HILO (thread) (Jan Philippe V. Carpio, 2007)

Within the framework of the huis-clos hangs, with obsessive recurrence, the cinematic corpus of Jan Philippe Carpio. As much as any other director might prefer to be identified with works of cosmic scope and significance, Carpio favors a more circumscribed premise: the closed doors, where characters are scathingly and powerlessly entrapped and pitted against each other. In Balay Daku (2002), his early masterpiece, Carpio foregrounded a hacienda full of inimical and inescapable bedfellows. In Tako, a short film about old flames threshing out their relationship at a despedida party, the premises could just as well be a phone booth.

Call it an affinity with the likes of John Cassavetes or Nobuhiro Suwa (M/Other comes to mind), call it a nod to Bunuel's hellish mise-en-scenes (The Exterminating Angel comes to mind), Carpio has often gravitated towards this strain of chamber drama, lean and spare, ever attuned to Sartre and his notion of the unbearable. The conflicts Carpio probes and examines are not so much materialist as they are metaphysical no-exits – as such, more irresolvable, and more harrowing, versions of hell.  

Hilo (2007), Carpio’s third full length film, further distills Carpio's fascination with the claustrophobia of the closed doors. Structured as a triptych, it charts the deadlocked relationship of two lovers, revolving around an unsettled and oft-interrupted dinner that runs the gamut of emotions, everything from nervous laughter to teary-eyed reticence.

Emerson and Jenny are, on the surface, regular lovers. Little indicates they are ill-matched. A salient point, however, is the fact that the man is a professor, while the woman is a student, which might explain certain dynamics between the two. Three almost identical episodes compose Hilo, slightly different from one another only in their gradual addition of detail and the growing tone of fatigue. The setting is a  dining table -- that hallowed place which imposes civility on the proceedings. Consequently, the couple hem and haw, approach and circle their issues with much trembling energy and much awkward aside. Speech bears a lot of informational withholdings, skirts a lot of verbal taboo. Voices trail off, murmur and sing to themselves, the objects of their predicates are missing, their pronouns refer to unknown antecedents. The problem is "it." But there is much misplaced laughter, that crutch of silent spaces and improvisatory dead air, almost to shatter the fourth wall for us.

Hell is other people, Sartre once declared. But Carpio is not as misanthropic nor hell-bent on passing judgment. With Brechtian mannerisms and a withholding of the true bugaboos bewitching the characters, Hilo keeps us at a respectful distance, our perspective bearing witness to the effects rather than the causes of the couple's impasse. Instead this dramatic aloofness, one suspects, serves to fetishize gentility – that of the ever-shifting mirage of civility, a bourgeois strain of which Carpio observes and sometimes subverts in Balay Daku. We suspect the truth about Emerson and Jenny, but there are enough gestural fakes and feints to throw us off; all we are certain of seeing are bits and pieces, like so many fragments and facets of a cubist painting.

Describing his oeuvre as a succession of “momentaries,” Carpio emphasizes the instantaneousness of his films, their shimmer that we briefly glimpse. Call them snapshots, quick cross sections, or slices of life, Carpio seems solely intent to present points in a continuum, a mere thread in a bigger tapestry, all meant to preclude easy, conventional conceptions about his body of narratives and character construction.

With the bareness and minimalism of a Dogme 95 setting – a table for two, a half-full dish of pasta, and spoons and forks that Emerson and Jenny toy self-consciously with – Hilo funnels our attentions to its two actors and their curious dynamic that manages to engage our empathy. Sympathy,  on the other hand, is made elusive by distanciation. Meanwhile the improvisational work of the two actors, Jenny Logico and Emerson Sanchez, is commendable. Carpio is not unlike a Prospero who sets a basic premise into motion for his protagonists to extemporize and enflesh its ontological bare bones.

True to the implications of Carpio’s conceptual idée fixe, Hilo  concludes in a kind of impasse, the problems as insoluble as ever. Things are back to square one, and somehow different. For, without exactly knowing why, we have undergone the brunt of emotional and psychical attrition, only guessing at the unknown wellsprings of the couple's problems. Without realizing it, we have come full circle: The couple is dead! Long live the couple!   

BALAY DAKU (Jan Philippe V. Carpio, 2002)

This house is huge, indeed. Home to the Gonzales clan, sugar barons of Bacolod City, this dwelling, however, should come with a caveat: few of its spaces welcome the outsider. Each room seems a hermetic cocoon, a seemingly padded cell of confinement and isolation. There is an empty and hollow air that hangs in the living room. In its immensity and capaciousness, this communal space evokes the dead interiors of a museum. True enough, we are made to see multifarious curios and artifacts adorning the wide walls and expansive floors. From the same walls are portraits of dead ancestors looking down coldly, inhospitably.

Yet make no mistake about it. The foregoing is no preamble to a traditional family melodrama. Balay Daku, the feature debut of director Jan Philippe Carpio and quite possibly the first regional film ever produced in the country, steers clear of the histrionically draining trappings of this genre to claim a category all its own. With light, bracing humor and mock seriousness, Carpio’s film teases and exposes the excesses of the landed upper class in a smart and artful manner. We inhabit the house most tellingly through the eyes of Stella, a stranger to this surroundings, a woman newly married to Julio, a scion of this family being groomed to take over the family's hacienda. Soon enough, transition into this provincial setting becomes suffocating and filled with such strange tensions for the newcomer that she blurts out, “Are there ghosts in this house?”

In Carpio’s film, the spectres are not of the paranormal kind, but characters ostensibly deranged and trapped by the ennui and isolation of their class and social position. The matriarch, Inday Carmen, rules the home with stern presence, but alone in her inner sanctum, she weeps in her sleep, self-suffocating, self-imprisoned for an indeterminate reason. Her eldest son, Boy, seems just as bedevilled, but his problems are more over-determined. He runs the hacienda almost singlehandedly and yet without the assurance of tenure. In love and romance, his life is just as problematic: he is continually spurned by Isabela, who is younger brother Julio’s jilted lover. What rankles in the mind of this older brother is just that: sibling animosity. And yet there is little, explicit vitriol. Or little sounds like it.

Friction and tension are negotiated by the Gonzaleses through the vocality of language, in particular the Ilonggo tongue. The verbal tussles between Stella and Julio are not too grating on the nerves, but register as lovers’ quarrels, paradoxically romantic and humorous, albeit shading into violence. Class differences melt away between Stella and the housemaid Lore whenever they talk and switch signs. Inday Carmen’s peremptory pronouncements are resonant as much through timbre of voice as the tonalities of language. The orality of voice finds expression, too, in many telephone conversations that pepper the proceedings.

Carpio’s affinity for dialogue and its dynamics finds a correlative in the sweet and dulcet tones of his mother tongue. If Tako, another of the director’s films, demonstrated the lacerating properties of language, Balay Daku enunciates a seemingly more singsong infliction of hurts.  Either way, it seems Carpio has cast his lot with the likes of Sang-Soo Hong and John Cassavetes, experts at the snarl and growl of dialogue, and yet not too distant to Rohmer, whose ear for ingenious conversation is just as meticulous.  

In this connection, it is worth noting how Balay Daku does bear, among other benchmarks, the brand of the French New Wave. The attention to dialogue can be attributable to Rohmer; the formal experiments (e.g. the elliptical editing) to Godard; the capricious energy and flights of fancy to Rivette. What remains indubitable, however, is how Carpio adroitly merges the influences of cinematic modernism and achieves what he has set out to do: a damning, damaging, but well-sublimated portrait of the rich.            

If Balay Daku ends on a conciliatory tone, the image of a fused family, we know enough not to trust it. We know that this could all be an impasse. We still hear the ironic laughter that has started to echo in this house. Maybe a new generation is on its way. Maybe not. The words trail away as we recede from the gates, that house is huge, a shorthand for our disdain.