MANORO (Brillante Mendoza, 2006)

By now, every film enthusiast worth his salt must be aware of the teachings and tenets of real-time filmmaking, a paradigm of Filipino cinematic practice pioneered by the avuncular Armando Lao. Often, however, it remains misunderstood to mean something literally unfolding in real time, that is a 90-minute-or-so glimpse of one continuum. It isn't strictly so, although it may create the appearance of a compressed span of temporality. What's most important, however, is not the illusion of synchronic inspection; rather its immediate and intimate dramatic impact on the audience and a logistic one on the fledgling filmmaker. In a nutshell, this film approach denotes a narrative paradigm encoded in a "found story" framework, nominally taking its cue from experimental, non-fictional film-making only in so far as it reworks and processes "found" material by the filmmaker -- perhaps in the form of documentary footage or research material -- until a narrative coheres and is put through further production. Often sociological in nature, often taken for Filipino neorealism, real-time filmmaking may share some of the Italian paradigm's features -- actual marginal people and actual locations -- but Lao's tenets may be more liberal and do not exclude, among other things, the use of professional actors and assistance, and a tendency towards documentary immediacy. Under the illusion of a spontaneous actuality it seems to faithfully depict lies the deliberate but unseen hand of the auteur-writer as creator.

In recent years, a string of real-time masterpieces, including Jeffrey Jeturian’s Kubrador and Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador, has given this film practice a high artistic profile. Manoro, another work by Mendoza, continues to demonstrate the virtues of this school of filmmaking. With its compressed narrative taking place in a handful of days, involving non-professional Aeta actors, and a documentary intimacy -- factors that bestow the filmmaking process with economical and streamlined aesthetics -- Manoro ("teacher" in the Aeta tongue) is a film of disarming and deceptive simplicity that chronicles the life of the Aetas, particularly that of Jonalyn Ablong, a teenage girl tasked to instruct her fellow Aetas -- illiterates all -- how to fill out the ballot.

The year is 2004 and it is the eve of presidential elections. Armed with basic equipment and a makeshift blackboard, young Jonalyn must traverse a dying landscape, past water-lily-strangled streams, across lahar-choked plains and mountains, to prepare her fellow Aetas to vote. Whether taking pains to write down FPJ, GMA, or Lacson, there seems to be a child-like struggle to do so for the Aeta. Meanwhile, Jonalyn’s grandmother’s mind seems to be elsewhere – before a simple attack of black ants disperses this gathering.

Another matter of concern for Jonalyn is her grandfather who has gone hunting for wild boar in the mountains. She and her father must make a long, arduous trek through treacherous trails to look for him if he is to cast his ballot the following day. Jonalyn’s father seems equally fickle about the coming elections, and seems more inclined to find employment at a South Korean project in the vicinity. But that, too, requires filling out forms.

Manoro is as much about a portrait of a young teenage girl (i.e. the disproportion between her ability and her mission), as it is about a portrait of an indigenous people, a subtle sociology of shortcomings through an outsider's prism. Ralston Jover’s script offers a balanced vantage but ultimately an understated reproach to the Aetas. They may be depicted as a close-knit community who share the fruits of hunting and gathering, but there are less than flattering jabs in their direction. Take their worship of pagan gods to whom much is attributed. Take their flighty and fickle stance towards the election, the allegory of the lowly ants that can scatter them. They seem to be caught unsure at a crucial crossroads, no longer simply hunter-gatherers but not fully absorbed into modern society just yet.

Harnessing a cast of Aeta characters who essentially play themselves, a highly suitable use of hand-held cameras and a documentary approach, Manoro evokes a multi-faceted fable – of troubled hope and of a people caught in retreat. There are faint echoes of Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards and Kiarostami’s Where is The Friend's House? and other Iranian films to be found in this film. There are also slight resonances of the mysticism of something like Souleymane Cisse’s Yeelen. But Manoro lays solid and unshakable claim to what it portrays. Filmmakers of the old schools, sit up and take notice!  

reviewed: September 11, 2009
revised: May 11, 2013

TIRADOR (Brillante Mendoza, 2007)

Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador opens summarily and briskly with a police raid on a shantytown in the outskirts of Quiapo. Rendered in cinéma-vérité fashion, it's a night sequence that simulates what we see on the evening news, the herky-jerky camera work that documents all manner of interrupted illegality – and in this breeding ground of criminals, out they come tumbling.

The element of surprise rattles the red-handed: packets of drugs and other paraphernalia go flying out the windows, prostitution stops short of consummation, and the guilty, who must feel accordingly so, take a dive into fetid waters to escape. No exit for the unwitting – except for those who have learned to adapt to these specialized lives, those who know the loopholes of the law and can humor them.

It’s a heady and humorous beginning to what is essentially a cross-section of the underbelly of Quiapo, a portrait of the small-time criminals whose fates literally crisscross in the commerce and commotion of its busy streets. Much of the humor and irony can be self-deprecating, taking to heart, it seems, the truism that the Filpino laughs at his own misfortunes. And there can be as much misfortune as fortune in the act of everyday survival. Mendoza’s criminals are not smooth and infallible operators, but they know how to roll with the punches.

Young Odie is one of them, and his modus operandi is to pilfer coins from unattended gambling machines. Another is Caloy who must turn to snatching after his pedicab is heartlessly repossessed. Odie’s father will take your valuables at knifepoint, but shares his meager takings with adopted families. Rex and Tes are a couple in more ways than one, pilfering cheap electronics in well-coordinated tandem.

In Tirador, most of these men and women, young and old, have long ago stopped sentimentalizing the despondency of being at the bottom of the social totem pole. Even among their own kind, there is no letting their guard down. They live by the cold laws of the urban jungle, where Social Darwinism applies with ruthlessness as well as with finesse. One can never afford to turn his back on a cowering figure or a seemingly repentant or remorseful quarry. They are a pack of chameleons with well-practiced masks, all honed to second nature.

Mendoza’s social commentary – leavened by streetwise idiom and the jargon of gangsters and thieves – levels the breakdown of law and order on the whole rotten hierarchy of society. The usual suspects are easy targets and not spared here: they whose electoral faces are plastered all over walls like so many mugshots of wanted criminals. But the culture of cynicism and immorality are more deeply entrenched. Politicians and religion are partly singled out, but in truth, it’s an over-determined state of things. Corruption breeds corruption, ad infinitum.

To disentangle the coils of corruption, however, is not, ultimately, Tirador's purpose. What’s paramount is its study of self-preservation. Nothing is sacred here-- so that the feast of the Black Nazarene is not just a moment for religious fervour – but provides singular opportunities for thievery. Grand electoral rallies, with the fiery motherhood speeches of the country’s supreme leaders, are equally promising bonanzas for thieves.

Tirador, as the foregoing suggests, is sheer gritty realism – but not angry, certainly not vociferously so. Paradoxically it radiates raw and lurid power with underplayed drama. As a piece of docudrama, it has much method and stripped-down production values in common with Mendoza’s other real-time film, Manoro. It’s a visual departure from the self-conscious aestheticism of his other films namely Masahista and Serbis. But in Tirador, there is a hand-in-glove dovetailing of form and content. The handheld, in-the-trenches camera work goes hand in hand with street-level proceedings, observing without comment what would otherwise be sentimentalized or overdramatized. Where exploitation might be unavoidable, Tirador achieves sheer human compassion.

  
Reviewed: September 29, 2009  (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)