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Hubog
English Translation: Shape
English Title: Wretched Lives
Year of Release: 2001
Director: Joel Lamangan [as Joel C. Lamangan]
Screenwriter: Roy Iglesias
Producer: Good Harvest Productions
Cast: Assunta de Rossi, Alessandra de Rossi, Wendell Ramos, Jay Manalo, Romel Villamor, Jackie Castillejos, Mel Kimura, Jim Pebanco, Tony Mabesa, Mhalouh Crisologo, Mario Magallona, Joanne Quintas, Ryan Eigenmann
Vanessa, a casual worker, strives to provide for her intellectually disabled younger sister Nikka in order to stave off social workers bent on taking her, following the death of their mother. Vanessa’s boyfriend Oliver offers little support given his work as both cabbie and petty criminal. Eventually, Vanessa leaves him for Uno, a bodyguard who seems more capable of providing for her and Nikka. As discontent among slum dwellers intensifies with the 1998 ouster of President Joseph Estrada, a breakdown in peace and order extends to the personal relationships among Vanessa, the men in her lives, and the community she lives in.
Shorn of its cynical intentions and reduced to its generic elements, “poverty porn” need not bear the derogation that has made it an easy satirical target among contemporary observers and filmmakers. Hubog is a case in point: early commentators may have been put off by its political allegories—specifically referencing the EDSA III rallies that sought to restore deposed President Joseph Estrada—as well as its literal approach to the “porn” aspect. Way over a decade since its release, however, it has shed off its aura of eager exploitation, retained its confidence in engaging in social discourse, and daringly foretold a right-wing pro-fascist drift, along with an extensive reliance on social-networking, among the dispossessed—a then-contained vision that became a reality during the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath. The movie cleverly modifies the standard inscription of “nation” on women’s bodies by splitting the usual singular representative into two: a mature contract worker who makes herself sexually available as a matter of survival, and her mentally challenged and therefore readily abused younger sister. No happy resolution awaits such a situation, especially when the only choice they can make among male prospects is whoever can be the least evil. Nevertheless the film attains a note of poignant triumph, as the sisters prove not just their devotion to each other but also their willingness to struggle valiantly in a society that can only hold forth the bleakest outcome for its least-privileged members.
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Walang Kawala
English Title: No Way Out
Year of Release: 2008
Director: Joel Lamangan [as Joel C. Lamangan]
Screenwriter: Eric Ramos
From a story by Jose Lamangan, Manny Valera, Eric Ramos
Producer: DMV Entertainment
Cast: Polo Ravales, Joseph Bitangcol, Emilio Garcia, Jean GArcia, Paolo Rivero, Althea Vega, Marco Morales, Ermie Concepcion, Mike Magat, Jon Romano, Anthony Taylor, Alchris Galura, Wilson Go, Aaron Domingo, Beth Rivera, Mellow Johnson, Evelyn Tagalog, Danilo Regala, Lea Regala, Sue Prado, Ace Castro, Arron Cadawas, Aldrich Darren, Renz Cruz, Miguel M<orales, John Lalu, Miggy Valdez, Vicvic Villavicencio, Noel “Chino” Sarenas
Everyone in Cynthia’s fishing village is surprised when she suddenly returns from the Middle East. She tells her husband Joaquin that she wanted to spring a surprise, and that she wants to bear their eldest child before she returns to overseas work. Joaquin gets increasingly worn out because he has to suspend his intimacy with Waldo, the troubled orphan whom he helped complete high-school studies, but with whom he fell in love. Fired by jealousy, Waldo’s unstable condition returns and he leaves for Manila. Joaquin confesses to Cynthia about his new preference and she makes a scene as he deserts her to search for Waldo. He’s able to track the latter to his last known residence and workplace, a gaybar. When he finds out that Rufo Bansuelo, a married police officer who likes young men, offered Waldo a place to stay, he hangs out at the places where Waldo worked and quickly draws Rufo’s attention. Rufo takes him to his home, where Joaquin discovers that he physically abuses his wife and that Waldo is nowhere to be found; Rufo rapes him and keeps him locked in a room.
Walang Kawala can be regarded as one of the culminations of Joel Lamangan’s interest in the plight of sex workers, inasmuch as he and Lino Brocka were once associated with the Philippine Educational Theater Association, and he played a gaybar madam in Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988). Preceded by Mel Chionglo’s informal trilogy on male erotic dancers—Sibak: Midnight Dancers (1994), Burlesk King (1999), and Twilight Dancers (2006)—WK distinguishes itself by being a closer reworking of Brocka’s biggest global hit, minus the several digressions intended to elevate the earlier work’s political and postcolonial significance but that also resulted in an unwieldy overblown text. One unfortunate result in both cases, carefully negotiated in the Chionglo trilogy, is the marginal and occasionally villainous handling of women roles. But the pathos of working-class men unable to react responsibly to the call of same-sex desire is rounded out admirably, with high-powered readings by a trio of actors fully committed to their roles: the temperamental youth unable to avail of therapeutic treatment and therefore constantly endangered by his own volatility; the earnest newcomer to homodesire who realizes that prostitution will be the only means of urban survival available to someone in his station; the striver who finds a respectable profession but winds up lashing out at the wife that his image requires him to maintain, and whose only means of upgrading his income is by engaging in corruption. The tinderbox situation is compounded by the intensity of each character’s passion, and one might even be relieved that the narrative resolves tragically but not for everyone. The real victim is the vanquishment of a love doomed only because of its nature, prevented from performing productively for subjects who happen to belong to the class of citizens counted as socially unacceptable.
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Burgos
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Joel Lamangan
Screenwriter: Ricky Lee
Producer: Heaven’s Best Entertainment
Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Tirso Cruz III, Rocco Nacino, Allen Dizon, Ina Feleo, Dimples Romana, Bangs Garcia, Kerbie Zamora, Barbara Miguel, Jim Pebanco, Tony Mabesa, Gilleth Sandico, Raquel Villavicencio, Madeleine Nicolas, Anna Luna, Menggie Cobarrubias, Lollie Mara, Joe Gruta, Arlyn de la Cruz, Dorothy Gilmore, Ruby Ruiz, Jess Evardone, Brian Arda
Edita Burgos persists in tracking down the whereabouts of her missing son Jonas. The farmer’s collective he was working for claims that the military abducted him for his alleged subversive activities. Widowed when her husband Joe died of a stroke in 2003, Edita warned Jonas about associating with people considered outlaws by the military; when he responded that she and his father similarly undertook a dangerous form of activism by pioneering in what became known as the “mosquito press” by the fascist Marcos administration, she had no choice but to reluctantly allow him to continue with his commitment to radical change. The other members of her family as well as an organization of desaparecido seekers assist her in her quest, although the Carmelite order, which she joined as a lay nun, expresses misgivings about her increasingly high-profile image as well as her seeming refusal to forgive the people who might have disappeared her son.
Part of Joel Lamangan’s announced legacy project of documenting the human-rights record of the martial-law regime of the first Ferdinand Marcos (1972-86), including its aftereffects in the turbulent post-dictatorship era, Burgos also stands out as a departure from his tendency to incorporate sermonizing in his narrative resolutions. Possibly necessitated by budgetary restrictions, the approach is well-complimented by his maturation as film director, benefiting from striking use of closeups, fluid editing, and sharp coaching of performers. The film presents an open-ended delineation of Edita Burgos’s still-ongoing search for her son Jonas, with Lorna Tolentino embodying what must be the most credible figuration of a formally consecrated individual increasingly conflicted by an activist commitment she thought she could already leave behind. Proceeding in medias res, Burgos necessarily relies on flashbacks in order to explicate Edita’s frustration with a democratized system to which she and her late husband had devoted their most productive years, only to revert to a covert fascism that cut down one of her own, in case she wanted to still harbor any delusions about it. Her strategy of drawing strength from her past builds up to a quietly devastating finale, with Lamangan demonstrating a subtlety and sophistication that betokens a newfound reliance on the capacities of the medium he’d been working in for the past several decades already.
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