Canon Decampment: Rico Maria Ilarde

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Sa Ilalim ng Cogon

English Title: Beneath the Cogon
Year of Release: 2005
Director: Rico Maria Ilarde
Screenwriters: Rico Maria Ilarde & Mammu Chua
(From a story by Rico Maria Ilarde)
Producers: DuduyPlus Co. & Modern Films Production

Cast: Yul Servo, Julia Clarete, Dido de la Paz, Raul Morit, Eugie Rodriguez, Ramon Bautista, At Maculangan, Rico Orbita, Hector Macaso, R.A. Rivera, Katya Guerrero, Una Ilarde, Jun Sabayton, Joel Torre, Rico Maria Ilarde, Stephanie Lim

During a violent robbery where Pepito betrays his companion Ruel, their getaway driver Sam realizes that he’ll also be rubbed out. His military training enables him to overpower Pepito and he’s able to flee with the money, with Pepito’s body in the trunk. Sam recalls how Pepito conscripted him in the operation during their stint in prison, with the sponsorship of crime boss Johnny-B. Realizing he’ll be in trouble explaining why his companions are dead, Sam takes a turn in the road and finds an abandoned mansion, where he shacks up. He finds a beautiful maiden whom he later learns is named Katia, who leaves wrapped food in front of the house every day, with the package always gone the next day. Sam makes Katia’s acquaintance and they fall for each other, but Sam also realizes that Johnny-B’s manhunt is closing in on him.

After a short spell of creating horror that focused on the emergence of the monstrous, Pinas-reared and US-trained Rico Maria Ilarde (son of a famous broadcast-media personality) opted for material that centered on citizens continually victimized by the psychosocial horrors visited on them by brutes of patriarchy, with the monster making a full appearance almost as an afterthought. Sa Ilalim ng Cogon nearly stacks its moral dialectics in favor of wholesome innocence, but the underworld where its drama plays out does not permit such oversimplifications, so the film’s main characters conduct a careful recounting of what transgressions they or their loved ones have committed and explain to each other (and to the audience) how their future actuations could help them attain a cleaner, though never a perfect, condition. Such moral clarity extends to the peripheral characters, but never in the typical self-explanatory mode that fulfills humanist principles while raising realist appreciators’ eyebrows. The monster’s begetter is left to subsist in the ruins of his good child’s memory, but the the members of other “family,” comprising a criminal operator and his henchpersons, become miniatures of complex individualities. The leader may be expectedly benevolent in his ruthlessness, but his unruliest and least predictable follower is provided with enough motivation, despite limited screen time, by starting out as the male lead’s prison inmate and ending with a kicker of a closing line. One might also accuse Ilarde of idealizing these personalities, but anyone who’s hung out with a wide variety of antisocial types will recognize that many of them are capable of developing political and globalist perspectives. If ever the moribund action-film genre can somehow restore itself back to dominance, SIC will be one of the most useful templates available.

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Altar

Year of Release: 2007
Director: Rico Maria Ilarde
Screenwriters: Rico Maria Ilarde & Mammu Chua
(From a story by Rico Maria Ilarde)
Producers: Cinema One Originals & DuduyPlus Co.

Cast: Zanjoe Marudo, Nor Domingo, Dimples Romana, Dido de la Paz, Krista Miller, Raul Morit, Anna Marie Faybyshev, Katya Guerrero, Ranny Comia, Edd Toralba, Johnny Barnes, Mildred Formanez

Hoping for an opportunity for construction work, Anton Marquez makes the acquaintance of Lope, but Mang Erning, the contractor, runs out of openings for them. When he recognizes Anton as his favorite boxer, however, he offers the two a live-in position repairing a rundown mansion on the outskirts of the city. It turns out that Anton foreswore the sport after his last opponent died from his blows to the head; Mang Erning warns the two that they have access to all the rooms in the house except the basement. While on an outdoor break, the two make the acquaintance of a pair of domestic help in the neighborhood, with Lope readily making out with one of them. Anton asks his designated partner, Angie, to check out on the internet the meaning of some words found on the entrance to the basement. Anton tells her that he keeps seeing a vision of a girl in white asking for his help, but when she’s finally able to look up the words, she warns him that he and Lope are in danger.

As in the instance of Sa Ilalim ng Cogon (Beneath the Cogon, 2005), the second film collaboration of Rico Maria Ilarde and his producer-scriptwriter Mammu Chua set itself apart from his previous output despite his usual hybrid approach to material. Altar harks back to his concerns with ritualistic supernatural horror, premised on an admonition never to trespass a proscribed area. The Bluebeard reference will be recognizable to fairy-tale enthusiasts, but this time, the damsel in distress is a veteran boxer, traumatized by his own expertise in inadvertently killing a competitor. The implicit feminization of the working-class citizen, already made to line up in the hope of getting selected for paid work, and pledging to follow his employer’s preferences as if he didn’t have any desires of his own, is affirmed by the higher power in the basement when it punishes his high-spirited and hedonistic coworker. The narrative itself takes a few ironic turns but never grants the full triumph that Bluebeard’s last wife supposedly attains in some optimistic versions of the tale. But Ilarde’s constancy is just as admirable, if somewhat disconcerting to anyone raised on a diet of Philippine popular narratives: the lowly folk who populate his stories are as casually invested with wisdom as the best of them would be in real life, though the question of why this property should be so rarely realized in film-stories made for them might be worth closer inspection by students of social psychology.

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Á!