Full Beast Mode

Beast
Directed by Lawrence Fajardo
Written by Jim Flores

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To hear the cacophony of responses to Lawrence Fajardo’s Beast, currently screening in Manila as part of the ongoing Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival, would be tantamount to missing out on its several significant achievements. One might even be inclined to agree with its most extreme appreciators’ declaration that it’s the director’s best work – fulsome praise enough, considering Fajardo’s stature as one of the best Filipino filmmakers in the current millennium.

Lolo Omeng tells Pepe about the legend of the abandoned woman whose tears watered her crops.

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11011What makes the entry singularly remarkable is its left-field status in the director’s track record. With over forty film and TV titles to his directorial credit, and an even larger number of works he edited (including his own, as in the current case), nothing in the list can be categorized as an apparently children’s tale. The choice of unexpected material may be reminiscent of David Lynch deciding to abandon offbeat material to narrate a straightforward adaptation of a news item in The Straight Story (1999), and Beast works for the same reason: whether or not Fajardo avoided the material, his accumulation of skills in diametrically opposed subjects could only have not only fortified any longing he was repressing, but also inspired him to determine how he could enrich such topics using counter-intuitive skills sets.

In the tale, the lover promises to return from Manila but never shows up again.

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11011The closest Pinas cinema has come to such a parallel attempt was when action specialist Romy Suzara, toward the end of his career, tackled queer-themed material in Tinik (2013). His triumph was not as definitive as Fajardo’s, but neither was the attempt an embarrassment for him. One could initiate an appreciation of Beast by stating that it purveys childlike wonder, but ends up far from children’s entertainment. The trailer element that might imprint on viewers would be the spectacle of a water buffalo that speaks adult human language, although this proceeds from an early plot point where the primary character, a farm tenant, narrates a tale to a child who hangs around, like a virtual surrogate son, of a barrio lass whose lover took leave to work in the capital city and never returned: her farm menagerie kept imploring her to move on with her life, but she insisted on looking forward to his reappearance in her life.

The landlord and his lawyer inform Omeng that his land will be sold.

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11011This premise is simple enough, except that history refuses to be molded into such a neat outline. While the thesis draws from European sources such as tales of the fairy-like vila and partakes of topflight feminist entertainment in Keith Deligero’s little-seen Lily (2016), real-life contemporary abandonment in the country is performed statistically by Filipinas, who comprise the majority of overseas migrant workers. Beast’s creatives are sufficiently mindful of this irony and are careful to incorporate it in their narrative resolution, although for discovery’s sake we should desist from spoiling it for potential audiences.

Bob speaks to Omeng for the first time.

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11011Bob, the comically garrulous carabao, is voiced by stage and screen veteran Lou Veloso, in a demonstration of how a sufficiently gifted performer may be saddled by costumes or makeup or, in this case, absent from the screen, yet still be capable of a larger-than-life presentation. This is facilitated by the dynamic he forms as comic foil with lead actor John Arcilla, who not surprisingly makes every effort to divest himself of the neurotic-strongman persona he assumed in Jerrold Tarog’s Heneral Luna (2015) but winds up rendering a characterization of such rarely realized pathos that it could be easily misrecognized as a documental depiction of typical rural reticence: the fact that Bob first chatters after Lolo Omeng is informed that he will lose what he expected was a lifetime tenancy suggests the traumatization that our citizens have to find ways of handling on their own.

Omeng takes Bob to Manila to search for a niece who never returned.

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11011The performative groundwork laid by this theater-honed pair, complemented by the disciplined delivery of an ensemble who might be recognizable to viewers familiar with Fajardo’s multicharacter-reliant work, facilitates one of the more satisfying plot twists in recent local cinema. One may or may not come across the director’s own account of how, at some point in postproduction, he stopped worrying about technical finesse. Formalist evaluators may take him to task for it, but it only makes of Beast a genuine throwback to Pinas cinema’s Golden Ages productions, when entertainment (not to mention artistic confidence) was of such paramount importance that audience approval mattered more than critical or festival recognition.

11011In the best Third-cinema tradition, Beast relies on the acceptance of mass viewers out to seek some respite from a harried and cruel existence, and sneaks in political insight of such longstanding usefulness that audiences could wind up wondering just what hit them and return for surer answers and recurrent pleasures.

First published in The FilAm. Beast is produced by Puregold CinePanalo Film Festival, Wild Coyote Pictures, Butlak Banaag Studios, PostPro, Pelikulaw, and Allied Artists of Asia.

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