GIVE UP TOMORROW (Marty Syjuco / Michael Collins, 2012)

That this film was underwritten, bankrolled and co-directed by a relative of Francisco Juan "Paco" Larrañaga, the subject of this documentary, should give the viewer some pause and perspective. Not the pause and perspective that are borne out of the film’s understandable bias, but the pause and perspective that our own biases have run rampant within us from being fed by mass media only part of a crime story involving Larrañaga. 

For most of us old enough to remember him, Paco Larrañaga seemed every inch guilty as charged of the rape and murder of the Chiong Sisters, Marijoy and Jacqueline, sometime in 1997 along with his co-accused. But the truth is we were made to know precious little of a more comprehensive story: forces in society worked to suppress the bigger, deeper, and more accurate picture. 

More than 14 years later, the air may have sufficiently cooled. This film tries to go upstream, as it were, to dramatize the story of a long-suffering family who may have kept their silence for far too long, and perhaps more crucially, present Larrañaga's own testimony which was muzzled, every step of the way, by the trial courts. The film gives voice to a simple but well-corroborated defense: the plain, verifiable contention that Larrañaga, 20 years old then, was in Manila, studying at a culinary school, when the crimes were supposed to have taken place in Cebu. 

Today, Larrañaga, a dual citizen of Spain and our country, sits in a prison in Madrid awaiting an elusive parole after a protracted odyssey, having shuttled perilously from a life sentence to a death sentence, then back again, before his repatriation. The wounds and hurts he and his family have been inflicted, however, may be too deep to ever fully heal.

 

That will help explain part of the thrust of the film not to spare anyone, not even the aggrieved family of the late Chiong Sisters. Many of the intentions of the bereaved parents come into question and they don’t come off smelling like roses. They are made to appear of knowingly pinning the blame for the deaths of their daughters on innocents. They are implicated in keeping mum on their knowledge of crimes. Suspects arise: there is a shadowy and powerful figure, hinted at but judiciously unrevealed by the film, who may be behind the horrific fate of their daughters, although this theory is not allowed to fully cohere. 

But the overarching influence that the Chiongs are supposed to wield – an influence that holds sway on the police, the anti-crime groups, the justice system, all the way up to the president – does hold some water. It all stemmed from mass sympathy and outrage, the groundswell that put pressure on the minders of society. Everyone was sucked into the vortex of an almost soap-operatic drama that struck a societal chord: the perception that the rich always get away scot-free.

The film then is double-edged in its affect and effect: it is a defense of a kinsman as well as an implicit indictment of how society can go horribly wrong. Footages of editorial shows on television that were quick to condemn Larrañaga make us flinch, and the interviews of members of the Larrañaga family are full of helpless grief. They all add up to the plausibility of injustice being committed against someone repeatedly referred to as a “boy.” Society may be to blame, but their motivations, akin to that of a mob, however, may also be explicable. Larrañaga, mestizo and reputed to be a bad boy in Cebu,  “a scion of the influential Osmena clan,” became the flashpoint of a seething class antagonism. This is the revenge of the masses, so to speak, against one of the aristocracy.       

But what proves ultimately powerful, despite the care and discretion of the filmmakers not to sentimentalize their subject to the point of seemingly insulating him, is how the film remains profoundly, dramatically affecting. There are not many footages involving Larrañaga’s own statements -- might he implicate himself otherwise? -- but somehow his scarcity and perceived reticence gives him an aura of dignity and an aura of even-mindedness. It is the members of his family who are called upon to reveal what this man and they themselves have had to suffer and endure in the interim. In the words of those who make testimonies on his behalf, he still remains a child. Then as the footages unfold, we see him being led away in handcuffs to the chants of death, then little by little we see him grow into adulthood, and because he remains something of a mystery throughout, we wonder what these experiences have wrought on his life. Then he speaks, uncertain of his future, quite philosophically, how if he is to give up on life, he should “give up tomorrow.” And tomorrow, he will repeat the same line. Heartbreaking.  

 

ANG NAWAWALA (Marie Jamora, 2012)

I spent my youth obsessing about music -- seeking out films like this, films whose soundtracks might appeal to me, not merely as accompaniment and background to enhance, or embellish, the dramatic proceedings onscreen, but rather, as splendid and cherished music on their own, waiting to be abstracted, identified, and acquired for my own listening pleasure. Foundational films are all but synonymous with John Hughes and include such classics as Some Kind of Wonderful, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Ferris Bueller Day Off -- superlative examples whose sound design transcended their cinematic purpose and became personal and popular soundtracks for an entire generation. Active in the 80s and early 90s, Hughes pioneered this innovative kind of incidental music, culling from the pop and rock music of the era -- often British New Wave, sometimes Australian, sometimes continental Europe, sometimes North American -- rather than commissioning the work of professional film scorers. (No accident that most of the titles enumerated above form part of Hughes filmography.)

During those simpler and admittedly more naive times, films made the grade if they included cameo performances by beloved bands, if a favorite tune or some excellent new discovery would only play in the background. In many instances, a song was the mnemonic to remember any movie by. Times, however, change. Years later that kind of music fell into decline and it closed that chapter of my life. Besides, films of that persuasion, most often of the so-called high school subgenre, were also coterminous with that era. Now everything is a memory, a corollary of my younger, more innocent, more ignorant days. Today cinematic cameos and walk-ons of musicians, more often than not, strike me like so much product placement.

What of more recent retrospective movies, say, those throwbacks to the postpunk era and their music-related thematics like 24 Hour Party People or Control, you may ask? Did I not succumb to the tempting evocation of Manchester's independent scene circa 1980s, and savor, in particular, the recreation of concerts of Factory label bands at the legendary Hacienda? Did I not lap up the brief life of Ian Curtis, the briefer life of Joy Division, the timbre of this suicide's tortured vocals and his spastic dance moves? Admittedly, I did, on all counts, with wide-eyed nostalgia to boot. Admittedly, when cleansing the retina of challenging films, I allow myself the soft touch of such films. Admittedly, too, my jaundiced presumptions of their lack of worth have been time and again proven wrong, as demonstrated above. So with the push and pull of mixed feelings, I went to watch Marie Jamora’s Ang Nawawala, partly with a knee-jerk jadedness, but partly with something akin to an adolescent’s exuberance. Ang Nawawala, after all, promised to fill the bill. The spotlight was on a kind of music after my heart, indie pop, that little known variety of pop with a small, specialized following.

To my dismay, nothing clicked. Nothing registered with me. Alas, there were no anthems worth latching onto, at least not to my fairly cultivated ear for music. Many of the indie pop allusions were not lost on me, but there were moments of vague disconnect: was it the film's glaring formulism, was it the distancing and warping effect of age and my past musical allegiances, is today's indiepop not my thing despite my profession of affinity? Turning into an unwilling eavesdropper, I had to suffer through the uninteresting non-story, mostly a pretext for shooting band performances and the indie pop lifestyle that I initially thought to be cinematic. Wrong. For some reason, it cut no ice with me. Not even the slew of cameos -- from Pedicab to Outerhope -- came close to home. My affections for films with a musical leitmotif turned limp and lifeless.

Ten years reportedly went into the preparation and gestation of Jamora's film debut, but what comes across is mere surface luster: a spankingly crisp and fluid cinematography that takes in everything from band sound checks and gigs to a fine array of indie pop paraphernalia and status symbols: Tintin t-shirts, Hello Kitty headphones, Korg synthesizers, a Japanese vinyl pressing of Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration, and stacks of mostly New Wave vinyl records -- all calculated to jack up the hipster index. But what was put on the back burner was, unfortunately, the single most important ingredient: the blueprint for a plausible, well-written screenplay. Ang Nawawala's story proves paper-thin, its focus on music, concerts and records, nothing novel, its central character, a self-imposed mute, is improbable. Compare and contrast that with, say, Stephen Frears' High Fidelity. For one, Frears' film concerns relatively more identifiable and more believable characters. Moreover, much of the musical aces up its sleeve, now well-known tropes, were unique to it and newly minted when the movie first appeared, mainly thanks to Nick Hornby's novel. Maybe High Fidelity was the apex of its kind, after which everything went downhill and derivative: the proto-film about mix tapes, vinyl records, and musical coolness and triumphalism.

At some point even Frears' movie started to sag on me, as soon as its mechanisms became apparent on subsequent viewings. Ang Nawawala doesn't fare better, formulated with a much-used Hollywood template -- i.e. boy and girl meet cute, boy goes steady with girl, boy loses girl -- and worse, it tries to be a bricolage of two movies, the first one being the above-mentioned courtship between boy and girl, a lot of which happens at indie pop concerts-cum-karaoke-sessions, and the second one involves the nominal theme of filial estrangement, a negligible Oedipal conflict of sorts, tacked on at the eleventh hour to save the whole project.

Much of Ang Nawawala seems simply too precious to be comprehended. By the time it begins, our hero has held himself incommunicado for the duration of a decade, and for reasons, it would turn out, that seem to be non-issues. However, he obliges to communicate through all sorts of gadgets and electronics, too. Where is the integrity here for that prisoner of a long-lingering shock? It all seems at cross-purposes, but there may be an explanation: it does, after all, conform to a certain brand of indie pop ethos. Consider how most indie pop sub-genres such as chamber pop, twee, guitar pop, sophisti pop, jangle, c86, and bedroom pop, for instance, mirror a kind of aesthetics that is more pop-slanted than rock-oriented, more self-conscious than self-assured. Consider the mannerisms of these sub-genres and they may well hint at the mellow and subdued sensibilities of the average indie pop listener, including our hero, a melancholy softie who can't and seemingly won't outgrow his traumas. When the great reveal of his hurts happens, it predictably proves underwhelming, and we wonder if it is intended as a reproach to the indie pop fan's putatively suspect constitution, or as a larger, more encompassing critique of middle class vulnerabilities.

Amid the growing welter of poverty films circulating at all the domestic festivals -- those grimly serious films tackling widespread and legitimate social problems in earnest -- Ang Nawawala sticks out like a sore thumb, a whimsical work by comparison that foregrounds affluence, privilege and the ridiculous problematics of a young man rendered perpetually mute by his mother's casual slip of tongue. Frankly, much, much better conceptualized statements can be made about the bourgeoisie than this. To be sure, Ang Nawawala excels in terms of photographic polish and irreproachable production values but there is a gaping chasm at its narrative and ideological center. A flashback towards the end weakly explicates the source of our hero's protracted silence: his trauma stems from an overly precocious realization, at the age of 10, of his mother's secondary regard for him vis-a-vis his twin brother, the favorite, who dies suddenly and leaves a void in his mother's life. The felt hurt of neglect, of not being the fair-haired son, may sting but is it supposed to linger? Mountain, or, rather, molehill? Or has it all been in the agenda: has writer-director Jamora endeavored to show that such a hypersensitivity defines the upper crust our hero represents -- that the bourgeois are made of such feeble and fragile stuff? Possible, but doubtful: there is no tangible ideological slant within the film. And when the music fails in the final reckoning, a music that serves as an aphrodisiac for its two blossoming lovers, but shows, in the end, the tenuousness of its talismanic power -- let's just say, the girl proves promiscuously phonocentric while our hero remains silent and tight-lipped -- Ang Nawawala has become a matter of sheer indifference.   

    
Title in English: What Is Not There

SANTA NIÑA (Emmanuel Quindo Palo, 2012)

The stance of anticlericalism is a rare thing in the movies. For a filmmaker, it is akin to a granitic rock he picks up and bludgeons his head with. Pressure groups, the so-called guardians of morality, not to mention the church, are bound to scuttle his film and even threaten excommunication. Luis Bunuel was the odd one, the single biggest filmmaker the Christian Church has ever had for an opponent. Films such as L’Age d’Or and Viridiana attest to the surreal and artful means the Spanish master employed to skewer organized religion. Fast forward to the present and Emmanuel Quindo Palo has taken the cue from this precedent, venting his own hurts and heresies against the Church through his feature debut. Unlike Bunuel’s sophisticated broadsides, however, Palo’s mouthpiece is astonishingly the fervor of a layman -- and how he holds his own!

The story Santa Nina tells is striking but not unfamiliar: premised on the discovery of an uncorrupted young girl’s corpse in the lahar-laden wastelands of Pampanga. In the scramble for safety during Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption many years earlier, Marikit’s coffin had been swept away and got buried in volcanic material. The girl’s father, Pol, a man who has amends to make with the Church and with a deeply moralistic society, sees his child’s return as a sign of God’s forgiveness.

At this point the film pays homage to Bernal’s Himala as the illustrious corpse of Marikit becomes a kind of holy relic. We see the droves of the sick and the faithful making the pilgrimage to Pol’s house. And we see the cottage industries that sprout around it. Even the governor and his wife are soon believers bestowed with healing; Pol’s own senile mother has become lucid once again. Pol's estranged marriage also undergoes amelioration.  

When testimonies to the miraculous powers of the corpse start to spread, Pol becomes bullish and dares to believe that out of his sinful loins, he has fathered a saint. Here the scenes turn into reverse catechism, as Pol confronts religious leaders about his religious doubts and his fervent wish for his daughter. Basic and common-sense questions about doctrines go begging here. The film has to be watched if only for these seemingly simple-minded but potent questions. Pol’s words are as fiery as those of a scorned figure, and one by one the parish priest, Pol’s sister, a nun, and the archbishop of San Fernando fail to dissuade him. True, canonization is easier said than done, entailing a bureaucratic logjam, but all fail to argue against the simple logic of this layman.  Pol, however, makes silent and outspoken converts of some of his doubters, even among the ranks of the Church.

That religious skepticism, if not mischief, was on the mind of the filmmaker is when it handpicked Leo Martinez --- a comedian who often portrays corrupt politicians and rich, womanizing fat cats – to play the archbishop. His devilish typecast is not lost upon us. True enough, his archbishop hems and haws, a figure of fun, while Pol is not unlike Pasolini’s ferocious Jesus. Sister Madel meanwhile argues in favor of the layman, not unlike a layman, while decked in the vestments of the Church.

That Santa Nina has ultimately a conciliatory and seemingly submissive ending, that Pol swallows his own rebellious voice, that he undertakes Lenten crucifixion, may be Palo’s way of hedging his heresies. And perhaps, he must calculate and not push the Church to the rearguard. The Church should be made to think of its high ground, its magnanimity, its co-option of the film’s dramatic dissension. Even so, even as the holy relic proves to be an illusion, the gospel of Pol is now out there, spreading from mouth to mouth.

Alternate Title: Santa Nina, Sta. Nina

DIABLO (Mes de Guzman, 2012)

Diablo throws us for a loop with an opening scene that depicts a devil possession in a mining camp in the highlands of Nueva Vizcaya. This is a red herring, a play on our expectations as to the earthly manifestations of the devil, a play on our expectations when it comes to the traditions of horror. But this is no conventional horror. This may not be a horror film at all. If the prologue says anything, it is that dark forces do exist, in the chambers of cheerless caves up in the mountains, as well as in the chambers of  the heart in our own living breasts – where we don’t dare to look, where they are least expected. 

Then we find ourselves in the huge, half empty house of Nanay Lusing, a mysterious matriarch who seems to be a master of her solitude. She is a reserved and intrepid woman who hardly makes a peep when an earthquake shakes her house. She is a widow and has five sons, all of whom have left home but who come to visit once in a long while. There is the miner, there is the soldier, there is the inheritance-seeking never-do-well, there is the farmer, there is the Lamplighter, whose emulation of Jesus throws us for another loop. He comes in the night and scales Nanay Lusing’s home as though it were to battle a monolith of the devil. Again, director Mes de Guzman seems to be pulling our legs, and humorously preparing his meditations on the conflict of good and evil.     

    

The devil, in truth, does not come in the form of cloven hooves, forked tails and horns. The devil may very well be our own living flesh, our own spawn, our battle with loneliness, our battle with solitude. Nanay Lusing at first seems an impregnable wall:  all the “devil” can do is stand in silhouette in the shadows, another de Guzman joke. As long as she can hold on to the few things that keep her sane, however seemingly little, she is free of the devil. She is an impregnable wall who cannot be brought down by rumors about herself, the neglect by her sons. She insists that she can fend for herself. Instead, she befriends street waifs, feeds them, and takes them into her home.

Some of the most telling scenes on the ineptitude of the devil are made clear by the return of Nanay Lusing’s money-grubbing son, full of schemes and full of cunning and wiles. He will stop at nothing to get his way, he may even send her own mother down the river. If anything, however, the scenes involving  this son demonstrate how the devil gets discomfited and thwarted, how the principle of goodness almost makes easy fun of it. Look for the sequences full of risible magic realism, on the power of holy palm wreaths, and how they are supposed to ward off the devil.  

But de Guzman may be simply wearing the ill-fitting mask of humor. Like the deadpan faces in a Kaurismaki picture, the humor here can be dark and wry. As far as I can tell, this could very well be dedicated to the predestined loneliness of all mothers. I see my own mother here. I see his own mother here: I’ve heard about her delicate condition nowadays. When life starts to go haywire at the end, when the nature of life is overturned, the devil may very well be there to waylay. When Nanay Lusing yelps at the death of her radio’s batteries – a signal of how the cumulative force of human tragedies has finally hit her – de Guzman has taken an abstract of the devil’s impending triumph and has given it a concrete expression.

  

POSAS (Lawrence Fajardo, 2012)

Like a visual motif threading the film, the camera fixes on these ministerial words on the sides of patrol cars, on the walls of a police precinct: to serve and to protect. Transpiring in a matter of a day, Lawrence Fajardo’s crime thriller, Posas, demonstrates the terrible irony of such a fighting cry. It begins with the commission of one petty crime and ends disturbingly with a terrible mug shot of a well-entrenched culture of higher crime and corruption. At film’s end, who gets served and protected gets unmasked yet again in a society where law is no deterrent but, paradoxically, an expedient that serves the unscrupulous.

It all starts with the simple theft of a cell phone in Quiapo. A pickpocket operating in the vicinity, Jestoni Biag, is caught red-handed and identified by his victim. At this point, the police procedural unfolds with the customary manner of the genre, from the finger-printing of the suspect to his moment at the fiscal’s office. But as the proceedings wear on, the brutalization of the petty thief takes hold. The thief’s denials are easy pickings for the brutal police who force a confession out of him. The police secure him his pardon, but not before utter pain, not before anguish, not before a Faustian bargain for his soul.

If nothing else, Posas depicts the pecking order of crime and corruption: from the street-level thief to the fence to the police to the unseen voices on the phones. The entrenched nature of this breeding ground for crime ought to be a chilling proposition but the treatment by Fajardo is sadly too impressionistic and epidermal. Instead of enlarging on his stories, he sometimes gets caught up in the improvisational skills brought in by his actors. He seems to be aiming for a documentary immediacy, although it is bound to pale in comparison to, say, the rawness of TV Patrol.

But that is not to say that the film has failed in his purpose. Although most of this material is mundane knowledge, it has its moments. For one, there is an almost imperceptible rearing of ugly heads here: corruption almost sneaks up on us. What might start as a routinary questioning of the suspect turns gradually into obscene dehumanization. What might seem like a complaisant handling of a pretty victim’s case, turns out to be an insidious ploy by the police all along: a calculated act of evil that is too practiced and fluid not to achieve its ends.

Fajardo also contributes to this genre the psychology of the criminal. Like the corrupt policemen around him, he is getting adapted to the technicalities of the law. He latches on to the loopholes, and even his family starts to reason like him. But as pecking orders go, he remains the bottom feeder. Posas, then, retells the tragedy of the small fry who at the end of the day will get the bad end of it. And here as in real life, he fails to get his day in the sun. Instead, he must suffer the ultimate loss of his soul. Here as in real life, he must reside in the shadows of the bigger and monstrous forces who manipulate and circumvent the law.   

Title in English: Shackled   

BWAKAW (Jun Robles Lana, 2012)

Advancing age does not sit well with Old Man Rene. The years have not been kind to him and have given him the patina of a grumpy, unhappy figure. Woe to anyone who dares cross him: the old man has a withering tongue and a mildly violent streak. Fierce in his solitude, he keeps many of his friends and neighbors at bay, and lives alone in a rickety ancestral dwelling. Here his sole companions are Bwakaw, a voracious, loyal stray, and if you can count it, a wooden sculpture of a supine Jesus that is said to be miraculously growing. 

The crux of his unhappiness seems to stem from his unflaunted and secretive sexuality. When one of his friends, Zaldy, an aging but flamboyant parlorista, gives him first dibs on a couple of call boys, he sends them back with a stinging reprimand. The old man seems to be going through the motions of life. All that consumes him are the details of impending death: an empty coffin sits in his living room; his prized belongings are wrapped up and inscribed with the names of intended recipients; he obsessively revises a last will and testament that he entrusts to the parish priest. An encounter with a brusque and muscular tricycle driver named Sol, however, breaks down his grumpy, irascible exterior. Now the perpetual scowl has turned into secret smiles; the old man relents to a haircut and has his gray hair dyed.

While this premise is far from novel anymore, there is charm in the the small, aforementioned and still unmentioned details. They are all marshaled with great timing and pacing. While Lana’s script seems to have been cobbled together from a cycle of old-man films -- such as De Sica’s Umberto D. (about a man and his trusty dog), Kurosawa’s Ikiru (an existential fare about an old man finding meaning in the terminus of life), and even Bergman’s The Wild Strawberries (a lyrical surreal meditation on old age) and Sorin’s Bombon El Perro (about a man who finds inspiration and redemption from his dog) -- Bwakaw finds an alchemy through the bricolage of dialogue and characterization, if the foregoing paints a part of the picture.

A meditation on old age and death, Bwakaw is splendidly leavened by acerbic wit and rough humor. This often finds expression in brutal exchanges between Old Man Rene and the ensemble of absurdly comic characters around him. The overall tone remains light and bright. While there are plenty of references to sickness and death – e.g. someone keeps importuning Old Man Rene for an audience with the miraculous santo entierro on behalf of the sick, and fatal sickness surrounds the old man and ultimately strikes close to home – they contrast with and are eclipsed by the lively and robust and humorous characters. A moment of hilarity that thumbs its nose at death happens when Old Man Rene lies down in his coffin, and pretends death while his friends and neighbors walk in on him and start mourning.

The triumph of Jun Lana’s film is to serve up death in a marinade of humor, vitality, and indomitability. There is no treacle dripping from it; no cloying, sickly sweet aftertaste. None of the histrionics of dying, no heavenly kowtowing. Neither is Bwakaw a celebration of ghoulish morbidity and dark humor. Nor are the characters steeped in bitterness and cynicism. Even at the film's lowest moments, darkness does not enter into it. Like the titular dog, one must learn to seize even the scraps. Like the dog, one should be voracious for life.  

  

KALAYAAN (Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr., 2012)

Enisled on Kota Island, one of the disputed islands of the Spratlys, Julian Macaraig, a solitary sentry, spends his long, uneventful days in routine and ennui. Other than reporting ship movements in the area, there is little productive to do, so he idles the time away with silent and deadpan regularity. Here he listens to the unfolding news of President Estrada’s imminent downfall on radio and television, on the shore he poaches turtle eggs buried in the sand, he keeps himself fit with his daily dozen, and masturbates to Asian pornography.

But there is something strange that draws him to the island’s mangroves. He bears witness to inexplicable sightings here. This is prefigured by a prologue showing a mermaid giving pleasure to a man of unknown identity. When two other soldiers are assigned to join Julian on the island, we learn the enchanted and maddened fate of those who previously held the same post. But they are tales of the fantastic: how mermaids abound and may make contact, how a lost and spectral sentry roams the islands, how the secret location of deposits of black gold is kept by the mermaids. We also learn how the death of his predecessor has rendered Julian mute for many moons.

On the surface, Kalayaan follows through lengthy, unedited takes the island sentry’s isolation, a fact which foreshadows the dangers of enforced exile and solitude.  Silence is its first symptom. Seeing mythical things is another. Madness may be next. But through radio and television broadcasts, the fate of the disputed islands is made to run parallel with the fate of a nation, a fact that allegorizes the importance of the latter. The film’s title, after all, denotes the grand word of freedom. One interpretation might point to the ironic lack of freedom of the film’s main protagonist – his seemingly being held incommunicado, a victim of large traumas. This is echoed and verbalized with empathic displeasure by the two arrivals. On the island, the lack of freedom destroys the mind, and evokes illusory figures and phantasms, dark and fatal as the promise of oil.

Along with Sandoval’s Aparisyon, Kalayaan is probably the most consciously and frontally European in tone and approach among this year’s Cinemalaya entries. The thrust of visuality and the sparsity of dialogue not only remove the burden of the vernacular from its Thai actor but bring the film closer to the aesthetics of Western filmmakers. In scenes showing the sentries performing exercises, there is a conscious effort to take a page from Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, a film about the French Foreign Legion in a remote outpost in Djibouti. This is not to mention the entire tradition of contemplative cinema valorized in the last decade or so in Europe that Kalayaan seems to draw from. Closer to home, Kalayaan has affinities to the work of Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose own enchanted forests figure in Blissfully Yours and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives.

Judged as a work in the prolific career of director Alix, Kalayaan represents a triumph. Kalayaan is a deceptively simple film about the dark side of solitude, and yet read at a higher level, yields a more profound significance.  Like last year’s Isda, and unlike his earlier output, it exemplifies how elements of magic realism and the supernatural can be harnessed to deepen and add meanings. That it may signify Alix’s easy (too,easy, some will maintain) adaptability, that it may suggest that he is something of a chameleon without a particular style (from the straightforward, unaffected debut of Donsol to the Iranian-inspired Kadin to the expressionist, poverty film Chassis), this filmmaker can answer by making more and more films of this caliber and quality. There can be no doubt, Kalayaan is one of the superlative films at this year’s Cinemalaya.

Title in English: Wildlife

REQUIEME! (Loy Arcenas, 2012)

The way we regard our own doesn't always equal the way we regard the foreign born: how often we discriminate against ourselves. Filmmaker Loy Arcenas continues to impress and delight -- this time with such themes as xenomania, and double social and moral standards. No sophomore slump here. A new and rich vein, in fact, has opened up for him. Gone for now is the lyric mode inherent in his debut, Niño. Gone for the moment is the serious and solemn tone. In its place is the ludic and ironic side of a versatile film practice. REquieme! demonstrates a more frolicsome bent, a more inclusive reach with its searing portrayal of the addled Filipino psyche.

There is much to appreciate here: the wealth of relevant themes and the way Arcenas weaves, intercuts and translates them into his own brand of black comedy. There is a temptation to go for broke and swing for the fences, but the director shows maturity in depicting his ludicrous observations with such assured judgment that the wry sense of humor does not come across as mean-spirited or off-putting. He skewers them all, though he is more composed than scattershot: our operatic grief, our sacralization of the dead, and our irreverence to all things that spout out of us like so much stream of consciousness, emphasizing a wildly verbal culture.

REquieme! is irreverent but not done in bad taste. Arcenas brand of black humor here supports the soap box for four deaths, and two funerals, those twin themes of death and lamentation. Our supposed reverence for the dead is given an uproarious roller-coaster ride with a televised saga of a corpse being mistakenly transported elsewhere around the world -- from Riyadh to Rome to Hawaii – to much dismay and mourning of his family. Then such lack of reverence  finds wry expression in how a dead man is given two funerals. Elsewhere another of the corpses gets held up interminably by red tape and rigid bureaucrats.

But just as paramount to REquieme!’s concerns is its commentary on the discrimination against unconventional sexuality. Surprisingly it is also the film's heart. At the center of the film, after all, is Joanna, a would-be transgender who, after running away from his homophobic home, has found a new identity and a semblance of family. When one of his surrogate kin dies, he goes to the extremes of giving him a decent burial. Meanwhile, Swanie, his estranged mother and a barangay captain, is trying to make a show of grief and translate the death of his distant Filipino-American nephew Adolfo Payapa – the notorious killer of a famous fashion designer – into electoral victory. 

What makes us infamously tick as a people, Arcenas seems to know by instinct. And he is learning well, openly taking a page from another accomplished satirist, Dennis Marasigan (director of Vox Populi), who gets a famous nod here. REquieme! keeps it refreshingly current owing to its strong sense of our fundamental social and cultural weaknesses, although it is clearly inspired by the life and death of Andrew Cunanan and his murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace in 1997. 

Whatever the case, the viewer is apt to be surprised with shock after shock of self-recognition. Just as much, the moments of the collective mentality are bound to be telling: the second-guessing and kibitzing as communities gather around television sets, radios, and funerals. Arcenas transmutes these moments of the Filipino psyche with a keen sense of humor and irony. They never feel crass or perverse, only that the sociology of a people is spot-on and so pitch-perfect that our only rejoinder is laughter, a nodding, knowing  laughter.                             

APARISYON (Vincent Sandoval, 2012)

Darkness has fallen upon the country. The streets of the capital are smoldering and exploding with mass protests to overthrow a despotic regime. Plaza Miranda has just been bombed, sending shock waves of brutal repression. The proclamation of Martial Law seems imminent. Somewhere in the countryside -- in a nunnery in the woods -- the state of things, however, couldn’t be more different. Monastic life is all but untouched and proceeds with idyllic steadiness:  the nuns undertake their tasks in perfect peace and serenity, there is joy and wide smiles during meals. A new nun has even come to the fold. The spreading lawlessness, however, is about to shatter this peace and interrogate their connection with the outside world. 

Vincent Sandoval’s Aparisyon is set with historical and political specificity, but it could happen anywhere where the fate of a people is at stake, where the push of a precious little could tilt the balance. Aparisyon is a film that allegorizes the inaction of the crucial many, the silent majority of society. More important, it thematizes the horrors and dangers of social passivity. 

Rather than receive the terrifying news from outside, the Mother Superior in Aparisyon silences the last remaining radio with confiscation. Rather than resolve the ills that claw and paw at them, there is an inward direction and even self-flagellation. Rather than blow the whistle on a crime, the nuns allow themselves to be gagged, lest they call attention to themselves, lest the malefactors turn upon them.

Sandoval establishes all this with lush cinematography. The theme of cowardly inaction is carefully and poetically constructed in brilliant compositions. Often, the faces of elderly nuns are framed in close-ups to reveal deep and heavy circles around their eyes, eyes that silently betray fear and meekness and apprehension, brows that are knitted in self-concern. Mostly they are silent. What begins as a gravitation towards natural idylls, turns into a lingering in the cold interiors of the nunnery. The camera pans here are slow and lingering in keeping with the sluggish response of the nuns, in keeping with the themes of inaction and indecision.

Great credit is due the filmmaker for fashioning something that is often thought beyond conflation: a poetic and lyrical allegory that is also profoundly political, profoundly dialectical. It is doubly to his credit that he accomplishes this without leaving the environs of a nunnery. It features nuns but it may have little to do with them. In effect, Aparisyon questions, for one, our own received images about nuns – nuns that link up in the frontlines of People Power, nuns who are fierce, brave and eloquent -- but it never mocks us and our complacent stand. In this regard, Sandoval is something of a humanistic instructor, a Socratic mentor who always wants us to question the world. Wants us to jump down from the fences and act bravely and decisively when the crucial moment comes.