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Tandem
Year of Release: 2015
Director: King Palisoc
Screenwriter: Zig Marasigan
Based on an original story by Mikhail Red
Producers: Tuko Film Productions, Buchi Boy Films, Quantum Films
Cast: JM de Guzman, Nico Antonio, Rochelle Pangilinan, Elora Españo, Alan Paule, Simon Ibarra, Paolo O’Hara, Dennis Marasigan, Joel Saracho, Karl Medina, BJ Forbes, Bongjon Jose, Marga Zaylo, Melissa Ramos, Carla del Rosario, Maja del Rosario, Dennis Corteza, Jenn Romano, Ysabel Yuzon, Prince, Grace de Luna
Roman commits snatch thefts with his younger brother Rex by working (though not riding) in tandem on their respective motorcycles. As an ex-convict, Roman feels protective toward his brother and concerned for his pregnant wife, although he also once had a fling with Rex’s current sex-working girlfriend. Rex however is too compulsive and reckless, as Roman once was. One of their attempts, caught on a security camera, incites an exchange of gunfire between Rex and a security guard. Alba, the corrupt police officer who provides protection for Roman, warns the latter about his brother-partner. The brothers then plan one last lucrative heist with an accomplice, where they pounce on the delivery agent of a construction company and flee with the bag that contains personnel salary. But the understanding that a failed operation will place them at the mercy of Alba drives a wedge between them.
The misconception that art films are antigenre by definition fortunately didn’t endure to the present, except for miseducated, often privileged products of the country’s communication schools. Unfortunately, the acknowledgment of the universal preponderance of genre principles was unsurprisingly transmuted by influential critics demonizing the socially oriented films that were created primarily for foreign filmfest exhibition. It took a concerted ploy among genuinely progressive commentators to point out that the desire for overseas validation was itself the problem—a critique that implicitly challenged the original film critics circle’s tendency to recognize foreign-exhibited films, obviously to suggest a parallel between the members and the foreign evaluators. The term used to downgrade social-problem films was “poverty porn,” a problematic throwback to the film-educated preference for genres that were not considered low and therefore dismissible (better designated by feminist critics as body genres, since these incited physical responses in their viewers; pornography itself has become one of the most productive areas of genre study since the late twentieth century). Tandem may be regarded as one of the numerous releases designated as worthy but trafficking in so-called poverty porn. Enough temporal distance ought to enable us to appreciate its careful appropriation of the semiotics of social significance even as it refuses to relinquish its valuation of the complexities and ambiguities of well-observed plot and character, with an ironic resolution that can only be fairly described as heartrending in its cold-bloodedness. The fact that the film was exhibited on the eve of the inauguration of a regime that made riding-in-tandem fashionable not for robbery, but for assassination, should alert the country’s commentators to their failure to read warning signs prominently presented in popular culture.
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