ANATOMIYA NG KORUPSIYON (Dennis Marasigan, 2011)

Expectations run high when a film like this attempts a portrait of such a monolithic subject as corruption. Anatomiya ng Korupsyon seems dressed for the part, as portentously titled as any picture put on screen, conjuring in our minds something epic and dramatic. Director Dennis Marasigan, however, has a reputation for making films of finesse and tempered sentiment, and sadly enough, in this film, he sticks too conservatively to his comfort zone.

As much as a public pillory is in order -- that carcass of corruption dragged out into the open -- Marasigan softpedals it. The subject he singles out -- shenanigans in a Marcos-era government office -- is handled all but daintily. Euphemistically. Marasigan seems too much of a nice guy to fight fire with fire. He all but says, excuse me, before he skewers his quarry. 

In Anatomiya ng Korupsyon, Marasigan hides more than he shows -- often to our dismay. Perhaps we are expecting an expose, while Marasigan presumes his subject to be a fait accompli. For instance, he gives us a scene where a government clerk with a deck of playing cards proposes a game to an officemate, but Marasigan just as soon cuts away. It is an opportunity fraught with possibilities that goes begging. We get it, but Marasigan approaches it with control and restraint, and consummates what the scene is about off screen. 

Restraint, obviously, is not bad in itself. And there are those who like Anatomiya the way it is. But sometimes this film doesn't need it. Sometimes it needs to loosen its reins for fear of asphyxiation. Following through on its potentially humorous moments will only improve the synergy of its parts.

Few filmmakers like Bresson (L'Argent) can pull off what Marasigan is trying to do, a tight-lipped treatment of a massive theme like corruption. As it is, Marasigan is doing Frank Capra material with Bressonian seriousness and deadpan. Here, its main protagonist, Cely Martinez, a new, idealistic lawyer appointed to the Family Court, is the picture of deadpan, to the point of making her seem more soulless than the lively corrupt government officials that surround her. (It might be argued that that is precisely the point: Corruption has been naturalized.) 

That is the kind of ambiguity and uncertainty marring this film. When dealing with its humorous moments, it also gets bogged down by its oscillation between parody and satire. Parody, for instance, is a shot of an office drawer stocked full of merchandize like cigarettes and candy. We don’t laugh. It’s old and there is no riff on it.  

Satire, on the other hand, is what happens when a corrupt clerk actively hides a folder of documents on a disordered desk in order to delay their delivery and therefore cause more bureaucratic grease money. Now this image is fresh and we react accordingly. In terms of parody, Anatomiya does not present anything new, nor does it reinvent its images. With its satire, the film scores points by ridiculing, for instance, the actions of the misguided clerk. Why satire is not sustained all along, one can only suspect that the material has not been thoroughly developed. 

Ambiguity also attends the depiction of corrupt superiors in Anatomiya. They do not come across as villains. They are almost too clean and mild-mannered. They don’t wallow in luxury and money. They are almost understanding, nice guys, giving the newcomer all the leeway she needs. Perhaps it is all intended to depict a new kind of culpability, but their lot looks more naturally life-like than the film’s supposed heroine. 

If I'm somewhat disappointed with Anatomiya ng Korupsyon, it is because the film is not half bad. Marasigan is a well-meaning filmmaker who has proven himself in this vein before, but this time, he has in his hands a work in progress. Perhaps he ought to look at his film’s ending first. Out of nowhere, it equates an idealistic and incorruptible character like Cely Martinez with someone like Jun Lozada, someone who is not exactly beyond reproach. While the likes of Cely Martinez eat insipid cafeteria food under a mocking poster of La Dolce Vita, the likes of Lozada are luxuriating in a club house in some exclusive subdivision. And what of the staggeringly cynical line that Anatomiya takes from Lozada – how he was tasked to "moderate the greed” of public officials – are there gradations of greed then? Is corruption, and the guilt born out of it, a matter of negotiation now?   

Alternate Title: Anatomiya ng Korupsyon

Title in English: Anatomy of Corruption

MGA ANINO SA TANGHALING TAPAT (Ivy Universe Baldoza, 2011)

  

The shadows at noon, they have always been there... 

These dark, penumbral undercurrents sneak up on the viewer. They stalk the center, where three girls rush to embrace the advent of adolescence. On the cusp of full-fledged bodies, these girls anticipate it with a sense of wonder and headiness. Baldoza’s film is meant to foreshadow the collision of changes – spiritual, intellectual and physiological – in the lives of its characters: a personal testimony that reminds us how fraught with distress, as much as happiness, this stage in life can be. 

These girls are the newly adolescent. Their flowering is headlong, and complacent. They embrace the latitude of their young age, but ignore the fine print that comes with it. They handle sex as an unfamiliar apparatus, in different stages of clumsiness and callowness. They are tempting fate, a fate that memorializes them in various stages of maturation. You can all but draw a schema. Thus there is a reason to read a symbolic subtext into their destinies.

Much mystifies the illustration of the three girls’ lives. There is a biblical fatality in their quest for knowledge, more so that they are oblivious and uncalculating, myopically curious and caught up with the turning of their bodies. They meet at the wake of their grandfather in a bucolic province. Ines is an urban adolescent who is curious about her family secrets, wanting to come to terms with her mother’s past. Odessa is a provincial lass who is experiencing the bloody bodily changes of adolescence, and savoring in turn the sight of a boy bathing half-clad. And Ezra, her elder sister, frontally and boldly faces the urges within her, sexual and sensual. 

Their fable is framed by a rural superstition about the contagion of death. When someone dies, it is said, a relative should refuse overtures that occur in their dreams, or be the next to die. You never realize how significant this line is until the chilling, haunting end. In the meantime, there is beauty in how the literal and the symbolic are inextricably intertwined in this allegorical piece.  

The vulnerabilities of the girls are illustrated by the story of Ines and her impressionability to the supernatural. Appearing to her in a kind of dream, spirits of the forest proposition her in exchange for the secrets about her mother. She gravitates to them and their mysteries, perhaps even in her waking moments. Yet she is not even the most susceptible.

At every turn rears the mystery of life and sex and death, their symbolic interconnectedness. You can, however, read this film as both allegorical and actual and there is plenty to spare; that is its singular achievement. You can range far from folklore to Freud and not explain this film away, or you can dwell on the everyday in which it is set. These are the transpositions and juxtapositions that Baldoza makes possible in this unlikely coming of age film.   

Mga Anino Sa Tanghaling Tapat is a film that starts quite generically but ends up strong and indelibly. The makings of a family drama at the start give way to an unforgettable fable that crisscrosses genres and realities. It is no simple achievement, juggling the various elements mentioned above without taxing our sense of enthrallment. Adept as any fabulist, Baldoza strikes a commendable, careful balance, creating a film that ought to garner a viewership. Whether adolescents should see it, perhaps they ought to. Although the strong imagery may preclude it, the film's message is a kind of caveat to youth that recommends itself. But I doubt, in this all too literal and prudish country, their hysterical, blushing mothers would allow it.

Alternate title: Mga Anino ng Tanghaling Tapat

Title in English: Shadows of Noon

SA KANTO NG ULAP AT LUPA (Mes de Guzman, 2011)

Filmmaker Mes de Guzman seems to have one overriding and obsessive tendency throughout his career: a Wordsworthian affinity for naif and innocent characters caught helplessly in the clutches of an unwelcoming world. These protagonists in de Guzman's films are often children or youths, depicted as castaways or as disenfranchised creatures left to their own devices, scarcely comprehending their sorry plight. Many of the old Kanun films of Iran, films catered to the young, are artificial compared to this, their dilemmas little more than math problems geared to their delicate age, their outcomes leaning towards happy or hopeful resolutions. De Guzman, on the other hand, does not shy away from tragic denouements, taking the classical unities of drama to their logical and truthful ends.

This darkening of vision in the work of de Guzman has been most pronounced in recent years. Last year, he engineered Stone is the Earth and Ice is the Earth, two parts in a projected trilogy that are particularly embedded in this ominous vein. That is not to say that it is a newfangled tendency: his earliest short, Batang Trapo (2002), and his famous Daang Patungong Kalimugtong (2005) are not exactly sunshine paeans to children.

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa is apt to sunder hearts once again. Set in the inhospitable province of Nueva Vizcaya, it takes an unflinching gaze at the hand-to-mouth lives of four street boys living on the fringes. They are from the highlands, but the lure of modern life and disaffection from their families have made them come down to the big, bustling towns like Solano, Aritao and Bayombong. However, few jobs and opportunities beckon, only the pangs of privation. Instead of food, they chew on betel-nut to slake their hunger. 

As in many broods, there is a pecking order among these kids. Yoyong, the eldest, most adolescent of the group, is big-brotherly but not above putting a hand on his younger mates at the slightest provocation. Poklat is a firebrand, who either stands up to Yoyong or abuses his secondary position. Boying seems loyally attached to the group, finding his way back even after being forced home by his father. Uding, the literate among them, is the bottom feeder, who must make do with scraps after every one has had their fill. 

Episodic in structure, neorealist in approach, De Guzman's film shows these kids caught in the last gasp of innocence. Their naivety is best illustrated in a scene where they bring home a discarded vhs player found on a garbage heap. Believing it to be a gift, they have it tested on a neighbor’s television, only to realize that it is broken and  beyond repair. Worse, it is technology as obsolete as their innocent worldview. 

For the most part, cynicism has not corrupted these kids. The world still holds out grand abstractions like camaraderie and love. In one episode for instance, Yoyong is taught how to read and write by Uding, in the hope that through letters he can court a well-off girl he admires from afar.

De Guzman, however, does not underestimate his characters. He affords them with sparks of cunning that seem lifted from childishly clever movies they have seen. One episode details how the youngsters write a letter to trick the boss at the local slaughterhouse into hiring Yoyong. They surprisingly succeed, and are soon helping Yoyong wash pig entrails. At such times, the twists and turns may seem to be scarcely plausible.

But De Guzman is carefully setting things up. He is chiseling away at dramatic uniformity. This is the bliss before the fall. Events are steering inevitably into an incontrovertible ending. What happens, he asks, when a disjuncture between the boys' unwieldy dreams and the world's monolithic reality becomes all too painfully manifest? What happens when their sense of family derived from the group is threatened and the appeasement requires such grand and heroic gestures?  And what happens when hunger intervenes in all these boys' hardships? Antidotes to these visceral yearning lose their dark luster. They must be sought at all costs. 

Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa is a film composed with calibrated compassion. It secretly wishes for a reprieve for its characters, but it concedes to the tenor of things. The final moments are oneiric and hallucinatory, swathed in muted light and thick fog: the boys are trudging up a grassy mountain. Does it conjure a kind of ascension, or are they being summoned again for a cruel comeuppance? Are they going back home, or nowhere between heaven and earth?    

             
(Title in English: At The Corner of Heaven and Earth)
(Alternate Name for Director: Ramon Mez de Guzman)

BIG BOY (Shireen Seno, 2011)

Pax Americana, circa 1945, comes to the Philippine Islands at the end of war. On the island of Mindoro, American parachutes rigged with relief goods dangle from the high branches of trees like loaded socks on a Christmas tree. There is expectation of colonial largesse in the air. Former soldiers serving under the Americans claim their much-cherished benefits. Citizenship. Travel. Money. Livelihood.  

Strange, bittersweet things, however, are afoot for a pre-adolescent boy named Julio. From a laboratory in his backyard, his father has just created a growth concoction whose efficacy is quite a success. Each day made to take spoonfuls of the bitter drug and bodily stretched on a rack, Julio is the docile guinea pig. His growth spurts are notched on the bamboo poles supporting the family nipa hut. This way, approval from his father seems welcome, but Julio must pay for it according to the strictures of scientific method. His siblings run free; he has grown distant from the village. He seems mute, wearing a doleful look. Julio has become Big Boy, the mascot of his father’s entrepreneurial spirit, deep in the fastnesses of Mindoro. One day he stops growing.

Big Boy, the first feature film by Shireen Seno, is in many ways about the traumatization of childhood. Childhood is not always magic and idyll. True, to some extent, Seno’s film mirrors Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A Summer at Grandpa’s with its evocation of a happy childhood. Here with fondness are the wonder years: the parlor games, the outdoor adventures, the staunch playmates, the favorite songs, and the innocence. But in Big Boy, the innocent is uncomprehending and bewildered, tragic and ill-fated. It is perhaps because national hindsight paints a darker picture, owing to the unlucky turns in our history.

For her first film, Seno deserves a ton of credits for her unflinching recreation of a colorful but sorrowful childhood. One can imagine a screenplay almost wholly descriptive of time, mood and place: Big Boy is quite visual. Seno finds a true correlative not just with a grainy stock and a Super 8 camera that felicitously envision bygone times, but with collaborative and mentoring minds who help her transition into feature filmmaking. John Torres and Pam Miras are credited by Seno in one interview, but two kindred spirits emerge from a viewing of Big Boy. Raya Martin’s Independencia and Kidlat Tahimik’s Turumba are what come to mind, one of them a period piece set in early American times, and the other about a child's traumatic encounter with the West.

Apart from its strong and evocative visual qualities (an out-of-focus, deteriorated look and a smudgy palette), Seno makes conscientiously sure that the film's soundtrack is not neglected. Her use of out-of-synch sound evokes the convolutions of memory. We remember this way: the sounds and images are sometimes governed by different mnemonics. And again, the verbal aspects in Seno’s film are as evocative as the visuals themselves. For one, the singing of songs and the family banter and endearments are pitch-perfect and seamlessly complement what appears onscreen. No mean feat for a film that mostly foregrounds children,  most of whom are non-professionals.

Big Boy is also a study in how a few touches can recreate faithfully a given period. It helps that some architecture of American handiwork remains, but with minimum expense the visuals of Big Boy seem to take on an old vintage. A street sign, household implements, a costume or two, an American song sung as a lullaby – all not so elaborate minutiae that believably indicate the postwar era.      

Few filmmakers are like Seno, for what she achieves is not even often attempted. Today’s filmmakers want to be modern and contemporary and urban, or simply have no connections to the past. Seno is not one of them. Big Boy has a special resonance for those who have once listened to the older and slowly disappearing generation. The stories they tell often turn toward the generosity of our old colonizers. Hey, Joe, do you have chocolates? The line is anachronistic, but you still hear that in the provinces.  My grandfather, an English teacher in peacetime, named his children after characters in books that his American counterparts gave him. Our obsession with our old masters has been total – and fatal. Seno tells this heart-wrenching story.