Probably
more famously known for his cinema of the historical (A Short Film
About the Indio Nacional, Autohystoria, and more recently,
Independencia), Raya Martin is very rapidly making strides in another
direction in what might be called his cinema of the topical. After
inaugurating his Box Office Trilogy in 2008 with a film entitled Now
Showing, the 24-year-old director has quickly followed it up with its
second installment, Next Attraction, a film about the current state of
the local film industry and about the young director’s conversations
with his favored medium. In Next Attraction, we get for the most part
the supposed neutrality of the cinema-verite documentary that is used,
but the nature of what is being documented can be sometimes indicting.
Right
from the start, we are asked to ruminate on a sequence shot – a long
static one – of a house built circa 1970s. More precisely, this first
scene happens in the poorly-kept backyard of this house, grass unmown,
the roof water-stained, suggestive, perhaps, of unsettled, troubled
thoughts. Winds buffet the coconut and palm trees and the other
ornamentals in the background as a woman saunters out of the house and
sits in one of the wrought-iron chairs in the yard. From
a distance, her slow, deliberate manner, running her fingers through
her hair, is indicative of wistful, pensive thoughts. We aren’t too
sure, however; her face is a blur. The winds soon die down. As the
minutes pass meditatively, the strange detail of a klieg light standing
in a corner, beaming brightly in broad daylight, becomes apparent. What
is this film up to now? Then we hear the empathic word: Cut! This has been all a take; the woman is an actress in a film.
It’s
a film within a film. Director and writer Raya Martin, however, is not
content with this tried-and-tested conceit. Francois Truffaut (Day for
Night), Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up) and Andrzej Wajda (Everything for Sale)
have tried their hand at this narrative device before, but Martin goes
one better: Next Attraction is a film within a film within a film. What
results is surprisingly an intricate but coherent work. Three realities,
three verisimilitudes in one film: one conveying a fictitious film crew
being documented; another conveying the fictitious documentarians who
never become visible other than through their scrupulous hands covering
camera lenses, indicating cuts; and the third conveying the apparently
“true story” being filmed. What we ultimately see is the documentarians’
point of view chronicling a film crew in action.
As
might be expected when cameras are rolling, the film crew being
documented are a picture of efficiency and synergy. They pull off the
naturalism of a tight-knit group going about their business through a
day of exacting work. Although they seem oblivious of anyone documenting
them, they seem too eager to work with each other. No tantrum-throwing
directors here, only modest actresses who don’t mind posing with
admirers for pictures and such. This film crew is exemplary, bent
assiduously on their tasks and everyone, from the director down to the
technicians, is on his best behavior.
Complementing
this film crew very well are the documentarians: very discreet and
unobtrusive, as they chronicle the long, grueling but not necessarily
unsatisfying shoots of a film crew. Using cinema-verite methods, the
documentarians position themselves in the least intrusive positions on
the set, shielding their lenses and turning off their cameras when
needed. They almost shy away from the filmmakers’ shoots, and seem to
home in on the dynamics of this film crew instead. What they capture is
by turns reflective (conveyed through simple cuts to black) and frenetic
(or perhaps tedious) (conveyed through jump cuts).
The
overall tone of Next Attraction is, for the most part, tongue-in-cheek
as it captures the controlled chaos of a film shoot. The fictitious film
director (J.K. Anicoche) has time for small talk – jabbing playfully at
Raya Martin the famous director in one of his overheard conversations
with his crew. But if this is a time for a little humor, this also the
time to pay homage to the capacity of the camera to fictionalize, to
create its own truths. With simple editing trickery, this documentary of
sorts is suggestive of ars cinematica – whose visual zeal and
robustness echo the self-referential mannerisms of Godard.
And
the film being shot? When the resulting film is tacked on and shown at
the end, it might seem like anticlimax: it seems too aestheticized, too
prettified compared to the relatively grittier realism of the actual
shoot. But this fictitious film embodies many of the truths about what
goes on in local cinema. The penchant for melodrama, the current
predominance of indie aesthetics and production values, and the
commodification of homoerotic acts are but some of the salient points of
this fictitious film. And what is it about? Suffice to say that it
features a troubled relationship between mother (Jacklyn Jose) and her
17-year-old son (Coco Martin).
Next
Attraction is perhaps as much about the struggling (moribund?) state of
one national cinema as it is a meditation on the nature of filmmaking,
of what is true and what is not. Nothing (or perhaps everything) is what
it seems: the truth is filtered through so many intervening mediations
that might influence it. What may come billed as “a true story” is
ultimately amplified, modulated and refracted by actor, film crew,
director, editor and
so on – subject to their synergy, the smallest eventuality, the
smallest whimsy of everyone on the set. If there are passages that
apotheosize an actress in bygone times in Now Showing, Next Attraction
is more inclusive, it congratulates everyone who is (was ever) involved
in that backbreaking
endeavor called filmmaking. And perhaps that’s the note on which Raya
Martin ultimately wants to leave us – not a scathing satire but an
oblique homage to filmmaking.
reviewed: June 28, 2009
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