SITIO (Mes De Guzman, 2013)

Sitio, by Mes de Guzman’s own admission, originates from a story that he had to dig up from his old baul. It is a decent film, to a certain extent likable, but to be honest about it, it gets iffy with its embryonic ideology. This time de Guzman's adopted province of Nueva Vizcaya and its country types are defamiliarized beyond recognition. Whether in a good way or not is another matter altogether. 

Sitio, in essence, tells the tale, at once harrowing and humorous, of urban folks rusticating to the titular village in Nueva Vizcaya: Jonas, a real estate magnate reeling from a business fiasco, is on the retreat with his two younger sisters in tow. Here, they encounter rural men with ominously strange gallows humor (Don’t be surprised if these crazy Ilocanos suddenly point a bolo at your jugular and threaten your life if they want to play a prank on you.)

This, then, sets up a world turned upside down. De Guzman posits an urban-rich/rural-poor dichotomy. This encapsulates an oft-examined scenario basic to the cinematic lore of the former Communist countries (good examples would be Otar Iosseliani’s Pastorale and Vsevolod Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia), where this time the binary hierarchy of these two spheres is reversed in the manner of Derrida. This time, then, the city dwellers, with their superior airs, are in for a surprise. At first they may seem in power, but the rural protagonists here are not without cunning. 

The crux for the urbanites comes when they are suspected of killing one of the villagers. This sets off a scheme on the part of the dead man's relatives – all of whom are male (which may or may not accrue to a subtext of phallocracy) – to live off Jonas and his sisters. So they make merry – with food and drink – at the expense of the put-upon hosts. The rural denizens thus become the oppressive and privileged class.

But the ideological schema diagrams the situation this way: the poor locals show a limited, simple-headed opportunism, while the rich urban visitors evolve from complacency to fierce display of self-preservation. The Marxist critic may be left wondering as to who, in truth, is the more adaptable and resilient of these antagonistic classes. So much, it seems, for the ascendance of the real oppressed.

Perhaps it should not be unexpected of De Guzman to go off on such a tangent. Sitio, however, is an act of recidivism; it represents an admittedly more larval stage in the director's  evolution. His more mature work has seen him go from strength to strength, from romanticizing young children in Iranian New Wave fashion in early films like Ang Daang Patungong Kalimugtong to demonstrating the desperate pedagogy of the oppressed in Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa up and just earlier this year, Ang Kuwento ni Mabuti. His version of the oppressed has become more complex. They have unmistakable shadings of moral ambiguity, alloyed with human dimensions.

In Sitio, however, we come face to face with crude, unsophisticated cosmologies: a regression of thought processes, which somehow interrogates the reason for the creation of this film. The situation the poor provincials create is rather factitious and begs questions. If all they are ever after are a handful of free lunches, they are doltish tricksters. Real opportunity, real pragmaticism, real revolution, is not about a free meal but a transfer of the mode of production, as it is explicated in Marxism. 

Even in affluent societies, acts of opportunism are an offshoot of such a premise (e.g. it goes under the heading of "a litigious situation"), but that of the poor in Sitio represents something of a caricature of historical materialism. There is no urgency nor tension to settle fatal class grievances. As if aware of their place in a farce and black comedy, the dead man's relatives are content to partake of banquets and milk their hosts for money in piecemeal fashion. Meanwhile, the rich captives are just as simple-minded, not thinking of taking the matter with all the moral certainty to the authorities (Here one recalls, too, an escape route in an earlier episode involving a dead chicken.) This way it nullifies the deadlock of entrapment to come as in Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Which may be the point of the exercise, a nod to an ancestor, something which Sitio makes plain, trying to recreate it with less violence and terror but with mixed success.       

ANG KWENTO NI MABUTI (Mes de Guzman, 2013)

Money connotes evil. Not just that, money has come to denote evil. Entirely evil. Lopsidedly that is how Robert Bresson coldly dissects the figure and presence of money in L'Argent: a manipulative demon with its accompanying materialist ideology, a trail of murder and crime lying in its wake. Nothing good can come out of it: money reeks. Enter Ang Kwento ni Mabuti, a film that reimagines this signifier of sin, repurposing money for yet another intention. The old aura of money seems to invert and shift colors in this new and commendable film by Mes de Guzman: foregrounding the question of what is virtuous in a world where nothing is unalloyed, where ethical and moral absolutes are a pipe dream even for utopians among us. Here many of the dependent characters are deeply flawed and face an unpromising earthly future, their sins wearing out their originality and mortality, by the time the virtuous Mabuti is placed in the hot seat, tested by poverty's ineluctable problem and a bagful of money.

In its searching of worldly deliverance, Ang Kuwento ni Mabuti is not unlike an old morality play, where its title character has an agon with her sense of right and wrong, whether it will serve an individual or a social good (at least her own society), but the stakes are less otherworldly and sublime, more immediate and mundane: terrestrial salvation. Forget the world to come, it seems to imply. Pragmaticism and consequentialism are not untenable, it whispers. Mabuti must read the fine print that comes with the money and the semaphores of circumstance: isn't it value neutral?

All but a truism to say that everything Nora Aunor touches turns, even from dross, into gold: the alchemy of Mabuti is no exception. Nora lends tremendous cachet to it by her stellar thespian presence, reaffirmed here with understated perfomance in the Ilocano idiom. But what must be equally recognized is how Mes de Guzman’s authorial achievement lays equal claim to this movie, based on a story he wrote some time ago without an explicit wish of making it into a medium for a Nora Aunor. Everyone around de Guzman, however, simply couldn’t help discerning the bright adumbration of the great actress in the role of Mabuti. De Guzman kept his fingers crossed and one day, with a connection made and consummated, she simply showed up on the set.

Ang Kuwento ni Mabuti may present a scenario so well-trodden as to be negligible -- how to transform the matter of money, the crux of conscience? -- but de Guzman handles it in such a way that we simultaneously shake and nod our heads by the time his film concludes. Chances are, most will agree with its signals of predestiny, but not without a sneaking question left hanging silently somewhere within. But it is all part and parcel of Mabuti’s own passion. Along the way, she, like a pilgrim in progress, is tested and tempted, and when we suspect coming on an obligatory Christian ending, de Guzman inverts the influence of religion: Mabuti’s own definition of virtue comes to the fore. Remember how the devilish son gets thwarted time and again in de Guzman’s earlier film, Diablo? This time the progress of Mabuti’s journeys gets often interrupted, but all is stoically shouldered. That is Mabuti’s deceptive grace. Mabuti, like a ministering saint, fields and keeps the needy under her wings: the daughters of her errant daughter, the equally cavalier and wayward son, and the many neighbors who need her faith and shamanic succor.

But in greater moral terms, if Bresson fingers money as filthy lucre, passed around as a gun in a genuine Russian roulette, de Guzman elevates the matter of money beyond something like a Kantian category, although we might be convinced we are trapped in one with all the crookedness and immorality surrounding Mabuti. Perhaps when, in the hardscrabble, poverty-stricken life that must be waged in the mountains of Nueva Vizcaya – where Communist insurgency remains; bankrobbers, too -- Mabuti’s countenance seems to change at the sight of money, hinting at the vortex it represents, money that's not rightfully hers, the dangers of fate she thinks are playing tricks on her prove to be self-perpetuating and self-terminating. Fate seems here to tempt and ultimately withhold its own dangers and risks. That is perhaps, the one of two knocks on the film - along with its raft of piggybacking characters. -- Or is it simply the nature of fate?

Mabuti, in this sense, is the incarnation of sainthood made pragmatically attuned to the times. Far from a daughter who has children by many different men, a son who adds another, Nora's Mabuti remains resilient and earnest reminiscent of a Giulietta Massina through it all: she has a shy smile behind a dusky and weathered exterior. When not minding her many granddaughters, she has always enough time – the patience of a saint -- to dispel the incessant threat of rabies and venom with some spit and her magical poison-sucking stones.

Local color proves both bane and boon for the film: the mostly non-professional characters, Novo Vizcayanos, come off as mostly wooden if you speak their language, but they also have the unique presence, the sui generis, to enchant you by their strangeness – even as de Guzman makes no secret of his enthusiasm for his home province, his intent to democratize filmmaking in those parts. Sometimes, however, the movie's stab at equal opportunity threatens to spin off to many loose ends and subplots that divert with their seeming function of dedramatized anthropology. On the other hand, indigenous details may divert in a good way -- e.g. the playthings of the forest, the sumpak, the proliferation of shops for secondhand clothes or wag-wag stores, the corruption of local officials with jueteng, the many military checkpoints, the superstitions around faith healers. Somehow, it all works -- all accretes to texture. Forget how de Guzman passes off the town of Aritao as a city, because these are the ramifications of a journey of fate where, from de Guzman’s perspective, nothing is simply as it seems. Even as Nora has expressed an earnest interest in a film about villainy, the seeds of evil have been subtly planted here, only justified with a benevolent end, deep within Mabuti's bosom. Think about it. Light, after all, may never occur without its underside of shadow.  

  

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.

  

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)