HOW TO BECOME MYSELF (Jun Ichikawa, 2007)

Some profess that life must be lived with a mediation of masks. Others espouse the contrary: a life conducted with as much candor and consistency as possible, without dissimulations and the need for public personas. Jun Ichikawa’s How to Become Myself undermines the reductive simplicity of either perspective, and forwards a strategic compromise between the two. There is verity in the oft-repeated line from Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes." 

Based on a novel by Mado Kaori, this is the story of two kindred spirits floundering through young adolescence as they parse what it means to live happily and approach life at the right pitch and proportion. A profound yet delicate drama, it is a film that continues in the same vein and tonality as the director’s previous offering, Tony Takitani, employing a subtle direction that owes to the tranquil touch of Ozu. Ichikawa finds his comfort zone in borrowing the old master’s quiet cadences and pillow shots, affording his story a quality of equanimity and a lyrical rhythm.

As the film opens, two adolescent girls named Juri and Kanako meet very briefly just before high school graduation. It’s a meeting that leaves a lasting impression on both girls, with Kanako leaving behind a line from Dazai Osamu: “You’re a good liar; you should do the right thing.” Cryptic, but the line somehow clicks with the listener. The two lose touch and resettle in different towns, with Juri finding a sense of equilibrium in her new life. It’s no mean feat, as she must buck the divorce of her parents, and adapt to a new school and environment.

Thanks to the talismanic line from Dazai, the once-troubled Juri reinvents herself and turns her life around. She becomes well-adjusted enough to become everybody's favorite at school. This is the part where word about Kanako reaches her. Relocated to another school, she faces the same prospects as Juri once did. Juri decides to intervene and makes contact with Kanako via email. While Juri turns their correspondence into a novel, Kanako takes advice about everything: from classmates to school etiquette, down to what to say to a suitor, what to order on a date. Through her friend's steady instruction, Kanako refashions herself to great effect. 

It’s a hackneyed conceit straight out of Edmond Rostand. But Ichikawa makes the Cyrano-ish character of Juri more humanly vulnerable as the drama wears on. Juri proves to be no worldwise figure but an insulated girl who lives vicariously through her friend. The seemingly passive Kanako has been thoughtfully testing out her friend’s advice, all along, and provides the best existential insight in the film when Juri needs it.

But the concerns of Ichikawa’s film are also very contemporary. At a time of discarnate relationships online, relationships built on emails, video conferences, and text messages, it’s a film that slightly suspects but surprisingly doesn’t take an entirely dim view of new technology in advancing relationships. Cast to a great extent as email and text exchanges between Juri and Kanako, How to Become Myself recuperates the epistolary tradition. There is power in the written word, now more than ever.

The presence of novelist Dazai Osamu is often invoked and lingers in the background. His hovering spirit in Ichikawa’s film is an ambivalent one, not outright glorified nor ridiculed. His words sustain Juri at one point, but his meanings may very well have been misconstrued. If Dazai’s characters are frustrated suicides or maladjusted individuals, Ichikawa’s are made of sterner stuff. There is fight in them, and one is quite certain, no matter life’s adversities, of their resilience. They will never go the way of Yozo in Dazai's No Longer Human or Dazai himself.

At once poetic and pragmatic, How to Become Myself is like a book wanting to be read and learned from. A self-help tome, a survival manual, a teenager's guide to the universe, or what-not, but its heart will be forever in the right place.

Published: June 30, 2010 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

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

IMBURNAL (Sherad Anthony Sanchez, 2008)

 

The history of cinema is the history of the tyranny of narrative films. The right of first refusal to anything worth committing to film belongs to the province of narrative films. Narrative films are what sells, here and elsewhere. Narrativization, it seems, is the handmaiden of crass commercialism. Young filmmaker Sherad Anthony Sanchez turns away from this corruption of cinematic art and kneels down at the tabernacle of the experimental. Through Imburnal, a 3-hour, 30 minute tour de force set in the sewers and shantytowns of Davao City, director Sanchez renews and defamiliarizes our received notions about what it depicts, in the process dismantling the predictable tendencies of narrative films, in the process, too, reawakening our collective conscience and consciousness. Let the wounds reopen and fester again!

What Imburnal succeeds in doing is to recompose and poeticize the ugly, the squalor and the wretchedness. In effect, the cinematic alchemy is to see the sewers in a new light. The result may not be an aesthete’s notion of a paradisiacal playground, but the sewers are not merely repositories of filth and refuse either, but afford a hideaway for its denizens. They are the last refuge and haunting places for the kids and teenagers living in the nearby slums. We don’t smell these sewers for some reason, even as the waters flowing through them aren’t pristine either.

Eschewing straight narrative, director Sanchez decides to film episodes of life in the margins as they take place in and around the sewers. The editor (Sanchez, too?) and a phalanx of cinematographers are agents of abstraction as much as the director: the camera blurs out of focus, it decenters compositions, runs on and on in lengthy takes. Editing is as defamiliarizing: freeze frames, an assortment of jolting and jarring filters, disjunctive and non-linear editing, all intertwined with simply lyrical compositions. Out of potential tabloid material, Imburnal is perhaps what we might call an instance of poetic social realism.

While Davao City is hailed by lofty honors as the safest and cleanest city in Southeast Asia, there is much squalor in the periphery. Allen and Joel, two kids who figure in Imburnal, practically think of the sewers as their second home. They play and frolic and swim there, and tom-peep the older kids fornicating in different permutations. The older kids, no older than teenagers, hang out here too. They have dead-end prospects in life; their talk centers on sex, the opposite sex, love, and the mundane. Otherwise, there are cheap vices – smokes, alcohol, improvised drugs and all – to be had.

Imburnal attests to the instinctive resiliency of life – its strange but seductive mutations – where none is expected to survive. The sewers may not represent heaven on earth, but they sometimes function as the last refuge for the young who have nowhere to go. Some of them even go to die there. Through Imburnal, Sherad Anthony Sanchez has created both a poem – an elegiac one perhaps – and a document that attest to the lives of the marginalized and the voiceless. From the depths of these sewers rises a film that can arrest us, a beautiful Baudelairean flower.

Reviewed: August 30, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision) 

HALAW (Sheron Dayoc, 2010)

 

Here in imperial Manila, how often do we stop and think about distant Mindanao? This begs repeating, for in truth we have consigned our southern brethren to the margins of consciousness. Worse, we think of them with a colonizer’s orientalism: warlike and belligerent, intractable and ungovernable. No understanding and touching base with their kind, let alone extending what is due them as part of the nation. Our nexus with them is tenuous, characterized by neglect and ignorance, hostility and strife. While the North gets the lion’s share of infrastructural development, budgetary allocations and administrative favor, the South is a poor relation that must fend for itself, even if it means scattering its desperate denizens in search of greener pastures.

Sheron Dayoc’s feature debut, Halaw, is a story of the dangerous, daily diaspora from Mindanao to immediate foreign territories, a story of risky human traffic we have for far too long turned a blind eye to. From a native Mindanaoan director, it is a welcome corrective to the lack of films about the region in general. Hopefully, it isn’t the last. It isn’t pretty to look at as it should be, no glossy and hypnotically arresting visuals but a cinematographic treatment marked by raw, cinema-verite imagery centering on those who would rather escape notice, let alone documentation. Halaw is a film that follows the human smuggling through the so-called southern backdoor. Rendered in real-time narration, it details, with a strict observational stance, one fraught passage through the perilous seas of Mindanao.

In a seaside town in Zamboanga, where it all begins, a Badjao named Jahid and his young daughter Daying prepare for the illegal pump-boat crossing to Sabah, where they intend to locate his missing wife. They lack the requisite fare but prevail upon the boat’s conductor with Daying’s last remaining possession, her earrings. Another practiced traveler is Hernand, a white slavery operator who is finding it hard to recruit his share of unsuspecting women (i.e. virgins are at a premium). In Hernand’s company is one such girl, too wide-eyed and ignorant to calculate her impending mistake, drawn ironically to her future incarnation, a middle-aged prostitute in the same boat, who plies her flesh in Malaysian territories. This prostitute gladly humors her with a modern woman’s accessories: her beguiling perfume, her fancy clothes and her lucrative claims if the younger girl played her cards right.

However, the sea journey is never free of risk and treachery. 

The pump-boat operators may know all the precautionary measures from mapping out the best routes to escaping detection in Malaysian waters, but nothing is guaranteed. The smallest exigency – e.g. the presence of water in the hull, the sudden sputtering of the boat’s motor – can be a cause of concern for both the travelers and their transporters. Easy passage is for the unusually lucky.

Even as there are divertissements along the way – e.g. the young Daying regaling her boatmates with what must be a Badjao dance, something she parlays into a handful of coins – the sense of reprieve is palpably temporary. In a well-conceived, penultimate scene set on Mananako Island, the last stopover, the sense of peril becomes apparent. Flesh becomes the currency to settle old debts, and the sea is no longer what it seems. The hardest part, however, is far from over.

If, as one watches, one detects an Ariadne’s thread of sorts through Halaw and films like Jeturian’s Kubrador, Mendoza’s Manoro and Ralston Jover’s Bakal Boys, the sure guiding hand of Armando Lao and his real-time paradigm have been at work all along. This scriptwriting wizard, who has for years ensured a steady stream of well-conceived screenplays, lends his assistance to a new filmmaker once again, although one begins to wonder if his unmistakable influence has made for a homogenization of those films he has helped to shape. Frankly, for as long as a film is given ample time to germinate in the collaboration, what matters should be the well-made product.

That seems to be part of Halaw’s one glaring problem, its rough-draft finish. Like an almost exquisite corpse, Halaw has some missing vital parts. The interaction between the travelers, the agoraphobia of the open seas, the different complexions and colorations of a journey, seem hurriedly sketched, rushed. A sense of narrative truncation happens at the end, all too abruptly. Perhaps, this picture’s structure is an attempt to draw a parallel to the lay of the land, highlighting the chopped-up nature of a nation. Like a gangrenous limb, there is a part of us that must want, desperately, to be separated, amputated. 

Reviewed: July 19, 2010 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

MEMORIES OF MATSUKO (Tetsuya Nakashima, 2006)

Bless her poor soul. All she ever wanted was to do right by her loved-ones. All she ever did was to give a part of her self with little expectation of reward. But hers was not a perfect world. Life would boomerang on her despite her best efforts. This, in essence, is the sad trajectory of Matsuko's worldly existence.

At first blush, it seems like a subject matter meant solely for a downbeat film. Memories of Matsuko, however, manages to achieve a more complex feat, a more multifaceted and more polyphonic film than might appear on paper. It tones down the tragic in favor of a hyper-realistic portrait of the comic and the dramatic. It’s a movie that tries and succeeds in not playing it straight and yet retains the sad eventfulness of its heroine's story. Oscillating between its evocation of humor and pathos in 127 minutes of sheer emotional push and pull, it aims true for the heart.

We learn about Matsuko, however, through second hand and in flashbacks. By the time the film begins, she is a box full of ashes. Her nephew Shou, a directionless youth, has been tasked by his father to clean out his dead aunt’s apartment. Shou hardly knew her. Yet in death, Matsuko might just affect the tenor of his disaffected life.  

Matsuko’s fall from grace is rooted in childhood -- her father rejecting her in favor of her sickly younger sister -- but culminates when she protects her high school student who is suspected of theft. She takes the blame for it and is discharged from her duties in dishonor. Her family, most especially her father whose approval Matsuko seeks, disowns her.

Thrown out of the family, Matsuko rebounds from one abusive relationship to another, as she looks for companionship that has long eluded her. Almost all her lovers, however, prove to be wrong choices: There’s an aspiring but heavy-handed writer who takes his own life, a married man who is simply jealous of the writer, a pimp, a yakuza thug who is as fearsome as his tattoos. When she seems to have found the right man, she is thrown into jail for a crime she has been running away from.

Finely balanced between comedy and drama, Memories of Matsuko is leavened by pop tunes and musical numbers whose lyrics are relevant to the moment and the fate of its heroine. It’s a film that mixes tone in just the right proportions and emerges as both entertainment and as serious meditation on a life tracing a downward spiral.

The life of Matsuko is pretty much the stuff of soap operas – only her life seems without payoff and redemption. The film, however, never faults her for her ill-advised decisions, although there is a lot of them. Prostituting herself? No. Murdering her lover? No. Refusing help when she most needs it? No. 

This is the achievement of Nakashima’s film: Matsuko remains sympathetic all throughout despite her flaws. Memories of Matsuko feels neither too oppressively heavy nor too insistent on pulling at our heartstrings – at least not until the end. We are simply dazzled by the visual sumptuousness on the screen, the gloss and the crisp, rich colors that recall the best color movies (Gone With the Wind is one of the conscious references.). We are likewise diverted by the many incarnations of Matsuko, as well as the colorful characters that she meets: her shady jobs, the porn actress, the suicidal writer, the yakuza gangster, her bedridden sister, the boy band.

As her murder unfolds at film's end, the bittersweet irony clarifies: Matsuko has genuinely touched a few lives, even those who could only respond with treachery. When it's all over, there is but a single abiding image: her face and lips puckered at us, a woman not ashamed to make herself look silly just to make our day.


Reviewed: July 5, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

From Antonioni to Brocka, The Allusive Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang

 

From Antonioni to Brocka, The Allusive Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang

Born and raised in Kuching, Malaysia, Tsai Ming-liang was introduced to movies by his grandparents, who often took him to screenings of popular films from China, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, America, and the Philippines at any of the dozen or so cinemas that populated their small, quiet town.
-- Darren Hughes, Senses of Cinema

Don’t think for a moment that Tsai Ming-Liang, that formidable auteur of Taiwanese New Wave, sprang fully-formed from the godhead of cinema with his feature debut, Rebels of the Neon God, in 1992. Far from it. As the epigraph suggests, Tsai has had an early exposure to the influence of film, a childhood pervaded by film and moviegoing, and it doesn’t end there. Long before the clinical term for his condition had a name, Tsai’s diasporic life saw him cultivating a cinephilia, a voracious consumption of films. It’s a cinephilia that seems unabated and has found expression throughout many of the director’s films. Think Tarantino, think French New Wave, only more integrated. Less apparently intertextual.

For Tsai, the real watershed that ushered him into a more serious and obsessive pursuit of the moving image was his relocation to Taiwan at the age of twenty. Unlike his native Kuching which could only offer commercial cinematic fare, the cultural institutions of Taiwan had vaster resources and deeper, more extensive archives. Enrolling himself in the Chinese Culture University in Taipei to study drama and film, Tsai was soon exposed to the films of the French New Wave and the New German Cinema. This formative period would see his initiation into the works of Truffaut, Fassbinder, Bresson, and Antonioni. These are the auteurs to this day that are most often identified with Tsai.

True to form, Rebels of the Neon God is a laudable first film that doesn’t forget to pay tribute to the director’s considerable filmgoing. Thematically speaking, Rebels mirrors the urban alienation that preoccupies Antonioni in such films as La Notte and L’Eclisse. Obsessed with the more “modern” milieus of cities, Tsai would go on to problematize urban relationships in such films as Vive L’Amour and The Hole.

Rebels of the Neon God, in sum, chronicles the disechanted lives of several youths, lost in the unforgiving shuffle of city life. As the film begins, Hsiao-Kang evinces the symptoms of this anomic affliction. One restive night, he inexplicably crashes his hand through a window pane, an allusion to a similar scene in Wenders’ tale of alienation, False Move.

Meanwhile in the garish lights of this stormy evening, Ah-Tse and Ah-Ping, two youthful operators, ransack payphones for their hoard of coins. Later on, Ah-Kuei, another restless denizen of the city, winds up in someone’s bed yet again, her palliative to combat her loneliness. Then, a day later, Hsiao-Kang, with his hand bandaged, tries to get a refund for tutorial classes he is taking at a nearby school. End of education. They are dropping out from life, and neither does Tsai offer a neat solution, let alone an optimistic end. Rebels, as far as cinematic depiction goes, are meant to toe the line or be crushed. For good measure, Tsai never misses the chance to juxtapose Hsiao Kang with a pasteboard image of James Dean circa Rebel without A Cause.

A more fascinating aspect of Tsai's film, however, is its seeming wealth of references and allusions to Filipino films. Rebels of the Neon God may very well be Tsai’s sneaking tribute to Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Neon, probably the nearest film to depict the crushing and grinding stranglehold of a city. Lee Kang-Sheng’s Hsiao Kang, the central outsider-loner of Tsai’s film, bears an uncanny resemblance and countenance to Bembol Roco’s shell-shocked provincial Julio Madiaga in Brocka’s masterpiece. As Julio Madiaga is cornered by a murderous mob towards the film’s end, Ah-Tse and Ah-Ping, who have just been caught stealing motherboards from video game machines, suffer a very similar fate in the denouement of Tsai's film. The similarities are, well, uncanny.

If the foregoing should be dismissed as a function of speculation, mere conjecture, the charge may be justified. But consider the eerie sense of recognition as one goes down Tsai’s filmography. Take Hsiao-Kang’s transformation into a porn actor in Tsai's Wayward Cloud, a narrative twist prefigured by Julio Madiaga’s turn as a male prostitute. In another Tsai film, The Hole, there is the pivotal conceit of a hole in the floor of an apartment building that becomes a lifeline between a man and a woman. Familiar? Can you say Gallaga’s Scorpio Nights? A more particular and thorough study may yield more connections and perhaps these shouldn’t be surprising. Tsai’s easter eggs embedded in his films are a fitting tribute to a cinema that is worthy of tribute and emulation. Our cinema.

Reviewed: June 28, 2010 (Northern Portrait & Film Angel/The Persistence of Vision)