Canon Decampment: Ralston Jover

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1—Da Dog Show

English Title: The Dog Show
Year of Release: 2015
Director & Screenwriter: Ralston Jover [as Ralston G. Jover]
With Sergio Redolosa & Howie Severino as story consultants
Producers: Queen B Productions & sam cinema

Cast: Lou Veloso, Mercedes Cabral, Almira Alcid, Bernard Carritero, Aljon Ibañez, Simon Ibarra, Micko Laurente, Cherry Malvar, OJ Mariano, Flor Salanga, Menchie Diaz Tabije Villavert, Jhorel Bocade, Bobby Tamayo, Joshua Liechtenberg, Janzhed Negrite, Arrian Labios, Roma Oyson, Sandino Buan, Bernard Carritero, Kathleen Reyna, Rener Concepcion, Anthony Camposano, Jasmine Brazil

Although he should be retired at his age, 73-year-old Sergio has to continue earning a living by staging sidewalk programs where both of his trained dogs perform tricks for an audience of strangers in exchange for money. His intellectually disabled grownup daughter Celia helps him while her younger brother Alvin goes to school. For the past thirty years, they’ve been residing in the mausoleum of Sergio’s late employers—an arrangement that upset his wife so much that she fled to her provincial relatives with their youngest son Eddie Boy. Sergio saves up enough money so he could retrieve the kid. After Celia throws a tantrum, knowing she may never see her mother again, he brings her along as well as one of his dogs. His wife however refuses to see him and her relations don’t want to accede to his request without any legal oversight. Negotiations with district officials work out and he’s allowed to take Eddie Boy back to Manila with him, but their journey home turns out to be far more complicated than their arrival.

2—Hamog

English Title: Haze
Year of Release: 2015
Director & Screenwriter: Ralston Jover [as Ralston G. Jover]
Producers: Cinema One Originals, Keep Me Posted, Black Maria Pictures, CMB Film Services, Wildsound Studios

Cast: Zaijian Jaranilla, Therese Malvar, Samuel Quintana, Bon Andrew Lentejas, Kyline Alcantara, OJ Mariano, Anna Luna, Mike Liwag, Lou Veloso, Ruby Ruiz, Flor Salanga, Junjun Quintana, Vic Romano, Jane Torres, Cataleya Surio, Cyril Dayao, Elyboy Medina, Aljon Ibañez, Meljun Quinto, Vincent Olano, John Lloyd Medina, Bernard Carritero, Vangie Castillo, Kiko de Guzman, Eero Yves Francisco, Victor Taniegra, Charry Castinlag, Jomel Redobante, Jelyn Lavarez, Toby Anthony del Rosario, Luis Ruiz

Four street kids live in open spaces and earn a living by stealing from the drivers of vehicles that slow down at the busy cloverleaf interchange on the Makati City side of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue’s Guadalupe Bridge. Moy, the youngest, escaped from an orphanage, while the rest ran away from abusive parents or guardians: Jinky and Tisoy sleep together as a couple, while Rashid is a Muslim abandoned by his mother to his heavy-handed father. They’re familiar with the rules that police, social-work, and district officials of the area seek to impose on them, which is why they avoid getting caught. Their modus operandi consists of distracting a target driver (usually male, without a companion or passenger) and stealing his goods and valuables when he chases away some of them. In one instance, Jinky is caught by Danny, a cab driver, and brought by him to the police precinct; Tisoy, who’s frustrated in being unable to find her, intensifies his sniffing of rugby (named after the popular brand of addictive contact cement) and hallucinates a vision of Supergirl. In another instance, the loot they stash away is swiped by another gang of street kids. They give chase but Moy is hit by a delivery truck driven by an underage guy who’s also fleeing from an abusive employer. With Tisoy too stoned to help, Rashid finds himself alone in arranging for his friend’s burial.

Having written some well-received films for their respective directors, Ralston Jover arrived with raised expectations for his output as filmmaker. The passage of time functions best for the kind of work he does, with its focus on the intimate lives and irresolvable problems of overlooked citizens. The two films he released in 2015 recall the paired similar-yet-different scripts he wrote for Brillante Mendoza nearly a decade earlier, Foster Child and Tirador (Slingshot), both about grownups who turn out to be innocents when confronted with the harsh realities of urban existence. This time the characters are mature enough in approaching the challenges of uneven neoliberal development, but we’re provided the privilege of watching them cope with curveballs that most of us won’t have to worry about precisely because of privilege: consistent with the treatment he provided in all his previous materials, Jover doesn’t allow any of his characters to plead their cases with us—only with specific people in their universe, who they perceive as instrumental in determining whether they can succeed in their pursuits. Da Dog Show’s Sergio, an elderly father reduced to living in a graveyard but defying the reality of fast-approaching mortality for the sake of his four dependents (two humans and two animals) by staging entertainments for strangers, persists for the moment in order to recover one more son from his estranged wife. The treatment lends itself to comic or melodramatic handling, but Jover unexpectedly accepts the challenge of utilizing secular humanism, an option that initially softens the rough edges of Sergio’s existence but becomes entirely crucial with the increasing unpredictability of events in what should have been a fairly standard mission narrative: wherever Sergio might find himself by the time his hour upon the stage is up, Jover ensures that his fate, or at least an empathetic understanding of it, remains in our hands. In contrast, Hamog might seem to have an excess of the same sentiment, with its most vulnerable character, a severely abused young woman named Jinky, reciting improbably poetic introductory voiceovers … until the troubles that the characters grapple with bring up the question of our own prejudicial assumptions. For if Jinky manages to transcend this vision of hell she’d been plunged into, who’s to say if eloquence might still lie outside her range of abilities? As if to illustrate that existence is never always a strictly linear experience when trauma induces inner turmoil, Jover halts the plot and revisits an earlier incident, in order to make definitively clear why Jinky had to disappear from the lives of her comrades. Such a storytelling “error” would never be permitted by conventional script evaluators, but the triumph of Hamog lies in how this literal plot twist becomes more a necessity than a correction.

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Rene Villanueva’s Hiblang Abo

Alternate Title: Hiblang Abo
English Title: Strands of Gray
Year of Release: 2016
Director: Ralston Jover [as Ralston G. Jover]
Screenwriters: Naning Estrella & Ralston Jover
From the full-length 1980 play by Rene Villanueva, with poem “Tapus Na ang Prusisyon (The Procession is Over)” by Rener Concepcion
Producers: Cinemalaya, Queen B Productions, Keep Me Posted, Heaven’s Best Entertainment, Wildsound, Tabula Rasa

Cast: Lou Veloso, Jun Urbano, Leo Rialp, Nanding Josef, Matt Daclan, Lui Manansala, Flor Salanga, Cherry Malvar, Angela Cortez, Mike Liwag, Rommel Luna, Rener Concepcion, Anna Luna, Bernard Carritero

Four geriatric men, each with his own backstory, share a dormitory room in the Bahay ni Juan (John’s House) hospice. Through their voluntary sharing of their individual stories, they find out the reasons that they wound up rejected and, in one case, homeless. Huse was a playwright who came out as gay to his wife but was unable to maintain a student lover and his family’s upkeep. Blas narrates how he was a fiery union organizer although one of his companions uncovers a more disturbing version about the labor strike he led. Sotero, Teroy for short, was a farmer who had to allow his depraved landlord, Don Sixto, to collect his beloved daughter as payment for loans that his harvests could not cover. Pedro was the vagrant abused and rejected by his family, eventually found literally wallowing in mud. Unable to find a way back to the lives they once knew, the four find themselves haunted by their memories and upset at finding out about their companions’ suffering.

Hiblang Abo is the closest that Ralston Jover has come to melodrama, primarily because the source material by Rene Villanueva was conventionally designed and resolutely stagebound. By deciding to observe the play’s lines and structure, and enhancing the artifice by having the same actor depict each of the major characters in their younger years, Jover enables the successfully distinct feel of a filmed play; more important, he allows Villanueva’s long-standing concerns with native masculinities to be foregrounded, with Hiblang Abo intersecting with his own interest in the plight of people neglected by society. The entire outing might sound like a downbeat presentation, but the major attraction of theatrical events abides herein: each of the four lead performers is associated with different outstanding performing-arts circles in the country, decades of experience providing them with well-honed expertise that each one deploys in recollecting the crucial slice of memory that led to the shame and destitution of their seeking refuge in a hospice home. Although aware that Philippine society regards their status as failures, they admit to themselves that no other option remains for them except to await the arrival of the end in the place they happen to find themselves in at the moment. The fact that other sufferers share the same space ought to be a source of some comfort, but the opposite—that their companions’ respective misfortunes remind each of them of his own—could also take hold and upend whatever camaraderie they managed to work on. The most painful aspect of Villanueva’s bleak, heartbreaking vision is that the one among them capable of cruelty will endure, but our journey toward that realization, with some of the best performers of their generation treating us to the late playwright’s delight in language and drama, documented in full creative flowering by an old-for-his-years filmmaker, ensures that Hiblang Abo will age far better than its warmhearted but tragically damaged elderly folk.

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Bomba

English Title: The Bomb
Year of Release: 2017
Director & Screenwriter: Ralston Jover [as Ralston Gonzales Jover]
From a story by Ralston Jover & Dennis C. Evangelista
Producers: ATD Entertainment & Heaven’s Best Entertainment

Cast: Allen Dizon, Angeli Nicole Sanoy, Alan Paule, Sue Prado, Kate Brios, Joel Saracho, Felixia Crysten Dizon, Tabs Sumulong, Romeo Lindain, Lucas Allric Dizon, Apol Salonga, Bon Andrew Lentejas

Deaf-mute Pipo leaves his job as custodial assistant in a funeral parlor. The owner, a police officer, wants him to return, but he expresses an aversion to handling dead bodies, which happen to be in abundance because of the out-of-control drug war of then-President Rodrigo R. Duterte. None of the other jobs he finds, including scavenging at the dumpsite where he lives with his young daughter Cyril, earns enough to tide the two of them over. Fortunately the girl is mature for her age and is able to negotiate with grownups in the community. Finally, neighbors concerned with their condition are able to persuade Pipo to return to funerary work. But when Pipo approaches the site of a terrorist attack and is unable to answer the police’s questions, he is mistaken as a suspect and arrested. Cyril meanwhile hears her neighbor Ina pay attention to a man on the radio announcing that his daughter disappeared when her deaf-mute godfather brought her to Manila; Cyril pleads with Ina to leave her and Pipo in peace.

Protagonists in Ralston Jover’s films were consistently marked as highly susceptible to legal and social reprisals, but also as seriously flawed; to draw a link from one condition to the other would be tantamount to revealing one’s biases, rather than the characters’ blameworthiness. Bomba trains the harshest light in his oeuvre so far in its presentation of Pipo: the individual in question has to endure abuse even from strangers who misrecognize his regular appearance and never bother to figure out why he seems unable to understand and respond the way everybody else does; his devotion to Cyril makes his plight even more poignant and disconsolate. Although the latter possesses enough wisdom and valor to make a perfect match for her guardian, she first needs to conform to the greater expectations brought to bear on underage women. Rover intensifies the challenge of empathizing with this pair by focalizing our realization of the worst-case scenario in the responses of a concerned neighbor, their strongest supporter. Her suspicions reverberate throughout their circles, the scandal strong enough to overpower Cyril’s own warning that her father wishes to treat her as a sexual commodity. The final challenge for us (though not for the community, since drug-war violence already ensures what kind of measures will be taken) is to find a way to accommodate Pipo’s reprisal. The navigation provided by Allen Dizon, in a performance that speaks volumes even as the character struggles to articulate basic words, helps in shaping the scope and depth of a person who started with the intent to love and protect and wound up losing everything he held valuable, through no fault of his own.

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Latay (Battered Husband)

Additional Language: Kapampangan
Year of Release: 2019
Director & Screenwriter: Ralston Jover [as Ralston Gonzales Jover]
Producers: BG Productions International, Center Stage Productions, Sinag Maynila

Cast: Allen Dizon, Lovi Poe, Snooky Serna, Mariel de Leon, Soliman Cruz, Adrian Cabido, Tabs Sumulong, Renerich Ocon, Dianne Alvaro, Rhea Usares, Adda Musni, Lucas Allric Dizon, Ryan David, Hernand Tulud, Romeo Lindain, Baby F. Go, Khey Dalit, Art Bajar, Sean Andrei Maliwat, Rosalyn Veray, John Lloyd Mallari, Julie Ann Taylan, Tristan Mallari, Stephanie Tolentino, John Mark Guintu, John Nikki Sotto, Michael Mirador, Billy Gutierrez, Glen O. Gutierrez, Gobak L. Pangilinan, Roy P. Sotto Jr., Jemma Magtoto, Tricia Ann de Jesus, Anne dela Torre Tongol

In Minalin, a municipality in Pampanga, straight males cross-dress in the New Year celebration called Aguman Sanduk (Ladle Association). Olan participates although people who know him realize that the scratches and bruises on his body were inflicted by his wife Lorie because of his unfaithfulness to her. Olan endures her rage since she’ll be leaving for overseas work in a few days and he wants to reconcile with her. His former mistress Cherry visits him to arrange closure with him but Lorie gets wind of their assignation and creates a public disturbance by violently harassing Cherry; when Olan succeeds in separating them, she turns on her husband. Olan is also jealous of Noy, Lorie’s younger friend, and busts the farewell party that members of Lorie’s circle were holding for her. Lorie gives vent to her anger but their quarrel is disrupted by the arrival of Lorie’s mother, who never approved of her daughter’s choice of husband. Olan seeks solace with his father and asks permission to seek his mother in Manila but his father forbids him from doing so. His desperation is compounded by the sudden death of fish in the pond that he’s maintaining as well as Lorie’s declaration that she prefers to terminate their union as husband and wife, burning their mementos of their happy times together.

Latay takes the unusual step of looking at gender trouble by proceeding from a reversal in straight relationships: the inflictor of violence is the woman, with the man performing the role of acceptor. The arrangement applies the national dynamic to the level of familial transactions, since the ignominious failure of the social experiment in Marcos Sr.’s plan to fast-track development via authoritarian means, led to a welcome shift in granting Philippine women greater roles in public and even global living—with the film itself acknowledging as much when it opens with Lorie preparing to leave for overseas work. The retention of the standard recognition of the male as still ultimately a more dangerous force, derived from relative physical capability, is responsibly maintained in the narrative. Olan’s passivity, paralleling the country’s experience, derives from a combination of humiliation (his extramarital affair becomes public knowledge) and opportunism (Lorie’s prospective earnings will relieve him of the anxiety of inadequate income generation); his prerogatives of initiating intimacy with his wife and recognizing the emergence of a rival still abide. By all accounts, it is Lorie who misjudges her rage as strength, although to elaborate further would be to ruin the process of discovery. The allegorizing with civil society may also have been far from Ralston Jover’s mind, but the danger for anyone in approaching and dealing with a battered male, especially in confined circumstances, will be recognizable to anyone sufficiently familiar with the Philippine character.

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Á!