JUNGLE LOVE (Sherad Anthony Sanchez, 2012)

The jungle is obscene.   -- Werner Herzog 

 

The jungle is all about our dreams, our deepest emotions, our nightmares. It is not just a location, it is a state of our mind. It has almost human qualities... The question I asked myself when first confronted by the jungle was ' How can I use this terrain to portray landscapes of the mind?'
                                                                 
                                                    -- Werner Herzog

The jungle leads us beyond social and cultural codes, to a state of nature where humans must confront themselves to find themselves. Society increasingly makes us forget our inner lives and concentrate on the outer ones.

                                   -- Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
               nicknamed "The Sergei Eisenstein of the Jungle" 

 
In Apichatpong's work, the jungle is a radically different world, populated by spirits, mysterious beings, and half-animals. It is the realm of dreams, the non-rational, of secrets and desires. Whoever enters it leaves the safe communal space of the town or home and faces the unknown.”
                                            
                                                -- Natalie Boehler


Both the complex paradigms of the forest stemming from the Occident (the German Herzog) and the Orient (the Thai Weerasethakul) converge and conflate in Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s Jungle Love: the psychological and phenomenological (Herzog) coexist with the patently mystical and animistical (Weerasethakul), the stark vision of nightmare (Herzog) sits alongside the elusive but graspable notion of the sanctuary (Weerasethakul), the speculum of the immanent and imaginary (Herzog) juxtaposes with the robust transcendence of the supernatural (Weerasethakul). And still Sanchez thrives in its interstices and repurposes the jungle for socio-economic, religious and political usages. Everything happens and yet integrates closely together in Sanchez's version of the jungle.

Despite its supposed inviolability and sacrality in our culture, here the jungle is a playground, but one with a mind of its own, too. In it, we find a pair of young lovers from the city blithely lost and searching for a tribe in its midst, all the while using its landscapes for sexual relief. They taunt and torment their native guide with carnal innuendos and his temptations soon start to burgeon. About to cross their paths is a middle-aged woman, who sexually scorned by a younger married man, steals his child, and escapes through the jungle. Left momentarily alone, the infant in her possession mysteriously disappears into thin air. Meanwhile, a detail of army men undertake drills and training and take a swim in a nearby river. While there, one of them becomes enchanted by an invisible entity in the midst of the jungle.

Harnessing the frameworks on the jungle articulated by jungle-crazed directors like Herzog and Weerasethakul, Sherad Sanchez incorporates into his film a cross-pollination of all those ideas and translates them into a hybrid both imitative and yet original. As in Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Jungle Love is all about “our dreams and deepest nightmares.” As in Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives, Sanchez's jungle teems with “spirits and mysterious beings.” These presences are self-evident and hinted at here. As in the Thai auteur's Tropical Malady, Jungle Love is an escape from “social and cultural codes,” as evidenced by the free love that reigns in its midst.

What sets apart Sherad Sanchez’s Jungle Love, on the surface, is a light, unfreighted tonality and mood -- one of ludic and playful impishness and mischief that refreshingly distinguishes its vision from the often portentous, sombre and humorless approach of other filmmakers trying to condense the mysteries of the jungle. This can be ascribed, for one, to Sanchez's flippant treatment of all the denizens of this jungle, both tourists and transients, on one hand, and the resident spirits and the lost tribe, on the other.

Almost to a man, the characters in Jungle Love seem obliviously trapped or ensconced in the maze of the jungle so that they never appear grim nor do they angle for sympathy. While the old woman seems distraught over losing the baby, her condition does not prove pitiful. While the urbanites may forever go in circles beyond anyone's help, they aren’t tragic: we may even see their vanishing as just deserts for their desecration and carnalization of their surroundings. When an army man receives pleasuring from an invisible jungle spirit, the sight of orgasm is not off-putting nor perverse. When we get a glimpse of the tribe, they are a collection of fertility goddesses, with big, ample bosoms, bathed in prismatic colors. 

Sanchez strikes all the right notes -- no apparent grace notes at all -- and all the right chords to impart the film's effects, affects and sensations. Jungle Love is fingerprinted with a lightness of touch, and an even-handed, never over-the-top sense of the magical and mysterious. This moderation of that sense of the off-kilter is reinforced by a sparing and well-placed use of stylized details (a color filter or two, and how about the singing motley crew with animal masks who materialize at well-timed moments?). The soundtrack is also a keeper, keeping everything on the upbeat with humorous levity. The main theme is a pop song blaring from the radio with lyrics that go “Jesus loves you... ‘Mama Mary loves you.” Infectious.

So infectious is this insistent religious refrain that it starts to hint at a prevailing state of sin, accompanied by the possibility of redemption: it is not hard to imagine the locale of Jungle Love as a halfway point for its oversexed and wayward characters. A concept of purgatory hasn't been this much fun, but Jungle Love is indeed littered with clues of uncertain liminality. Now and again are images of limbo bordering on nightmare or hell: there are close-ups of the infant-stealing woman looking on with anguish, then the indiscriminate couplings, the sexual debauchery, and the sudden transmogrification of characters from one form to another. This is not paradise yet.  

More than a reimagining of purgatory, or an altered state of supernatural enchantment, Jungle Love posits a nation beset with our more immediate, more worldly and more concrete nightmares. Remember that Sanchez's magnum opus, Imburnal, is no harmless experimental film about nothing: a seemingly tangential yet haunting portrait of those who live in the fetid fringes of Davao City. Not dissimilar, not too far-fetched, Jungle Love stakes its claim as a political allegory about a country in the thrall of powerful forces -- where sex is a sinful opiate of the masses, where the urban rich flaunt their arrogance and indulge their pleasures, where nightmares are the currency, where only the military forces experience a guiltless, rejuvenating sense of jouissance. This could be the spitting image of a Christian Third World country, a kind of banana republic. Neither Herzog nor Weerasethakul could have visualized and conceived such an analogy. Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s Jungle Love is one fun and memorable romp through the great unknown that is the primeval forest as something we have inhabited all along. This, our jungle, is obscene.

COLOSSAL (Whammy Alcazaren, 2012)

What has become abundantly, colossally clear with the arrival of Whammy Alcazaren on the independent scene and the premiere of his experimental first film, Colossal, is that this young wunderkind has grand ambitions for cinema. For his feature debut, he has taken on “the myth of man” for his towering theme, as the Cinemanila programme proclaims, and to a considerable extent he has been equal to the task. For the moment, however, the hyperbole of the title remains inapplicable to the final product -- so tantalizingly close, but unconverted. Not a masterpiece just yet. Ask anyone else, however, about their encounter with Colossal and the testimonials would be glowing and the gigantism of superlatives is bound to gush forth.

Don’t think this is meant to be contrarian, the prodigious talent of Alcazaren is there to marvel at: I can perfectly see what the converted and the faithful see, but their adulations are also often colored, quick to favor and factor in his astonishing youth, that this is just his thesis film at the University of the Philippines. A school project, to be perfectly honest about it. And the myth of man? True, true. Such grand themes for such a young, collegial filmmaker. They say: "There is not anyone comparable, not any teenager or early twenty-something in recent memory, at least, who has undertaken such a work of such professed scope and breadth with such confidence and precocity. Not even Raya Martin, perhaps." That may not be too far-fetched, but about Colossal I harbor some reservations. 

What astonishes me, at this juncture, are the writerly gifts of Alcazaren. The screenplay for Colossal essentially consists of an epic monologue of consistent versification supposedly recited by an ancient, old man. Epics, it must be said, are rarely attempted in verse. For someone barely out of his teens, this hoary ventriloquism is no small feat. This has been, up to this point, Alcazaren's most developed metier. A considerable gift to envy even by writers twice his age. A gift so full-fledged and mature. The sinuousness and supple contortions of his syntax, as suggested by the English subtitles (how I wish I could understand Bisaya), are there for all to hear and see. The bamboo-like resistance of his lyricism sways with meanings: a single viewing may not be enough to illuminate the beauty of language and expression and comprehend the nuances of emotion and wisdom. But here it becomes a little dicey: the old ancient man addresses a second person -- is it even a person? -- whose death grieves him, but whose identity seems to shift around, remaining a nagging, unresolved question. 

Colossal's grief is its motif of grief -- as given verbal expression by the ancient man in a dolorous low key, compounded by scenes of mourning of a young contemporary man -- has no clear referent. This grief is suspended in the ether of the abstract. Should it be simply be understood as universal grief about human death? Or is this grief something more colossal -- about the demise of races, cultures, civilizations, or even grand abstracts? As the ancient man poeticizes in a disembodied voice, the young contemporary man, who is equally grief-stricken, traverses natural landscapes -- from forests to caves to shores -- to commune with the consolations of nature, of the cosmos, to meditate on the nature of man and grief and loss. Are they one and the same: the ancient man and the contemporary man, or are they the grieving archetypes of their time? And who is the dead? Apparently someone in the young man's tribe, apparently someone the old man grew up with -- his oft-mentioned mother, his entire tribe, his nation? Apparently it is lapsarian man. Apparently someone universal, with the ancient's clear reference to the myth of Orpheus.

Apparently this is about us as a nation. We get a tell-tale word or two to suggest it, and a montage of photographs to emphasize it. The old man hails from many generations ago, he confesses, in a time of noble chieftains, a time of datus. He also alludes to the creation myth of Malakas and Maganda, a sure sign of his provenance. All the while his meditations are woven together with still photographs: towards the beginning, of old and new Manila, for instance, the photo of an old, manicured Luneta, circa 1960s, juxtaposed in contrast with a photo of vehicular gridlocks in our streets of today. Towards the end, as the old man expresses solidarity with “colossal youths” -- the freedom fighters, the fallen but fighting youths in the streets -- there is a procession of euphoric revolutionary moments, the recent Edsa 2 revolution in particular (the youthful Alcazaren is too young to remember the first one), side by side with photos of happy anthemic moments from recent live concerts of local bands. Colossal -- but all on paper. For the moment, it leaves too many questions pendant.

For the moment, the visual approach of Alcazaren is static and in dire need of imagination and expansion. His use of still photographs is slavish for one. Another callow flaw is his obsessive, unmoving regard for natural forms verging on the abstract and tactile textures, and their well-worn symbolism: for instance, those of predictable rock formations and especially water. Water imagery seems to be his calling card -- its fluidity, he seems to say quite tritely, is not unlike the passage of time, the process of grief, the history of man -- whether taken as stills or captured in the following ways: water rolling onto shores, water crashing in waves against rocks, water pooling at the foot of falls.

Surely Alcazaren has a lot else in store for us. Colossal is nothing to sneeze at. Take for instance the ingenious epilogue, monochrome as the rest of the film's 86-minute duration, featuring what seems to be a firmament of stars where geometric patterns of lines are drawn. It seems like an afterthought to end it all, and yet how strangely apt and evocative, as though Alcazaren imagines the ancient consultation of stars, the birth and death of old and new constellations, as though to ground the place of man in the universe. Maybe this is the best way to foreground the wisdom of the old man's words, the myth of man. 

For now, Alcazaren has not attained the rarefied heights of the original. He has taken unmistakable pages from his cinematic ancestors, the closest one being Christopher Gozum, most especially his first film Anacbanua. Between the two, the reliance on poety recited in a regional tongue is one striking similarity. The ranging over landscapes is another glaring parallel, with Gozum marking his chronotope with Pangasinan particularity. Alcazaren’s landscapes and tribe, in contrast, seem a generic one, although complete with token tattoos and shamans. Otherwise, this tribe doesn’t exist, or is unrecognizable. Surprisingly he did not shoot in the Visayas but expediently on location in Ilocos Norte (but the young grieving man in the film might indeed hail from Ilocos to begin with) at some expense of authenticity. But we must greet the young Alcazaren with open arms at the start of a promising career. He is the future of our cinema. He is bound to be colossal.          

                  

PASCALINA (Pam Miras, 2012)

The more that I think about it, the more I see its parallels, at the narrative and character level, to a great Brazilian film, Suzana Amaral’s Hour of the Star. Each of these two films in question revolves around the story of a young, unprepossessing woman, each one seemingly out of place in an urban setting. Each of these two women -- Macabea in the Amaral classic and the eponym in Pam Miras' first feature-length film -- is portrayed with less than heroic traits: each socially awkward, each so inept at work that she faces the pink slip, each one so markedly plain and homely and each one oblivious to the treacheries and betrayals around her. Topping it off, each one’s destiny is about to be shaped by some form of supernatural agency. 

But one quick disclaimer, Pascalina is no rip-off: all the foregoing simply serves as a testament to the happy coincidence of two kindred stories, the happy coincidence of two female doppelgangers whose independent conceptions may hint at their universality. However, it must be asked, is this possible universality rooted in the real world or, rather, the narrow cosmos of cinema, which tends to construct the female subject in a uniform and limited fashion, while it empowers, valorizes and privileges the male gaze? The latter is plausible: the patriarchal interpellation of both female directors under consideration is not inconceivable. Macabea and Pascalina, it must be noted, are characters curiously prone to the harm and depredation of the men around them, a sure sign, it would seem, of the loaded dice against them. But consider their outcomes: While Amaral's Macabea seems doomed to a fatalistic trajectory in her fatal innocence, influenced by the crossed signals of clairvoyance, Miras' Pascalina is, at the end, a passionate protagonist who transforms herself and determines her own unique female subjectivity albeit with the aid of vampirism.

Here is where I admit experiencing a sort of ambivalence towards Pascalina. That her transformation into an avenging, sanguinary aswang may on the surface represent a fate far better, more seductive than her modest beginnings  -- a weak, unassertive dupe -- but is that what is paramount? Pascalina’s triumph over her betrayer, and her redress of the wrong done to her, are laudable, proactive and grand gestures, the radical feminist may declare with euphimism, but Pascalina's acts are essentially murder and revenge, for the repossession of a man who may no longer be worthy. So what next, if the film proceeded for another 20 minutes? What becomes of Pascalina with her newfangled powers but with a tampered moral compass? Maybe negate the man, too, the other betrayer, the radical feminist or Pascalina herself may aver.

Pascalina, to add to my misgivings, seems to be in the business of feeding alive on the latter-day hipness of  vampires in movies and literature, it seems to bank on the coolness quotient of it all, perhaps even among the déclassé Twilight crowd, to lend legitimacy to the monstrosity Pascalina becomes by her acceptance of an evil familial heritage. Nihilism, amorality are cool, no? Mais, oui, since vampires aren’t human.

Another fly in the ointment is Pascalina’s overt subsistence on essentialism: Pascalina’s inability to resort to means other than an appropriation of her supernatural heirloom seems to confine her in a box – and the film seems unapologetic about it and frames her transformation as a reflexive, instinctual progression. In sum, Pascalina's man is a two-timing cheat, his lover, the other woman, is a temptress, and Pascalina, the aswang, is an inherently evil vampire, according to the film's essentialist schema. Men are men, women are women, aswangs are aswangs -- all in their worst inherent aspects and limitations, all deemed incapable to act and perform otherwise from the standpoint of abiding stereotypes, prejudices and folklore.

Maybe the colliding ambiguities are the point of it all -- consider once more the simultaneity of the feminist and anti-feminist slants within the film, consider the duality of  moral and amoral undertones that might seem equally justifiable -- and certainly that is better than the soul-emptying fare in theatres these days that cannot nourish. Maybe deep down I latently admire Pascalina as much as the legion that openly swears by it. Perhaps it’s enough for a film to create a character that takes no shit from anyone (Pascalina's mettle is ultimately that of an antihero -- but antiheroes are cool, aren’t they? After all, they are like you and me.), and in this dog-eat-dog world, no one should willingly want to be a push-over, a patsy, a doormat. Forget the beatitudes, the moral cliches, for a moment. 

Right? 

Perhaps what I will take away the most, what is bound to linger long with me at the very least, is Pascalina's gritty indelibility, its retro look, its washed-out colors, its betamax quality, all its primitive charm and simplicity that may speak more volumes than the latest 48-frames-per-second atrocity out of Hollywood. Just the look that seems to say this is no time for easy voyeurism. No sir  -- no sirs -- Pascalina will not oblige.This is not going to be pretty.      

MAMAY UMENG (Dwein Baltazar, 2012)

At the heart of Dwein Baltazar’s Mamay Umeng is the unflinching, unblinking gaze at the consequences of old age and its cruel slowing of time. Whereas a film like Bwakaw squeezes this similar theme for crowd pleasing moments and warm fuzzy feelings, this one stares at it warts and all, with most of the pathos withheld. There’s a defining scene here where the titular old man gazes at himself full-length in a mirror, full of folds and wrinkles, and all the narcissism and self-delusion of youth appear gone. He may have just danced with the fairest girl in town, but his illusions end there. That instant might serve as a postscript to Lacan’s idea of the so-called mirror phase, where a child at a certain point admires itself in the mirror in total libidinal misrecognition and idealization.

Death is a natural part of life, it is often parroted. It is the antithesis that plays its part in a cycle, a process. But Baltazar, a precocious young director, deromanticizes  the approach of passing, so that the seeming reminiscence of a long life can be the worst form of entrapment. The stagnation of hours, born of old age, and not the acts of man nor the elements of nature, may be the most unkind of inhumanities.

At least, it seems that way. Dwein Baltazar’s quiet and contemplative but profound first film is much-reserved and never wordy: her assured and well-tempered direction relies on observational camerawork rather than a rhetorical script in its statement about the nature of life and death. The film unfolds in a series of plans-séquences -- static, unedited long takes that are paradoxically hauntingly expressive to our captive contemplation – detailing the elderly routines and the peregrinations of the titular hero, 84 years old, whose spirit is willing and desiring, but whose mind and flesh are weakening.

However there are also moments when Mamay Umeng is like a dynamo with vast reserves of sudden will and energy. Waking up at ungodly hours, driven by unknowable rhythms, or the absence of them, he wanders far away from home, even as curiously his mysterious compass points to destinations both mystical and perspectival: towards a vanishing point? Through establishing shots that are never downsized into close-ups, we see his smallness in the scheme of things, the vastness of the sea, the breadth of paddy fields, like perhaps a diminutive figure in an ancient Chinese scroll painting.

Baltazar’s first film is recursive, cyclical and unrelieved in its observation of the seemingly inescapable routines of senescence. In scene after recurrent scene, almost always without words but sometimes not without subtle humor, we see him light votive candles to the Child Jesus, listen to soap operas on radio, and sit alone partaking of coffee or snacks or just straight solitude. Sometimes Mamay Umeng wanders through the shrubbery as though trapped in a labyrinth so that we wonder if the old man is in the grip of dementia – and how often is he guided and called back home, how he seems otherworldly lost in thought amid the bustle and play of children around him! But these are all cumulative tropes and never heaped on out of nowhere. The symbolic juxtaposition of youth and old age is unmistakable.

What complements the film’s sense of enigma is the old man’s still and stoical presence. He is often quiet, lost in thought and unaffected by solitude or noise. But in one rare moment, the most surprisingly expressive one within the film, he sings a happy song to a friend who ironically would soon be deceased. Punitive fate of aloneness, and a remembrance of his own inevitable fate yet again. Baltazar, however, can sometimes be nitpicked for youthful modesty or is it just reverence for her old protagonist that she tarnishes and blurs the all-too-revealing mirror? But we get the picture: cinema is the mise en scene of desire, the medium of scopohilia; Mamay Umeng, on the other hand, is the mise en scene of death, and perhaps ought to be taken in mediated, regulated measures.

Baltazar’s slow burn, of old age, of time’s decay, is well-observed, well-judged and patient, unfolded through compassionate framing of the old man’s physiognomy: how often a profile instead of a full-frontal close-up. Baltazar also judiciously employs synecdoche, the mirror reflecting only the lower extremities of Mamay Umeng, as if to dismantle and dehumanize the old man in his long, terrible wait. In a few great moments, this studious and already sophisticated director reminds us of the uncompromising cinema of Carlos Reygadas and Lisandro Alonso, where the wrinkled and/or ugly body tells all and yet how elevated it is to the truthfully sublime. But for someone with already such a sure touch, Baltazar should read this review with a pinch of salt.

Welcome to Philippine cinema, Dwein Baltazar!