and require his same-sex partner to acknowledge the arrangement.

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Child’s Play

Takot Ako, Eh!
Directed by Mario O’Hara
Written by Mario O’Hara and Tito Rey

Poor Nora Aunor. Whether as a result of the trauma of her identification with the late unlamented Marcos regime or not, the fact remains that she parlayed her brood on the public when it was still suspicious of any move she would make thereafter. As it’s turning out, it wasn’t just her timing that was off; it’s the material as well – the content, if you will, of her latest career move, which has amounted to fostering on an apparently bewildered following all of her legal children. To be sure, the tots do seem to possess an acceptable amount of potential; at the very least, they could get by anywhere else on their unique brand of charisma, definitely drawn from their privileged intimacy with the only world-class multimedia phenomenon our culture has ever had the good fortune to witness.

11011Aye, but that’s where the rub sets in. For why should the selfsame phenomenon ever decide for the very public that made her possible in the first place? Granting that her decision to campaign for the Marcoses was borne out of an abiding political naïveté (which I did and still do believe was the case), should the disapproval of an understandably outraged populace signal that her time on the stage (or tube or screen) of public life is up? Besides, if the promotional build-up of her kids had been already planned before the hue and cry of her disastrous sorties, there arises another, even more vexed issue – that of pushing a number of innocents into a situation which they may have good reasons for not preferring, if granted the maturity and independence of the proper coming-of-age status.

11011The long and short of it is that Nora Aunor hasn’t yet given the public her fullest, judging from the upward arc of her recent performances, whether histrionic or vocal. If the masses seem to have lost a considerable amount of their admiration for her, then maybe it was high time that a reassessment of her public image were done anyway. If I may say so, better this new atmosphere of cynicism than the indiscriminate adulation everyone used to lavish on her. The solution lies in her coming to grips with a more critical audience through a no-nonsense display of that apparently bottomless reserve of talent she seems to be holding forth at the moment, rather than allowing a bunch of harmless but comparably less contributory minors take on the front lines for her. Meanwhile they’re here, all four of them, and every sensible movie fan should be caught up (as I am – a movie fan, that is) in the dilemma of wanting all those other poor orphans lying around to be adopted by such a distinctive mother, yet not wanting to have any more of such children turn into instant celebrities before their time. They’re all lumped together (and boy, do I mean lumped!) in their mother’s latest production, Takot Ako, Eh!

11011Actually I don’t intend my misgivings to mean that you should take the movie’s title as a piece of literal advice. The kids put up a brave struggle, I must admit their guts if nothing else (they’re mostly too young anyway) are worthy of their association with Aunor; and even she most carefully defers to them, by appearing in a low-key cameo and bowing out almost too soon before her presence begins to take hold. And that’s precisely where the trouble lies, friends. The kids couldn’t do yet without their mamma lending support, but if she did lend them enough, she’d surely wind up blotting them out. As a result, Takot Ako, Eh! suffers from a forward drive in its narrative, where the siblings, who play siblings, take too long to lead to a return to life of their dead mother, played by you-know-who; and when she does arrive, she just doesn’t stay long enough to develop dramatically.

The Nora Aunor brood in Mario O’Hara’s Takot Ako, Eh! (1987), left to right: Ian de Leon (her son by Christopher de Leon) and Lotlot de Leon, standing; Matet de Leon, Jimmy Fabregas (playing the kids’ father), and Kiko de Leon, sitting.

11011Not that I’m taking this entire outing seriously now, but you’ve got a team functioning here that’s capable of some impressive work, and in fact has done it before (in their previous effort, Tatlong Ina, Isang Anak, in fact). Aside from the weakness already pointed out, the sci-fi premise also demands a lot of imaginative stretching, not to mention state-of-the-art special effects, both of which are served short in this instance. Too bad; the material in Takot Ako, Eh! is far less pretentious than last year’s “Halimaw sa Banga” episode, and for that reason alone I kept waiting for the oportunity where it could serve to prove, as the full-length Halimaw did not, that all a horror movie need do to justify its existence and our appreciation of it is provide a good scare, regardless of our much-abused preoccupation with “social” messages.

11011The only evidence that Takot Ako, Eh! could not have been made by just anyone with the right money and resources lies in one extremely exclusive instance. This would take a whole lot of paring down and possibly a radical revision of the exposition, but if our point of reference is Halimaw, then you’d now have the best installment available for that omnibus product. I’m referring to the subplot involving Caridad Sanchez as a way-out househelp, not quite in her right mind yet not quite obtrusive enough to arouse anyone’s suspicions. Before the time machine brings back the Nora Aunor character it first spews out Dracula (a wonderfully with-it Richard Merck), who like all the previous males on the scene doesn’t really fall for the maid’s advances, but, unlike the rest, doesn’t have the advantage of remaining intact during daytime and going without blood.

11011When Sanchez starts turning on the charm for her captive lover, all hell, for him at least, breaks loose, and one wishes for the most part that the final Countdown hadn’t been sooner. And to return to where we started: wasn’t this the kind of role – the maid, I mean in particular – that Nora Aunor became famous for? A character performer like Caridad Sanchez can think of nothing about shifting from serious to comic interpretations within more or less similar characterizations (check out two temporally disparate Lino Brocka films, Santiago and Ano ang Kulay ng Mukha ng Diyos? plus her critically underrated salvo in Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Alyas Baby Tsina, for a sober accounting of the lady’s prowess); on the other hand, a Nora Aunor can only work on a highly involved plane of acting, in fact as in film. Forced to a distance (considering her bygone stature as the superstar of Cebuano cinema), Sanchez takes full advantage by playing to the hilt, damn the consequences, and involves everyone else in her having fun even at her own expense; Nora Aunor offers a weak substitute of herself, four of them in fact, and politely takes her place in the background. Somewhere there’s a metaphor for the human capacity for excessive celebrity, and the sadness of losing a precious sort of genius when the condition begins to take its toll.

[First published November 25, 1987, in National Midweek]

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An Update

The sobering of the national temper found its way into the essentially comic-fantastic genre discussed in this section, zeroing in on scatological details and the breaking of class-based sexual barriers. Given this type of requirement, authentic histrionic talent plays a role secondary to such criteria as physical deficiencies or bourgeois perfection. Meaning it won’t suffice to be just a well-prepared newcomer anymore, at least for the meantime. You’ll have to have something laughably wrong with your appearance, or else (if you’re female) an air of unattainability about you. The abstract notion of a pathetically unappealing male comedian being romantically linked, even if only in the movies, with a well-bred girl gone wild may not sound funny to you and me, but we can easily speculate that audiences who regularly undergo a sufficiently strong measure of social brutalization will eventually demand a proportionately desperate degree of entertainment. In terms of the particular examples already discussed, gay characters may have to straighten up or risk reverting to objects of offensive ridicule, while underdogs will have to bite; in short, (fictional) people will have to be what they’re really not for the moment, until matters beyond studio control begin to loosen up once more.

[First published October 24, 1990, in National Midweek]

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The World According to Aguila

Aguila
Directed and written by Eddie Romero

Daniel Aguila’s world consists of the 7,000-plus islands that make up the Philippines. Here he has led an existence that could provide sufficient material for any major movie. Enter Eddie Romero, film director-writer. Aside from technical expertise, ambiguity has been his most manifest trait. But never has this been more pronounced than in his story of Aguila. Previewed last Jan. 15 at the San Miguel Auditorium, Aguila the movie had its expected share of misgivings – both from its audience, which had its standards graciously low, and from its presenters, who reportedly discouraged subsequent comment. Such skepticism could be traced to the movie’s delicate financial future. At ₱6 million, it is the most expensive production in local movie history. Considering that is has to earn at least thrice that amount to break even, its failure as an economic enterprise is virtually foregone. But however it performs at the box office, Aguila will be in good company. Two other productions, Palawan and the re-edited version of Ang Alamat ni Julian Makabayan, will soon be exhibited but may hardly break even.

Newspaper layout ad for Eddie Romero’s Aguila (1980).

11011What sets Aguila apart from these two others is its quasi-official nature. Intended as the story of the Filipina’s search for herself, it normally would have, in these polarized times, two orientations to choose from: conservatism or radicalism. Eddie Romero, however, steers Aguila clear of any such commitment. His achievement in this regard is the movie’s prime virtue and, paradoxically, its prime fault – depending on one’s own political biases. Aguila is Romero’s fourth movie since his auspicious comeback in 1976. That year, his Gaano Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon? won the Metro Manila Film Festival and Urian best picture awards, in spite of the fiercest competition ever afforded by any single seventies year. Then came Sino’ng Kapiling? Sino’ng Kasiping? and Banta ng Kahapon, both in 1977. The former was an urbane treatment of marital morals, the latter a commentary on violent election traditions.

11011Romero’s 1977 efforts were better than the average Filipino director’s output, but were overshadowed by the excellence of Ganito Kami Noon. Moreover, some quarters questioned the inconsistency between Ganito Kami Noon and Banta ng Kahapon. For while the former observed radical historian Renato Constantino’s thesis on the evolution of the term “Filipino,” the latter presented the present regime as a favorable resolution of the past – a notion objectively incompatible with its predecessor’s. And yet … and yet there were elements in Ganito Kami Noon which may be seen as reactionary, just as other elements in Banta ng Kahapon may similarly be taken as radical. Recall the former’s contrast between the well-meaning American and the ill-mannered Filipino revolutionary, as well as its uniquely sympathetic depiction of a Chinese national; also the latter’s portrayal of the protagonist’s condition as better off before martial rule and miserable after.

11011This sense of equivocation is heightened in Aguila. Here the apparent attempt is to state that politics is never a matter of dichotomy, that social contradictions may demonstrate dialectical modes of behavior, but not necessarily according to the expectations dictated by academic idealism. Aguila tells the story of a Filipino, Daniel Aguila, born at about the time of the unfinished revolution against Spain. His mother was raped by a corrupt ilustrado, whom she marries for security after her husband gets killed in an uprising. À la the gospel story, Aguila’s adolescent years are left untold. He is suddenly more or less a man accompanying his stepfather and some American officials to Mindanao. There they divest a Muslim tribe of its property, first through duplicity and then through wholesale massacre. Daniel does not take active part in the undertaking; instead he impregnates an infatuated Muslim lass, who later pursues him to entrust to his care his son by her.

11011Back home Daniel gets involved in a legal tussle between an anti-American religious sect and his own townspeople. In the process he gets to know a liberal lady lawyer who gets fined and jailed for contempt of court while defending the sect leader. Because he desires to know this lawyer in another sense, he courts her. Some years after they marry, war against the invading Japanese breaks out, and so does Daniel’s wife – that is, with consumption. His eldest legitimate son joins him in the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), but gets abducted by the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (Hukbalahap), whose leader proposes an alliance with Daniel’s troops to liberate a strategically located town. The allies succeed, but at the loss of, among others, Daniel’s son’s amazon-lover. True to character, the USAFFE takes over and arrests the Hukbalahap soldiers. Later a Filipino commander confirms Daniel’s fear: Filipinos won the war against the Japanese only for the Americans.

11011Meanwhile Daniel’s half-sister has been having incestuous relations with his stepfather and even broke his illegitimate son’s heart by sleeping with and then spurning the boy. Daniel finds father and daughter alone in their mansion – she figuratively dead of love, he literally dying of it. Now also in the middle age, Daniel settles down by playing around. His mistress begins taking matters seriously and tries to avoid him, but he has become too serious for even himself. So he runs away from it all. His eldest legitimate son takes it upon himself to look for Daniel, thus providing the narrative motivation for the plot. First however he has a taste of pre-martial rule urban unrest, particularly in his experience as an oligarch. He blackmails a seemingly psychotic instigator by threatening to expose her extramarital activities, but the revelation proves unbearable for his son (Daniel’s grandson). Daniel’s son traces the father through Mindanao (encountering, peacefully, his Muslim half-brother), the Visayas, and finally Luzon again. There he finds Daniel Aguila working among the Aetas, who had nourished and protected him as an orphaned child. Having inscribed this dramatic and geographical circle, the movie ends.

11011Although the plot involves a series of flashbacks from the seventies, it actually runs betters than it reads, largely because of good pacing and effective evocation of time and place. Occassionally heavy-handedness sets in when the film makes didactic attempts at value reorientation. Even then, some of the sermonizing is done tongue-in-check. Production design, cinematography, and sound are above par compared with standard industry output, acting is low-key and works well in most cases. About the only glaring technical shortcoming in Aguila is the aging characters’ faulty makeup – which, over-all, the other aspects make up for. Romero’s straightforward style somewhat falters after more than three hours of utility though, notwithstanding the presence of big-time performers. One could even forgive an operatic build-up and a sensational climax for having stayed put that long. Still Romero did not compromise himself on that score. Which brings us back to his orientation: at least one can be thankful for the absence of some of the New Society’s senile symbols and bovine bromides. In the hands of a less capable director – who wouldn’t have been hard to find – Aguila would have been happily doomed.

11011Instead Romero opts for a measure of sad success by playing his politics both ways. Although the Hukbalahap fought for land, its leaders wound up collaborating with the government. Although the early seventies’ activists failed in emancipating labor, that was because they were dubiously motivated. Although the recent past was relatively peaceful, it was also less prosperous. In choosing to be neither bird nor beast in his approach to Philippine politics, does Romero in Aguila reduce himself to opportunistic flitting between irreconcilable camps? On the basis of his humanistic emphasis here and in his earlier films, one may allow him the benefit of the doubt. Like it or not, Aguila is a major Filipino movie, the industry’s first significant output for an uncertain decade. If only for this reason it merits more than mere critical consideration, whether commendatory or condemnatory; healthy public patronage could go a long way toward the encouragement of similarly high-risk ventures in future.

11011As for Romero, one can at least admire the daring by which he tackles complex political ramifications, infusing the attempts with a serene diplomacy surprising for its rarity hereabouts. Having gotten away decently with such issues of extremes in Aguila, what will he come up with next? More important, will his dualistic approach work for him again?

[First published February 2, 1980, in Who]

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A Decent Fight

Palaban
Directed and written by Eddie Romero

Palaban is no knockout, although it certainly puts up a decent fight. In this movie, director-writer Eddie Romero tackles domestic issues, a concern he seemed to have abandoned after Sino’ng Kapiling? Sino’ng Kasiping? in 1977. Palaban tells the story of a family whose splintered relationships are mended when their affairs get entangled with those of a so-called hospitality girl; in turn the latter, by striving to meet her more affluent counterparts on their level, realizes material, and eventually maternal, success.

11011Their cause of confluence is a child born out of wedlock to the girl and the family scion; the latter’s sister purchases the child to infuse her brother with a sense of responsibility. Impatient with her own strategy of self-development with which to impress the family, the girl decides upon the drastic solution of kidnapping her son. Apprehended before she could leave town, she discovers that the lawyer who volunteered to defend her in court was the estranged husband of her lover’s sister. The lawyer, in defending his client, presents in the process his case to his wife and manages to effect a reconciliation between them. The movie ends with the girl winning the baby, and the couple each other, with the antagonists befriending each other as a gesture of gratitude for their mutual maturation as social animals.

11011Such a story calls for a careful and conscious consideration of character – a requisite not fully developed in the movie. When the lawyer maneuvers the courtroom discussion in the direction of his domestic affair, the audience is prepared to sympathize with him only as far as his wisecracking and dropping of double ententes are concerned. In fact the same courtroom scenes, considering the tongue-in-cheek tone of the preceding scenes, render all the succeeding ones anticlimactic. After the lawyer’s self-conscious sermonizing, it somehow seems inappropriate to return to the same surface-level satire the movie had earlier indulged in. Moreover, as in its publicized take-off movie Kramer vs. Kramer, Palaban’s courtroom scenes misrepresent the legal process. For one thing, the child was never called in to testify, and for another, the judge ruled too readily in favor of the natural mother despite the latter’s lawyer’s off-tangent oratories. The most glaring oversight, however, lies in the movie’s ignorance of the legal mother’s best defense: that of questioning the claimant’s attorney – he after all being her estranged husband. It might be asking too much to expect perfect legal logic from Palaban, just as it is demanding too much to expect the same from the law. A real bargain from the movie may best be realized by simply sitting back and enjoying one of our better local film craftspersons at work. This way disappointments can be safely averted, inasmuch as Palaban proffers competent cinematic skills and commendable values which never seek to call undue attention to themselves.

11011There may be nothing really outstanding about the performances, but then casting never was Romero’s forte. At least Palaban has glamorous actors who manage to whet sensation-hungry moviegoers’ appetites through parallelisms between their screen and real-life existence. Then there are Romero’s peripheral parodies of social slip-ups: the propensity for scandal, the condescending attitude toward recently successful aspirants, the excessive regard for English as an indicator of upward social mobility. Romero has even taken pains to improve his poor command of Filipino – a defect which made Aguila’s high-flying surmises soar perilously close to absurdity. His use of language in Palaban, though sometimes well-nigh without what the situations actually call for, is nevertheless consistently adept, providing an otherwise loose plotline with a semblance of tightness.

11011In all, Palaban is one of Romero’s better-crafted films since his remarkable comeback four years ago. If since then he has been badly wanting in his treatment of material, with Palaban he has at least proved that the same cannot be said about his stance, even when fighting trim.

[First published June 28, 1980, in Times Journal]

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Romero’s Flip-Flop

Hari sa Hari, Lahi sa Lahi
Directed by Eddie Romero (Philippine version),
Hsiao Lang and Chou Lili (Chinese version)
Written by Hsiao Lang and Eddie Romero

As far as local achievements go, Eddie Romero’s career would be comparable to those of a select group of artists for whom nationality has become a secondary issue, having lived as they did relatively meaningful and meaningfully productive lives. A great work or two, a distinct aesthetic progression in one’s game plan, plus an abiding faith in humanity – I suppose most prodigies initially believe they could do better, but from the evidence available to us, the most old guards could hope for would be a little more time on this earth, if only to be able to advance to another stage in their effort. And so the most senior among our active film directors decreed some time ago that he deserved a better reputation (and the treatment that presumably accompanies it) than just a Hollywood “B” listing, regardless of the reverse snobbery involved. He chose to implement this transition in his very own homeland – to the mutual advantage of himself and our heritage, in the form of Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon? Here his heretofore underrated (outside of specific industry contexts) skills as storyteller complemented the reasonably attainable demands of period filmmaking – a balance that was never to be his privilege again.

11011Aguila and Kamakalawa, which along with Ganito Kami Noon were supposed to constitute a trilogy on the search by the Filipino for her national identity, fell by the weight of either one or the other factors that Romero required to be able to maximize his capabilities. The first had storytelling requirements that were way beyond his admittedly superior but still conventional approaches, while the second could only be accomplished within a setup that afforded the latest in special-effects technology. Nevertheless a trilogy of impressive Romero film-stories still exists – that is, if we replace Aguila with Sa Atin and Daigdig (directed by the late Cesar J. Amigo but produced and written by Romero, as per the film’s credits), and only the unforgiving would preempt a truly accomplished practitioner’s prerogative of demanding more from himself.

11011Here we go anyway. Hari sa Hari, Lahi sa Lahi obviously belongs to Romero’s phase of going respectable, in the specific sense of big-budget, Hollywood-glossy acceptability. And for the first time I should be happy to report that he has managed to attain it. Yet I couldn’t help wishing that Romero, old and wise as he should be, own up to the fact that in striving for something that we may not even need in the first place, he could get shanghai’d along the way, and we along with him. I’m sure that deep within the recesses of his honorable person, he knew that all the multimillion-peso undertaking would amount to, at best, would be a commemoration of a minor political event between two neighboring Asian countries, and that the considerable but still discussible upheavals that took place in the intervening centuries could not be raised directly enough for relevant dramatic purposes, for salient diplomatic reasons.[1]

11011Plus there was also a danger that he may not have anticipated, although the final product practically assaults the viewer with the fact of its presence: that down-home truths, which would only be a self-respecting narrative artist’s last recourse, could get swept away and rendered useless, if not ridiculous, by the excesses of visual spectacle. This is one among many possible instances in the exasperatingly complex medium of film where a good sense of story won’t suffice, unless good sense itself were exercised in the first place. Then again, who’d presume to tell a master what he should have done? With the utmost deference I believe that Romero should try taking seriously the only-apparently humble dimensions of the industrially limited filmmaking practice whence he emerged. Significance in a work, as all available examples in the medium so far indicate, is more a matter of enlarging one’s concerns from within rather than supplying mind-boggling resources from without. Ganito Kami Noon proves one aspect of it, the positive side, while Hari sa Hari, Lahi sa Lahi demonstrates the other. And from all appearances and purposes, what is desirable in this instance also, and quite happily, happens to be the more feasible.

[First published September 23, 1987, in National Midweek]

Note

[1] I was precipitate in attempting to pinpoint available faults in Romero’s work. In State and Society in the Philippines (2nd ed., Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Patricio N. Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso reference Cesar Majul’s account of how “Sulu was visited by Chinese Muslim traders and Arab missionaries who began to spread the faith in the late 14th century,” and mention Paduka Batara as “the Sulu ruler who died in China [and] left two sons to be raised among Chinese Muslims” (Chapter 2) – a major historical milestone by any standard.

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Exceptions

Kamakalawa
Directed and written by Eddie Romero

Kisapmata
Directed by Mike de Leon
Written by Mike de Leon, Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., and Raquel Villavicencio

Two movies – one by an old-school director and another by a considerably younger one – serve to demonstrate the classic conflict between theme and technique. Eddie Romero’s Kamakalawa is prevented from being entirely effective by its defective production values; Mike de Leon’s Kisapmata, on the other hand, very effectively says little. Kamakalawa is Eddie Romero’s third ambitious production since his auspicious comeback in 1976 (the other two are Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon? and Aguila). Set during the local pre-Spanish era, it tells the story of Kauing, a commoner who becomes involved in the intrigues among gods and noblemen. His adventures begin with the assassination of the reigning sultan by a rebel datu, upon which the princess calls on him to accompany her in summoning loyalist reinforcements. The mission is temporarily abandoned, however, as Kauing decides to save some elves and noblemen from the tyranny of the river goddess, in the process unwittingly seducing her. Meanwhile the sea god has to maintain his dominion over people, if not over nature. The river goddess, for her part, will have nothing to do with such to-dos, so long as her territorial concerns are left in order. Inevitably the sea and mountain gods confront and destroy each other, just as their respective mortal armies do. The river goddess’s downfall lies in her love for Kauing, which the fire god will not permit; to solve her predicament she embodies Kauing’s true love, the princess. In like manner, the surviving populace abandons its conflicting causes and acknowledges Kauing for his confidence in and compassion for humankind – a portrait of the leader as less concerned with than ignorant of politics, yet accomplished in the skills of diplomacy.

11011There is considerable intelligence in the interrelation of divine and temporal issues in Kamakalawa – at least enough to justify the combination of various local mythologies into a new and original whole which will annoy no one except purists. When, for example, the forest god beckons vampires to vanquish his peeves, the realization of a hierarchy among supernatural creatures, which makes them no better than their moral counterparts, is made clear, regional incompatibility notwithstanding. Even Philippine pre-Spanish society in Kamakalawa is somehow tailored to fit the filmmaker’s imaginative fabric. In a specific instance, Kauing, a tiller of soil (“clodhopper,” as the international version’s subtitles translate), proves his prowess over a haughty nobleman by first sparing his life in a royal bout and then saving him from various enchantments wrought by the gods of nature. The consideration of chronology – of the emergence of peasants only after the decline of indentured slavery and its attendant nobility – hardly matters anymore, subsumed as it is under the filmmaker’s interest in the superiority of productive forces over non-productive ones.

11011Filmic brilliance, however, cannot be confirmed to conceptualization alone. As in any other artistic medium, substance could be either enhanced or subverted by style. In the case of Kamakalawa Romero’s statements are not exactly negated by his direction; nevertheless, considering their scope and magnitude, they have not been handled with the high degree of expertise they deserve either. The most embarrassing examples of technique getting in the way in Kamakalawa are in its use of special effects. To put it kindly, the in-camera tricks and special laboratory processes employed in the movie are inferior to those of local fantasy films of lesser budgets. Care could have been exercised in minor matters such as the depiction of proportions among gods, mortals, and elves, the exploration by Kauing of the river goddess’s lair, or the appearance of a musical ghost. If these instances sound interesting, then the movie’s supernatural highlights are definite downers. The climatic showdown between the forest god and the sea god is appalling – but not because the protagonists lay the landscape to waste; their weapons do not behave like the flashes of lightning they are supposed to be, their clashes are mere washouts, the havoc they wreak could be outdone by faulty firecrackers.

11011This is not to say, however, that Kamakalawa is downright disastrous. As pointed out earlier, Romero’s healthy humanism is reason enough for the movie to be seriously taken. No other local director would have the sagacity, not to mention the audacity (considering the speaker’s ridiculous costume), to furnish a character, the fire god, with a monologue on power, existence, and eternity – and make it sound sincere enough for comfort.

11011Kisapmata, meanwhile, has everything it takes – and more, if one were to quantify Vic Silayan’s performance – to succeed where Kamakalawa fails. Taken as independent contributions to a creative collective, the various filmic elements of Kisapmata are, without exception, exceptional. In audiovisual terms, nothing in the film is obtrusive or inadequate – a balancing feat by any technical standard. Hence while watching the movie the viewer would be drawn along from beginning to end by correct composition and consistent visual tone; one would be helped along by sparse but purposeful auditory exploits; one would even be moved by the performances of individual members of the cast. On the whole, however, Kisapmata is nothing more than a narration of the events that lead to a father’s killing of his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and self; any relevant issue – incest, obsession, fascism, rebellion – is treated as an incidental angle, then quickly cast aside in the pursuit of plot.

Mike de Leon (b. 1947), the next Filipino talent to be featured at the Cannes Film Festival, after Lino Brocka.

11011Consider, say, the incest angle. The act itself is suggested by the father’s entrance into his daughter’s bedroom, with a little help from an earlier confrontation between the mother and daughter confirming the practice within the family. This is a discreet manner of presentation of a social taboo, which no doubt facilitated the movie’s passage through the eye of our rusty censorship needle. Whether it serves the movie’s purpose is a different consideration altogether. In fact the graphic depiction of another social taboo – the killing of kinsfolk – would not be in keeping with this attempt at adumbrating a comparatively lesser aberration. The social issues are just as inadequately treated. Lip service is paid to progressive concerns, such as references to political detention centers and acceptance of police corruption. Mere mention, however, is not the same as discussion: for all the complexity of the issues raised, the movie’s singular dialectic begins and ends with the father’s fatal obsession with his daughter.

11011This disturbing dichotomy between technical wealth and thematic poverty is best exemplified in the relationships among the characters. For in Kisapmata, the excellence of individual performances provides an illusion of successful characterization where there actually is none. The practice of incest, for example, should have introduced psychological changes in the daughter beyond normative dimensions. As it turns out, she responds to her mother’s calls for aid and rebels when she finds out that these are pretenses planned by her father; also, in spite of her conventionality (she resorts to religion regularly), she submits to another man – her husband, with whom she had premarital relations – without discernible traumatic consequences. The father, played with a plethora of nuances by Vic Silayan, comes on as an imposing figure right from the start, and remains that way throughout. In this regard, his fateful outburst at the movie’s climax may be safely logical – but not, by any means, tragic. A serious oversight on the filmmaker’s part prevented the evolution of the father into an understandable figure; before the shootout he is simplistically dismissed by his family as a psychotic. But since he is made to carry out the climax literally and figuratively singlehandedly, his character, to say the least, should have been provided with subjective developments.

11011Creating sympathy thus for the father would have been less bold than the incest angle, but it would have made the shootout at the end cathartic instead of simply shocking. In this sense Kisapmata can be regarded as representative of the Hollywood influence on contemporary Philippine cinema: technique-conscious, paradoxically to a fault. A return to thematic awareness in the manner of old guards like Romero would be more welcome – presuming, of course, that the filmmaker concerned is already capable of technical competence to begin with.

[First published November-December 1981 in The Review]

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Waiting for Godard

Batch ’81
Directed by Mike de Leon
Written by Mike de Leon, Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., and Raquel Villavicencio

Batch ’81 was a major movie in the making. Almost two years have elapsed between its conception and exhibition, and it was (and remains) MVP Pictures’ biggest budgeted production. Behind it is the same creative team responsible for two promising ventures, 1980’s Kakabakaba Ka Ba? and last year’s Kisapmata. As an added sidelight, it figured in what appears to be the fashion as far as serious local film projects go: a conflict between director and producer which, needless to add, should be of no consequence in evaluating the finished product. At its premier screening last March, the movie held up to reasonable expectations accordant to director Mike de Leon’s past works. Although the version was subsequently declared an “answer print” – that is, subject to further revisions, it exhibited an extremely expert flair for technical proficiency in both aural and visual aspects.

Ricky Sandico as a fraternity neophyte in Mike de Leon’s Batch ’81 (1982).

11011Among local directors no one has been perhaps as conscious (or, for that matter, as adept) as de Leon when it comes to filmic sound and music. The definitive proof would be his comedy-musical Kakabakaba for its overt emphasis on these elements; nevertheless all other de Leon films (apart from the abovementioned, these include Itim, 1976, and Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising, 1977) demonstrate considerable competence in the same direction, and Batch ’81 is no exception. Sound à la de Leon seeks to establish a distinct dimension, related but not subordinated to the film’s visual content. Furthermore it ignores conventional differences between itself and music, occasionally merging and then resolving in sometimes startling, always effective turns. In Batch ’81 de Leon also makes literally visible progress. Its cinematography is the most satisfying of any de Leon film so far, preferable to the prettiness of the earlier works or the novelty of the later ones. Here de Leon derives expressive significance from his use of light – or, more accurately, his disuse of it. This becomes apparent, on more levels than one, in the fraternity rumble sequence, wherein a sense of dreadful finality is emphatically evoked through the gradual dominance of shadows.

11011Impressive production values alone, however, do not a masterpiece make. In this regard de Leon can be credited with having chosen for Batch ’81 more serious subject matter – the fraternity as a microcosm of society – than those of his previous films (in receding order: thriller, musical, romance, and horror). Also, in Batch ’81, several literate tributes (as distinguished from outright plagiarism, in which the reference, without the benefit of adoptive context, is appropriated as an original device) are made to similarly serious exertions in foreign cinema. All these considerations are, of course, so far still secondary, dealing as they do with what may be seen or heard but not with what may be understood, and it is at this point that the film’s difficulties begin. For there is no real exploration of fraternity life in Batch ’81 beyond what may be arrived at through good research. Sensational but irrelevant incidents are substituted for related but presumably less provocative ones. As a consequence, more time is spent on the depiction of initiation rites than on lead character Sid Lucero’s motive for membership at all costs, when in fact it is his obsession that leads to an escalation of the level of violence in the neophytes’ experience.

11011The only clues ever afforded the audience concerning his peculiar trait are contained in his interactions with women. Here again the observance of character is minimized to make way for catchy detail – the arrogance of his pill-popping mother, for example, or the latent resentment of his hypercritical steady – which, instead of elaborating on the issues at hand, provokes an impression of unwarranted misogyny. As a result, the successful performances of the actresses in Batch ’81 run against the roles. Armida Siguion-Reyna and Charito Solis, as the respective mothers of Sid and his roommate, have only their presence to present in what essentially are walk-on (or, more appropriately, talk-on) parts, while Chanda Romero manages to make use of comic timing and an uncanny regional accent to warm up her stereotypically cold-blooded role as a whore hired by fraternity masters to devirginize a neophyte. In contrast the actors, at least some of them, have the benefit of more sympathetic roles; curiously the less likeable ones come off better, particularly Mark Gil as Sid and Mike Arvisu as Abet, both hard-liners of their respective warring fraternities.

11011A considerate consensus would probably ascribe this contradiction to some form of ethical nihilism on the part of de Leon, in which his anti-heroes attain fulfillment by refusing to become heroes. On the other hand, he may only be wanting in the craft of characterization – which may explain why Kisapmata, which had better performers, was better acted than Batch ’81. To put it another way, Batch ’81’s “bad” characters are easier to understand simply because they are less ambiguous than the rest. Such reliance on technical virtuosity as a determinant of dramatic development has resulted in fact in a duality of mutually exclusive narratives which share the same highlight – the murder of Sid’s roommate – and nothing else. The technical narrative, on the other hand, begins with Sid’s application for fraternity membership, proceeds through the parallelisms between his persistence and his roommate’s pusillanimity, and ends with the survivors’ initiation. Meanwhile the literal ending, in which the new members undertake the hazing of the next batch of neophytes, demands an entirely different set of developments all its own.

11011The obvious conclusion here is that technique, when allowed to proceed at its own pace, is liable to lose dramatic drift. By this account de Leon is, if not anything else, still a technician – a terrific one, no doubt, perhaps the country’s best; but once the industry has responded to the standards of technical excellence which only he has been able to meet so far, can he continue to count on craft alone?

[First published June 16, 1982, in Who]

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Return to Form

Bilanggo sa Dilim
Directed by Mike de Leon
Written by Jose Almojuela, Mike de Leon, and Bobby Lavides

Having done something like ten audiovisual works in about as many years, Mike de Leon should be this year’s celebrated candidate for artistic re-evaluation. The fact that of his works, only six are in commercial 35mm. format while the rest are in alternative film (super-8mm. and 16mm.) and video formats makes for even more relevant discussion, with the latest – a “videomovie” titled Bilanggo sa Dilim – all set to open the first Independent Film and Video Festival at the Wave Cinema in Cubao next week. Bilanggo sa Dilim has more things going for it than a Mike de Leon credit (although an influential circle of admirers would be content with that alone); it is the first local Sony Solid Video production to be released, with a couple of others already in the can (or should we say the cassette?) and a lot more in the planning stage (studio?).

Joel Torre in Mike de Leon’s Bilanggo sa Dilim (1986), the country’s first studio-produced video movie.

11011Typically the work – I hesitate to call it “film” – like the best of de Leon’s early achievement is the sort of thing that makes technique-conscious practitioners reach for the latest product manual or brochure, so as not to be left behind by the standards of competence it sets anew. In fact, with technical competence being the rare commodity it is these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if observers of Filipino audiovisual works again typically take to Bilanggo sa Dilim as if it were this year’s only qualified entry in the cinema-as-art competition that we so enjoy imposing on our film practitioners. And yet, in the sense that the work is opening an alternative film festival and should therefore be considered in that context first, I agree. Grudgingly, that is; for when in the recent past everyone seemed enamored with Mike de Leon’s displays of virtuosity (enhanced among insiders by a reputation for eccentricity), I had to endure some amount of difficulty in going against the grain, pardon the pun, just to be able to point out that other filmmakers were involved in even more substantial artistic and narratological innovations. I would say the height of irony in de Leon’s career took place when he abandoned his fondness for experimentation with the plastics of the medium and undertook the most conventional serious project he had set for himself – the agitprop film Sister Stella L. – and acquired in return the strongest round of raves and cheers (not to mention trophies) he had ever received yet.

11011So this time around I am genuinely resisting the temptation of going overboard in hailing Bilanggo sa Dilim as Mike de Leon’s return to form, in more ways than one, simply because it is his first videomovie, and his commercial-film record indicates a clear capability on his part to outdo himself. Those who have handled video will respond more readily to the precocity of Bilanggo sa Dilim, and might therefore understand my sense of panic-tinged admiration: video, as we have known it, has never been this accomplished, at least from within our national borders; after Bilanggo sa Dilim, how else could one dare to approach the medium with aesthetic intent? My past reservation about de Leon’s inadequacy (which after all may have been a mere hesistancy) in exploiting the dramaturgical potential of audiovisual media still holds to a certain extent for Bilanggo sa Dilim. Again, though, I must make clear that I measure his sense of drama against his flair for novelty, and not by the admittedly sorry standard obtaining in the commercial industry. For his latest, he has taken an extraneous source – a John Fowles novel – as the basis for his story, and though on the whole his adaptation is less conceited than, say, that of Karel Reisz’s version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I can safely bet (not having read Fowles’ The Collector) that, from the onscreen evidence, it is de Leon’s bravura orchestration of video’s exasperatingly resistant instruments that saves the adaptation from a too-obviously literary premise. In one singular instance he completely subverts the language of film as we have come to know and accept it – when, in the climactic chase scene, he cuts to a high-angle slow-motion shot of the protagonists; basic cinematographic conditioning ascribes a connotation of detachment for high angles and that of relaxation for slo-mo takes, but in Bilanggo sa Dilim the combined usage of both techniques produces a startling realization of the beauty inherent in outbursts of violence. This is not in itself an original discovery – Arthur Penn and the late Sam Peckinpah, to use Hollywood-based examples, were once accused (an honorable distinction in artist circles) of using the same thing – but it points to something that apparently has never been carefully considered before in local practice: that video, instead of acting as an adjunct to film, can in fact attain more effective peaks of expression by breaking free of the rules of conventional usage, in the manner of the more advanced items in cinema.

11011That in itself should ensure for Bilanggo sa Dilim more than just incidental stature in an already reputable body of aesthetic achievement in Philippine cinema. The responsible de Leon observer, however, could in addition take notice of the fact that, although the director forsook his credit for his last film, he took care not to do the same with his newfound skill in handling actors. Whereas in the past he used to rely on the relative expertise of his performers as a given, in Bilanggo sa Dilim he has been able to draw out the same harmonious ensemble acting that may be the only claim to posterity of Hindi Nahahati ang Langit; in addition, he allowed one of the protagonists to develop with a sympathetic sensuality (name me any other Mike de Leon film that exhibits this virtue!) that, coupled with the appropriate resources of Cherie Gil, has resulted in the first honest-to-goodness flesh-and-blood character (as opposed to performance) in any de Leon opus yet.

11011I would like to believe, for snobbery’s sake, that Mike de Leon was merely flexing his capabilities, so to speak, so as not to overstretch himself in the new medium. He has done better, if not entirely satisfactory, efforts in the commercial mode, but I’d rather play safe and say that come the time when the first de Leon work of unqualified greatness, in whatever format, is revealed to the public, I wouldn’t want to be caught off guard in failing to anticipate it. It may be on the order of a more thematically cogent Kakabakaba Ka Ba? or dramatically valid Batch ’81 or presentationally daring Sister Stella L. Or it may be a completely different concern altogether – in which case your prediction will be as good as mine, and we can only hope it matches Mike de Leon’s. Meantime we have an effective melodramatic thriller in our midst, and in the alleged format of the future at that, and maybe we should all be so grateful that its proportions were not major enough to completely overwhelm us.

[First published September 22, 1986, in New Day]

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