MONDOMANILA (Khavn dela Cruz, 2010)

These body fluids, this defilement, this shit, are what life withstands… Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility.

                       
                                  - Julia Kristeva, An Essay on Abjection

This is not another masterpiece by Khavn dela Cruz. This is not guerilla digital filmmaking at its finest. This is not the stuff of cinema: Certainly not about the high-jinks of the juvenile and the poor; the foisting upon audiences of the taboo and the abject; no, there is no subversive import lying just beneath the surface. No, this is not a film by Khavn dela Cruz. This is not his 28th film. This is not Mondomanila Filmfest Motherfuckers. 

Leaving aside frivolity, Mondomanila represents one of Khavn’s best films to date. Here is a flower of evil plucked from the fertile dung of the margins, blooming among the dregs of society; here is a work of uncompromising and unwavering vision, a film that was almost stillborn, but now here in our midst, jumping out at us like a jack-in-the-box, thumbing its nose at us who cower behind blinders. In a word, be prepared for a frightful but rollicking ride through a no-man’s land that we, the coddled, hold our breaths against and turn away from.

At the rotten core of Mondomanila are teenage layabout Tony and his juvenile posse, Paranoid X, pleasure-seeking delinquents without a future but never to be taken for pushovers. Here in their neighborhood of slums and garbage dumps, they are kings, and the cameras observe them in very close proximity, rendering them through hallucinatory filters, washed-out colors, split screens and strange lighting. These Bunuelian olvidados exhibit few inhibitions: young, brash and compliant, they mouth their syntax of obscenities and perform outrageous acts that straddle the lines of morality. They sing and rap, some of them break-dance, some hold small jobs, some don’t, but what makes them gravitate together, what defines them, are common misery and drug-induced fantasies. 

Much of their adolescent fantasies, predictably, revolve around sex. Among them is a compulsive masturbator, who uncontrollably does his thing even in the group’s presence. Another literally engages in bestiality: easing himself on a live, squawking goose, just before he chops off its head. Lumped together, their sexual obsession is even worse: they peep on fornicating midgets and lesbian twins. Meanwhile, menace lurks in the background: Whiteboy, a Caucasian pedophile, makes no bones about his perverse ideology and submits the young kids of the neighborhood to “sexual slavery.” Soon his deviancy hits very close to home.

Figuratively, yet all but literally, one gets buried neck-deep in Mondomanila’s proverbial bodily fluids. The immoral. The criminal. Few taboos remain unscathed here. Combining the abrasive aspects of his recent films namely Squatterpangk and The Family that Eats Soil, Khavn transvaluates Julia Kristeva’s notions of the abject and turns it from a source of horror to something darkly humorous. Instead of horrifying us and making our skin crawl, Khavn numbs and etherizes our sensibilities into a catharsis: blood, piss, excrement, bestiality, sodomy, and mutilation are here in plentiful doses that erode our guards. At some point we start to laugh; we wallow and luxuriate in it. Numbed and etherized in the abject, Khavn paves the way for his film’s subversive end.

Cunning murder, hypocritical revenge, to borrow Kristeva’s words, this is what the film deems its logical coda. Guile, cunning, hypocrisy are exactly the words that befit the crime, subsequently a composite of several crimes. The fact that the crime is compounded raises the acts to the level of the abject, many times over. We laugh nervously and must do a double-take, as the so-called heroes dance and sing for joy after the fact: We realize our rank complicity, our blurring concepts of right and wrong. We argue curiously: But doesn't the crime -- done as it is at the expense of someone draped with neo-colonial trappings -- translate to a symbolic act of patriotism? And how to explicate the aggravating actions after the crime? Reparations? Somehow it is so morally wrong; somehow it is so viscerally right.

Alternate Title: Mondomanila Filmfest Motherfuckers
reviewed: December 6, 2010

BREATHER (Khavn de la Cruz, 2011)

A filial tribute. A tone poem. A meditation on life and death. Breather stands as one of Khavn de la Cruz's most virtuosic works to date, commendable in the way it works on so many levels.

As a piece of portrait, it is a touching ode to Leonardo de la Cruz, the filmmaker’s late father, dead earlier this year of lung cancer at the age of 65. What is noteworthy is how Khavn has distilled the memory of his father, as it were, barely two months after the latter's demise. As a personal meditation, Breather is dark but not unrelieved by poetry on the mysteries of life, existence and mortality. As an artistic statement, Breather invites to be read as a furtive declaration of fatigue setting in. After 31 feature films in 12 hyperproductive years of film practice, Khavn, too, needs some breathing space.

Breather, however, belies this. It is hyperkinetic filmmaking, a mash-up of sound, image and poetry. Edited chaotically and mosaically, it allegorizes the mindscape, the thought processes, of a man trying to reconcile himself to life and its inexplicable mysteries. This man, his father and the world around them seem to embody distinct life principles. His father appears to represent the joy of life despite adversity. His words and his manner caught by Khavn’s handheld camera lack the bitterness of someone about to die. Staring at the imminent death of his father, Khavn is the opposite – inconsolable, all gloom and doom. The world is not stopping for either of them in its inexorable cycle of life.

Through a recitation of poetry, however, Khavn tries to find some kind of solace and sublimation. This enables him to hedge on his private grief by concealment in the poetry of others. Not one continuous text, the poetry has the effect of disjunction and fragmentation. Intoned by the filmmaker in voice-over, the verses seem inspired disparately, written by different authors. From time to time, a line of relevant verse pops out – something that has to do with the dark nature of existence, angst, bitterness, gloom – but we never stitch them together into one fabric. The important thing for the filmmaker, it seems, is to convey a dark tonality.

The most memorable passages of Breather-- the heart and the rock, as it were -- remain the footages featuring the father. Grace defines him. He dances in the teeth of death, literally. It takes a noble character to allow himself to be documented while he struggles for breath and sustains apparent pain; it takes a gracious father to be asked by his son with probing but groping questions. If Khavn hides behind poetry, the father is plainspoken. If Khavn uses his camera not just to document, but as a crutch to approach the father, the father, very composed and calm, is eloquent and obliging. This way, even though Khavn began to shoot belatedly, a month before the father’s eventual death, Breather succeeds at its portraiture. This limited time, however, meant a limited perspective: a hagiographic one.

Perhaps it all begins and ends with one word: bereavement. When the father is out of the frame, it is unmistakable elegy. The screen seems one cauldron of visual noise, the images fragment, blur, and superimpose on one another. When faces and music of friends and family bubble up, they are almost hallucinatory, celebratory. Life goes on, despite grief. As Khavn wraps up his 31st film in a dozen years, Breather seems to represent a gravitation to chaos, a seeming antithesis at a crucial point of his film practice. Where does Khavn go from here? What next? The man alone has the answer.The years are young; his horror vacui will fill the void in his life with worthy things soon enough.


Tagalog title: Pahinga