LAYANG BILANGGO (Mike Dagñalan, 2010)

There may be much to admire in the early goings of Mike Dagñalan's Layang Bilanggo, but somewhere along the way the film loses it, irretrievably, and falls into the trap of indiscriminate inclusiveness. The first 10 or so minutes are a study in storytelling restraint and concision, an opening sequence that redounds to great directorial promise. First, we are given to witness an assassin’s pinpoint precision as he executes a hit. The film then cuts to a jail office where a journalist and the chief warden discuss rumors of prisoner-assassins. The warden hems and haws, clearly concealing the truth. Subsequently, we get the assassin's vantage, his double life in prison. In a few precise and penetrating scenes that reflect and lay bare the urgency of what it dramatizes, the film sets up an absorbing premise and introduces the disturbing reality of the prisoner-for-hire.

Prisoner-for-hire. That criminal mutation born out of extreme state impunity and corruption, on the payroll and protection of penitentiaries that are supposed to reform him. In Mike Dagñalan’s sophomore film, the focus falls on one such assassin named Paul, a man who is caught on the horns of a dilemma. He wants to turn his life around, but he is helpless. For him, there is no exit: middle-aged and all, he must keep on killing to remain useful to his sponsors, to whom the diminishment of his abilities might spell expendability. Death. His is a cheapened life whose fate is not his to decide.

There are two parallel strands that interweave to tell this man’s story. One strand traces his apparent past as an assassin who gets instructions from a warden named Adamos and a shadowy godfather. Even in the confines of such irregular circumstances, there are still other irregularities: power struggles among penitentiary officials, and machinations for his criminal services. Which is where the film starts to lose it. These sequences comprise some of the subplots that unnecessarily complicate the film, where a little narrative restraint would have been to the point.

The other strand of Paul’s story is his search for his daughter and his admission into Anawim, an institution for the aged. Here he is a curious presence. While the real denizens of Anawim grapple with dementia and second childhoods, Paul turns out fine portraits. We soon realize why he is here: why he noticeably has a close rapport with the home's art teacher. She is his abandoned daughter. He has found her. There is no outright reunion, but that doesn’t stop the film from approximating it. Suffice it to say: she soon calls him father.

Such is the suspect dramatic roundedness of Layang Bilanggo. Overplotted and fulsome, it is crammed full with all the melodramatic elements beloved to Filipino tastes. Listen to its twist-a-minute delights: The sad, elderly stories in Anawim. The alliance of a cop and a criminal. The formidable foe in a woman assassin. A father and daughter’s de facto, if momentary, reunion. The high-body-count finale: What more can a casual filmgoer want?

Quick eventfulness seems to be the filmmakers' overriding credo and Layang Bilanggo's ultimate undoing. The film, it turns out, credits four scriptwriters. Throw in a script consultant in the person of Bing Lao, who must have wielded little veto power, and you have the makings of an over-determined and overwritten story. Where a more direct expose on a disturbing criminal reality would have sufficed in making a powerful and unforgettable and relevant statement, Dagñalan stubbornly elects to tell a story chockful of popular and sensational action and drama. Layang Bilanggo may have romped off with the top prizes at the recent Cinema One Film Festival but it remains the work of a callow filmmaker. This is not yet Kubrador or Kinatay or Bakal Boys. This is glorified soap opera.

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

MARIE-JO AND HER TWO LOVES (Robert Guediguian, 2002)

 

The French, it seems, do not shock so easily. They aren’t hardened and rigid moralists about to cry foul at the prospect of the aberrant and the transgressive. Well, at least not to those of us moviegoers attuned to the ethically-ambiguous and sophisticated laissez-faire of French cinema. The theme of marital infidelity, for one, has obsessed and exercised many of its filmmakers for ages and established an extensive tradition of controversial filmmaking. In Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur, a husband declares his dalliances with a woman with the full expectation that his wife would understand him. Louis Malle’s Les Amants is regarded as one of the watershed films in this subgenre, featuring the most torrid sexual scenes at the time of its initial screening all across Europe. Other notable exponents of this much-contested theme are Claire Denis, whose Friday Night apotheosizes one tryst, and Bertrand Blier, whose films like Trop Belle Pour Toi and Get Out Your Handkerchiefs were not only well-received but also well-awarded. 

The canon is expanding each day. Of recent vintage is Robert Guediguian’s Marie-Jo and Her Two Loves, where this time, it is a woman who asserts her questionable subjectivity. Marie-Jo, the main character, is torn between what can only be reductively called a romantic love and a pragmatic love. To her, at first, there doesn’t even seem to be a distinction between sex and love. She seems to be playing it by ear. What makes this scenario more remarkable is the fact that Daniel, her husband, and Marco, the lover, seem amenable to a three-cornered relationship. When the husband senses the tell-tale signs of infidelity and verifies the affair, he teeters between confronting her and keeping quiet. He chooses the latter. While on the other hand the lover is reduced to importuning her over the phone for the next tryst. He doesn’t demand her divorce and allows things to go on as before. 

Marie-Jo, in truth, is caught between two equally desirable choices. Daniel is a thoughtful and devoted type of man who may lack learning and education but whose love and constancy for Marie-Jo cannot be questioned. Marco, on the other hand, is the stuff of romance and robust love: a good-looking man with a felicitously effusive tongue, he is a well-traveled seafarer who knows a hundred cultures and can regale any listener with fantastic tales for hours on end. Marie-Jo starts her affair on purely sexual grounds with him, but ends up head over heels in love. Enough for her to abandon Daniel and her daughter Julie. 

Set in the seaside city of Marseille, with recurrent shots of massive sea-faring hulls of ships and wide expanses of water, the film tests the openness to forbidden relationships of its world-wise inhabitants. Surprisingly everyone around Marie-Jo approves of her affair with Marco and entertains the possibility of her leaving Daniel for the lover: a workmate of Marco’s, a patient at the hospital where Marie-Jo is a nurse. It is for the simple reason that she seems noticeably “happy” and the lover likewise. 

What makes this film with a tricky theme a highly watchable affair is its recognition of relational details, details that can be telling and diverting. In one scene, Marco asks for a full disclosure of Marie-Jo’s day at home like a lovesick, forlorn lover. Hesitatingly she proceeds to describe all her domesticities, and stops humorously – to the dismay of the lover – when she comes to a point of describing what the husband does sexually to her. Another equally diverting scene is when Marie-Jo sets up Marco to meet her family and both sides end up liking each other. Marie-Jo and Her Two Loves (2002) seems to mark a departure for the director of The Town is Quiet (2000). Missing from the former film is the almost ethnographic study of Guediguian’s hometown, Marseille, and its locals; in its place is something akin to a fable, not a moral one but one about human foibles that cannot be judged or faulted. With that, the film concludes with a poetic but perhaps too contrived ending – the deep blue sea, a watery deus-ex-machina.

Reviewed: June 8, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

17 FOIS CÉCILE CASSARD (Christophe Honoré, 2002)

Christophe Honoré‘s 17 Fois Cécile Cassard is a film encompassing 17 fragments in the life of its title hero, a disconsolate widow who can’t seem to overcome her husband’s suicide. It is not a selfish suicide but one of self-sacrifice – in order to secure her future and their son’s with insurance money. As her sense of bereavement, however, becomes too much, she becomes incapable of living from day to day and taking care of her son. She must leave everything behind – her hometown of Tours, her friends, her son – and embark on a journey of consolation and renewal. 

Through 17 moments that trace a trajectory from grief to recovery, Honoré dramatizes a familiar story and perhaps a personal, autobiographical one, dedicated to the director's parents. By no means, however, do these fragments -- stylized and aestheticized -- form a clear-cut and conventional story. There is a suffocating sense of unreality to the proceedings: the characters Cécile Cassard meets along the way may not be mere people but abstractions incarnate; his final destination, Toulouse, seems like an allegorical city. Much of the film is drenched in the atmospherics of darkness and stasis complemented by soundscapes that reflect the inner states of the film’s widowed protagonist. Great distortions and noise in the tradition of My Bloody Valentine suffuse much of the soundtrack. 

Another promising alumnus of Cahiers du Cinéma – a part of the second generation after Godard, Truffaut and company? — Christophe Honoré fashions out a brave and bold debut, a film that doesn’t so much take its cue from traditional plotting as it does from the gradual processes of life. We see the gradations from loss to renewal unfold as they should, with compact and quiet tonalities. 

Honoré takes away the literalness of the film's theme and subjects, and grounds them in a defamiliarized milieu. Toulouse, viewed through the prism of endless nights and dark emotions, becomes a kind of purgatory, populated almost exclusively by homosexuals, who are our world’s wretched, after all, consigned to a kind of social limbo. Honoré is unflinching in depicting homoerotic acts, the maddened men and their maddening sexual desires, as though to hint at the city’s psychical and emotional turbulence. 

Toulouse under a dark night is the film’s overarching presence, but the characters here provide a noteworthy counterpoint. Béatrice Dalle is sufficiently understated -- no chewing the atmospheric scenery here -- as Cécile Cassard. Romain Duris (L’Auberge Espagnole), who plays Matthieu, the gay man with a compassionate heart, however, steals the spotlight. Notable is the scene where he, barely clad in a thong, performs a number from Jacques Demy’s Lola. Although he is involved with another gay man, Matthieu has love to spare for Cécile and perhaps to everyone else who needs succor. Matthieu is like a consoling mother, a principle of nature, who promises to give Cécile another son. Perhaps, just perhaps, the night is lifting, the music is taking a redemptive turn. 

Reviewed: June 10, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

 

RIDICULE (Patrice Leconte, 1996)

Ridicule, when it goes unrefuted and unretorted in kind, is the kiss of death in this costume film by versatile French director Patrice Leconte. Ridicule, in a nutshell, is a pungent yet tasteful satire on aristocrats set in pre-revolutionary France. Set in the main at the palace in Versailles, it isn't so much about King Louis XVI as it is about his scheming and competing courtiers. At this court, wit is the ammunition; in order to survive – that is, to escape ridicule – one must devote oneself closely and studiously to cultivating it. 

Interestingly, this period piece appropriates many of the tropes of American high school movies, only this time in finery and thick facial powder. The competitions of wit and other goings-on at Versailles are not unlike the academic pursuits and rivalries evoked in this genre. One marquis, for instance, is not unlike a conscientious student who keeps careful notes – notebook after notebook – of witticisms he picks up from day to day – quips, paradoxes, repartees, all kinds. Another, an abbot no less, is like an exam cheat who makes sure he gets questions whose answers he already knows. The hectoring cliques are here, too, intent on putting the nonconformists in their place. While those who can’t keep up, the weak-hearted, resort to something drastic. They hang themselves.

Le Marquis Gregoire Ponceludon is the natural wit, the newcomer who is at court for more pressing and urgent reasons. An older aristocrat, Le Marquis de Bellegarde, takes him under his wing and becomes a bosom friend. The old man has a headstrong and academic daughter, Mathilde, who devotes her time to perfecting the 18^th century prototype of scuba-diving equipment and testing them out at the nearest well. But in order to further her studies without worries, she has agreed to marry a rich, old nobleman who can provide for her future. But that is all before she meets Gregoire, a well-learned engineer who seeks royal support to drain the fever-infested swamps of his humble region. 

Ridicule’s strength lies in its finely-conceived script – though some of it is easily lost in translation. Everyone here – even the deaf-mute – is a master at intellectual one-upmanship and can eloquently trade barbs with those who dare open their mouths. Everyone speaks in sweet, sententious tones, in effortless epigrams, as though they were reading from Voltaire or Rochefoucauld. In Ridicule, wit stands for the superficial concerns of aristocrats while peasants struggle to survive and die of preventable ailments. At court, wit seems to be the index of those who are most treacherous. Take Madame de Blayac, who presides over the games of intellect. She maneuvers and uses every expedient – of words, of charm, of connections – to get her way. Gregoire, beware.

Ironically, King Louis seems oblivious to it all. He displays the least capacity for these verbal games, and often misses the point. It isn’t long before the French Revolution breaks out. Could these courtiers have talked their way out of the guillotine?

Reviewed:  June 11, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

TERROR IS A MAN (Gerry de Leon, 1959)

 

A taut and superbly crafted science fiction horror b-movie, Terror is A Man terrifies on an individual, reflexive level, with its visceral and psychological effects, as well as on a wider, macrocosmic level, with its frightful visions regarding renegade science. The title could not have been better chosen: it’s a resonant billing and advertising come-on rolled into one. Terror and man, in the hands of the future National Artist, Gerry de Leon, truly, surpassingly, equate. 

For the purposes of the genre, there is the nominal beast of terror on the loose, while the true monster hides in plain sight, preens, man-like, in a dignified gown, on the foreground. This film revivifies and returns to the thematic concerns of Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau, among other models, as it skewers the arrogant anthropocentrism of man and the cold, inhuman methods of science.

A remote, misty and shadowy island off South America, the ominously named Blood Island, is the locus where terror reigns. De Leon conjures up an eerie and expressionist atmosphere with minimal fuss and minimal trappings, an island where a crazed scientist named Charles Girard rules with the sanction of science. Performing countless surgeries, transplants, and other disfiguring experiments on a panther, he seeks to bring about a new and improved species of man, a man without the burdens of unproductive emotions. 

The film's monster of science, a furry biped midway between animal and man, follows a cardinal principle of horror: he is a monster kept, literally, under wraps for much of the film. In fact, he is never completely visible, always either drenched in shadows, or swaddled in layers of gauze. When he starts to wreak revenge, we are held breathless by what he does and inflicts more than what he must look under the bandages. When the islanders start to die, they flee en masse just as an American survivor of a shipwreck is washed onshore. What this newcomer, a man named William Fitzgerald, finds on the island are unwilling accomplices to the heedless experiments: Frances, Girard’s wife and unwilling nurse; Walter, the doctor’s minion who lusts after the doctor’s wife; and their native servants. 

De Leon makes do with a shoestring budget and true poverty aesthetics. Filmed on location in Corregidor and Cavite and other parts of Luzon in the Philippines, with an able cast of mostly American actors, Terror is A Man was shot in grainy black-and-white with bare and spare settings and yet has the look and feel of a well-oiled Hollywood b-movie production. Filipino exploitation, in the form of other horror fare and women’s prison flicks, was still a decade or so away, but de Leon’s effort could very well have served as a prototype and template for those following in his footsteps.

At a time of over-heated debates worldwide about the possible pitfalls of genetic experimentation, Terror is A Man has the potential for a revival. With its eerie imagery of sadistic trial and error and unfeeling inflictions in the pursuit of knowledge and know-how, it packs a potent argument against the free, unregulated enterprise of scientific study. De Leon may be simply paying homage to literary classics by H.G. Wells and Shelley, but perhaps he had a strong prescience of technological and scientific dilemmas about to come, a prophecy that provides caution against man's boundless freedom.

Reviewed: September 24, 2010 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

BIYAHENG LUPA (Armando Lao, 2009)

 

Like a mirror image, Biyaheng Lupa resembles a little-known 1980 film by Slobodan Sijan entitled Who’s Singing Over There? with this premise: a passenger bus, a long journey, a cast of disharmonious travelers who must keep their sufferance. There, too, is the star-crossed destination. While the similarities are striking, they remain broad strokes of a deceptive comparison. Armando Lao’s debut feature outstrips its Serbian antecedent: it's not a simple account of comically claustrophobic travel, but a poetic, disembodied journey of voices.

Biyaheng Lupa is not so much a road movie, a journey to appointed places, as it is a trip into inner landscapes. Mouths barely open. Like telepaths, we hear the passengers think and feel inwardly, all their psychic activity audible on the soundtrack – making us privy to dramatic irony. Regrets, suspicions, disdains, fears, hopes, paranoias, desires, prejudices, the whote gamut: all feelings and senses oscillate in a steady stream-of-consciousness on this eventful bus ride. Travel has never been a more introspective activity. We don't get the impression of noise: the disembodied voices are devoid of ambient noise. 

Lao’s characters strike close to Filipino sensibilities and yet sound not too rehashed. Lao’s light satire sees them as caricatures caught in their funny and comical foibles. There is the man with the body odor who is unaware of it. This is complemented by a shadiness – pragmatic or opportunistic? – as he secretly wolfs down a wrapped espasol he finds under his seat. There is the multi-level marketer who dreams grand dreams of profits but is discomfited at every turn and finds no takers among a busload of streetwise passengers. His anti-cancer merchandise even gets him into trouble with the military. 

Elsewhere on the bus, a discreet cougar jealously guards reveries about her younger man on her way to another tryst. Her thoughts of romance, however, are broken as the town gossip has just come on board the bus. Her wariness turns to slight panic when she realizes that a picture of her lover and herself is missing. The gossip is an odd creature: a beautiful lady who is indeed profiled as a curiosity seeker. Yet her caviling instincts are balanced by her romantic thoughts for the ticket man on the bus.

Characters also come in parallels and polarities. The young text-mates, one of them a conflicted and secretive mute, who provide the aspect of puppy love. A homosexual and a good-looking teenager are cats and dogs. And this apparently involves thwarted sexual advances in the comfort room. A look into the hearts of a pair of old characters reveal checkered pasts, tinged with regrets and slight despair. 

Various checkpoints, stop-overs, and drop-offs mark the lengthy journey which, in hindsight, have the effect of a Russian roulette. But there are moments when the static nature of the mise-en-scene – mostly static framing of characters with just the dynamism of aural information – stagnates the flow of the film. Lao shifts gears with a song number, a chorus of the passengers with their teary-eyed plea for love or tenderness. Or understanding. I forget. Touching enough. 

Biyaheng Lupa may not break new ground in film art, but there are few films that precede it in its use of the stream-of-consciousness as a narrative device. Fewer have even succeeded. Off-hand there are Resnais’s seminal Last Year at Marienbad and Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone, but Lao’s film can be said to be more ambitious. In his directorial debut, he attempts a subconscious portrait of an ensemble cast of characters. It takes some flair and some balls to even attempt it. And Lao has some success. 

Biyaheng Lupa, in the end, however, is watered-down sociology, the sanitized fabric of the Filipino subconscious. The resulting portrait is not as raw, illogical and impressionistic as the Filipino psyche would have been. Still, this is one auspicious debut with moments of sheer cinematic beauty. Look for the butterfly floating through the bus, a lyrical moment that signals the uncertainty of this bus ride we call life. 

Reviewed: October 28, 2009 (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)

ALL IS FORGIVEN (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2007)

All is Forgiven is a family drama unlike any other: its portrayal of the sad realities of a troubled home, warts and all, is rendered with dignity and grace, subtlety and lyricism. While its underlying foundation and genre is drama – here one that enacts a family's dissolution and fragmentation, and its aftermath – it remains even-keeled and avoids the spectacle of the overwrought. It's a film that lives and breathes with graceful action as much as graceful pauses.

Mia Hansen-Love’s quietly poetic first film is one that does not take a high moral ground about the nature and dynamics of families. Everyone, after all, is born of a family: no didacticism needed. All the film wishes is to frame and follow its characters, its family of three: the thirty-something Frenchman Victor, his Austrian wife, Annette, and their still-uncomprehending five-year-old daughter, Pamela.

The film begins in 1995 in Vienna, where Annette is employed, and shifts to Paris a month or so later, where it slowly becomes clear that each change of residence is an attempt at a fresh start. This is all because Victor is nursing a bad habit. A drug addiction. Casually, he sums up his concept of life this way: writing in the morning (he is a failed poet), taking walks in the afternoon, and doing drugs at night. The change of scenery, however, fails to remedy their escalating marital problems, and the family dissolves.

The second half of the film takes place in Paris, twelve years later. Elided in the action are the rehabilitation of Victor, who now lives quietly in the city as a proof-reader in a publishing house; Annette’s re-marriage with another Frenchman; and the upbringing of Pamela. Pamela, who is now a high school student, soon receives word from Martine, Victor’s sister, and their contact results in a meeting. All those intervening years, Martine reveals, Victor has been trying to touch base with his estranged daughter. When Victor finally does get the chance, the father-daughter reunion is civil and without recrimination. As they meet subsequently again and exchange letters, the past is threshed out and finds a measure of resolution. The end is a moment that echoes with powerful pathos, with an even more ultimate resolution.

All is Forgiven, paradoxically, reveals and repeats what each of us already know, and yet resonates with a kind of emotive power that few films achieve. What’s almost as paradoxical is how Hansen-Love has crafted a highly refreshing film while remaining indebted to a host of filmmakers: in it, we find the quiet grace of Ozu, the poetic touch of Assayas, the conflicts of Pialat, and the tormented figures of Garrel. On second thought, the way Hansen-Love marshals her diverse influences with remarkable assurance and aplomb, and ultimately delivers, why should it be held against her?

Therein lies the real achievement of this film. Once director Hansen-Love realizes the universality of her themes, their inherent nature in our collective consciousness, she proceeds to draw on film lore, and her final calculations and execution bear her out. Elliptical, almost plotless, without a grand thesis, yet almost mythical, All is Forgiven tells us a story of such surprising immediacy and detail that we will remember the names and faces, flaws and all, for a long, long time. A lifetime.

Reviewed: September 13, 2010  (Northern Portrait/The Persistence of Vision)