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Silip
English Translation: Peek
English Title: Daughters of Eve
Year of Release: 1985
Director: Elwood Perez
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Viking Films International
Cast: Maria Isabel Lopez, Sarsi Emmanuelle, Mark Joseph, Myra Manibog, Pia Zabale, Daren Craig Johnson, Michael Angelo, Arwin Rogelio, Gloria Andrade, Cherriebee Santos
In a remote village, Tonya teaches catechism to the local children while trying to repress the lust she still feels for Simon, her former suitor. Tensions rise when Tonya’s childhood friend Selda returns to the village after years of living in the city. Selda’s sexual emancipation challenges Tonya’s pious facade and soon, their clashing beliefs lead to dire consequences for themselves and the people around them.
Even in terms of its best intentions, Ferdinand Marcos’s martial-law dictatorship inadvertently managed to subvert itself. Silip, admired by the “wrong” crowd, might ultimately serve as the means by which this principle could be demonstrated. It was set in the same locale, written by the same scenarist, and screened at the same venue as the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines’s most celebrated work, Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (1982). Yet Silip re-envisions its unacknowledged predecessor’s female bonding, between the miracle worker and her brothel-operating best friend, as a quest for sexual awakening and fulfillment, and pursues this earthy project to its nihilistic extreme. The ambition itself is quite jaw-dropping, considering the reputations that the artists and the support institution had staked on the project. Not surprisingly, the Church-supported February 1986 people-power uprising ensured that the movie would never be able to contribute to mainstream cultural discourse. As a result, Silip has remained associated with the type of disreputable films that could be shown only at censorship-exempt theaters during the Marcos period and at far more dubious venues afterward. Incredible as it may sound, this may be the closest Philippine cinema has ever come to the smutty sublimity of queer poet, philosopher, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, several of whose spiritually inflected film discourses were also infused with pornographic imagery and denounced by moralists accordingly.
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Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit
English Translation: Count the Stars in Heaven
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1989
Director: Elwood Perez
Screenwriters: Jake Cocadiz & Jigz Recto
Producer: Regal Films
Cast: Nora Aunor, Tirso Cruz III, Gloria Romero, Perla Bautista, Miguel Rodriguez, Ana Margarita Gonzales, Vangie Labalan, Mario Escudero, Flora Gasser, Beverly Salviejo, Rolando Tinio, Ella Luansing, Deborah Sun, Tess Dumpit
Peasant girl Magnolia has always loved her cruel landowner’s son, Anselmo. But their relationship turns sour as Magnolia, through hard work, becomes rich, and the indolence of Anselmo’s family causes them to lose their wealth. When Magnolia gets pregnant after a drunken tryst with Anselmo, she keeps this a secret from him. Years later, a romance between her daughter and Anselmo’s son forces her to deal with the resentment she has been harboring.
In an ideal world this film would be held up as Philippine cinema’s most successful sample of progressive genre transformation, a concept derived from the ground-breaking Cahiers du Cinéma editorial “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” written in 1969 by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni. The essay argued, among other points, that certain films, especially commercial projects, may be saddled with conventional material; yet filmmakers (such as Alfred Hitchcock) with sufficient mastery in the medium can utilize style as a means of providing critical commentary on content. Regal Films, with Elwood Perez as director, revived the wildly successful but then-already long-dormant Guy-and-Pip love team via the production company’s previous installments, Till We Meet Again and I Can’t Stop Loving You (both 1985). Perez continued to tinker with the components—usually involving class conflicts—to come up with increasingly ambitious diversions. With Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit, he went whole-hog with an epic melodrama with period elements and fan-pleasing contrivances, including having Nora Aunor voice a mestiza singer and getting the central couple to play parents as well as their own children. No other local performer could pull off a role that required over-the-top dramatization and playful self-awareness in the same instance, and Aunor had by then attained a performing peak that seemed destined to run for as long as she could stay alive.
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Ang Totoong Buhay ni Pacita M.
English Title: The Real Life of Pacita M.
Year of Release: 1991
Director: Elwood Perez
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: MRN Film International
Cast: Nora Aunor, Armida Siguion-Reyna, Lotlot de Leon, Juan Rodrigo, Subas Herrero, Marissa Delgado, Dexter Doria, Marilyn Villamayor, Eddie Infante, Alma Moreno, John Rendez
Pacita is a sassy nightclub singer by night, famed for her bawdy songs and repartee. But by day, she is a loving single parent to her only child, Grace, who is about to leave for Australia after bagging a college scholarship. When a shooting accident leaves Grace in a coma, Pacita’s resolve as a mother will be tested as she faces a slew of problems, not the least of which is her meddlesome and judgmental mother-in-law.
When Nora Aunor undertook the role of an unruly, obsessive nightclub performer, she had just decided to shelve her own auteur production, Greatest Performance (1989), on which she had completed principal photography as performer, writer, and director. Ang Totoong Buhay ni Pacita M. resonates with her understanding of the creative process as well as the insights she had accumulated from decades in the profession. Also by then making an impressive crossover to the legitimate stage via a couple of strenuous productions mounted by the Philippine Educational Theater Association, she apparently decided to amplify her execution of the title character in Pacita M., and only wound up proving that even when it comes to histrionic overkill, no one could do it as well as she could. The movie advances an enlightened pro-euthanasic argument, which serves the purpose of providing a useful message for those who prefer to find any.
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Otso
English Translation: Eight
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 2013 / B&W with Color
Director: Elwood Perez
Screenwriters: Vince Tañada & Elwood Perez
Producers: Film Development Council of the Philippines & Earth Moving Pictures
Cast: Vince Tañada, Monique Azerreda, Gabby Bautista, Anita Linda, Jun Urbano, Vangie Labalan, Mark Joseph Garde, Jordan Ladra, Adelle Ibarrientos, Cris Lim, Cindy Liper, Andrew Leavold
Lex returns from Los Angeles to Manila to work on a script for an indie film. After moving to a unit in a run-down condominium, he meets his neighbors—including the sultry Sabina and her aunt, actress Anita Linda, who owns the condo—and they inspire him as he writes. But during a birthday party for Anita, Lex realizes that his observations about what goes on around him are not what they seem.
Philippine cinema has never been known for late-career swings. In contrast with what John Grierson once said of Josef von Sternberg, “When a director dies, he becomes a photographer,” Filipino directors tend to turn into religious moralizers, if not proselytizers. This probably explains why the bewildering left-field turn of a box-office enfant terrible into a full-blown exponent of semi-autobiographical explorations has left mainstream film critics—i.e., the ones organized into award-giving bodies—out in the dark, pun incidental. Elwood Perez had brought on board enough of his audience-oriented skills to ensure that Otso could still work on the level of visual pleasure. The spectacle however of an always-too-successful blockbuster director returning from retirement and not just challenging established taste-mongers, but also overturning their list of favored indie-digital practitioners, must have stung those who preferred to conduct their business with self-certain constancy. The key to the film’s unique and unexpected triumph is scriptwriter and lead performer Vince Tañada, liberated for the moment from his history-based stage material. With Otso, he committed to the fever-dream collaboration with the fervor of someone who has been given an opportunity to make history, rather than interpreting it, for a change. Perez intended Otso, which was about a scriptwriter’s travails, to be the first installment of a personal trilogy drawn from his professional experiences: it was followed by Esoterika: Maynila (Esoterica: Manila, 2014), also with Tañada in a prominent role, about a komiks illustrator; and by the still-to-be-completed and provisionally titled #Mnemonics (Vaya con Dios) (meaning God Be with You), his tribute to 1960s movie queen Amalia Fuentes, with whom he made some of his early films.
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