PUROK 7 (Carlo Obispo, 2013)

 

Once I relished a fonder -- or perhaps vaster -- recollection of childhood. I remember the names of streets of my old hometown. I remember the vistas of dirt road and the wilderness surrounding the house I first called home. I remember how Indian mangoes, guavas and cacao fruits could be plucked from its unguarded trees. Those places were wide open spaces. Those spaces were a universe all their own, and every day did not pass without a sense of adventure. Those were idyllic times, and I would cherish through the years their presence in the mind’s eye. Characters of unforgettable attributes would jump out of my memory: the tattooed jailbird who brandished his paltik whenever drunk; the mistress whose house smelled of sardines; the so-called village madman, a gentle giant who roamed the streets, there, in a predominantly Ilocano enclave mingled with the Gaddang tongue. Years later I, would return here to try to revivify those memories, only to be blindsided by the distortions of time: my conception of my first milieu, to my dismay, had become severely disproportionate to actuality. These spaces had shrunk and had lost some of their virtuous dimensions. Gone were the characters that populated them. Memory all these years had flattered my sense of first habitation, and expanded its reaches of wonder, it all now seems.

Carlo Obispo’s Purok 7, a bittersweet portrait of the wonder years set against a backdrop of tragedy, seems to operate on such a prospective view of a time inextricably entwined with the happy hyperboles of memory. Two children, Diana and Julian, are left to fend for themselves when their mother undertakes a journey abroad she is bound never to survive. Their father, by then, has separated from her, and has started another family. Purok 7 concerns how a small village closes ranks and, actuated by sympathy, nourishes its virtual orphans. Later on, the truth may shed its disguise and dawn on them, as many adults come to realize, but time may by then have also healed their tragic loss. Time would have expanded and romanticized the landscapes and homescapes of the past. This is Obispo's hopeful thesis. Memory’s idealization of distant times will have cushioned the impact of the past's severities.

All but abandoned, Diana, 14 years old, and her younger brother Julian remain on the surface unaffected by it all. Approached by Obispo with a measure of mirthful sympathy -- Diana wears an unusual smile as Julian points out at one point -- their lives of feasting on nothing but swamp spinach or humble viands, however, are not without a sense of wonderment. Diana, the budding adolescent, receives unusual fondness from her childhood friend, for whom she fosters a palpable crush. Obispo’s observation of early youth is more or less precise, anchored on an uncanny sense of the idealization of childhood against a time of overarching loss. His sense of memory does not overly sentimentalize, but orchestrates proceedings with a very gingerly touch – almost to the point that his movie feels unstaged or unsimulated; its tone and acting are both grounded in lighter-than-air spontaneity. The director's intention is to counteract the depiction of a childhood of potent hurt with one filled with the more caring influence of benevolent humanity. Obispo’s compassionate concern invests faith in the resilience and self-healing attributes of the young, forging a film that stands more blithely and obliviously than such unsparing depictions of childhood as Miyazaki’s Grave of Fireflies, Jang Sun-Woo’s A Petal, Amir Naderi's The Runner, and Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows.

Purok 7’s tangle-and-twist-free plotline, however, seems both to work for and against it. Combined with its close immediacy and intimacy, on one hand, it works because there is a sense of unhampered, almost real-time take on its subjects, but from the standpoint of conventional dramaturgy, it seems like dead time. Dedramatization is not bad, but when the material is overly familiar as in this case, it can impoverish the experience. (Watch So Yong-Kim's Treeless Mountain for an illustration, a film with a very, very, very similar dynamic, set of themes and subjects, but with much deeper, more immersive and more complex emotions involved.) A predominant chunk of Purok 7 regrettably plays as a form of dreamy-eyed puppy love that we have seen elsewhere and often. Besides, it all feels unrealistic for the most part: the rich city dream boy all but requiting the shy presence of a plain, provincial Diana stretches it a bit, long before sympathy for Diana comes in and justifies his solicitous attentions. Instead of relegating us to adolescent pining too often frequented, the film could have been better served with a more thorough exploration of spaces and people of the village -- not this generic purok devoid of character and characters (not the overly familiar stuttering best friend, please) -- all in the manner that Gaston Bachelard describes as a sense of home that "protects the daydreamer." Only during short intervals is its underlying social issue touched upon: one or two underplayed scenes that haunt with the apparition of the absent mother. Despite this, the concentration on adolescent infatuation feels too central and minimizes attention from its bigger theme – the familial sense of distance from many overseas parents. This must be Obispo's way of showing his weariness with the less-than-subtle representation of the death-row subject itself. The effect is that of a metaphorical reverse shot of the melodrama and hysteric spectacle of films featuring overseas Filipinos on the verge of execution: the focus is, instead, the steadfast and spontaneous day-to-day life of those left behind. Still one can't shake the feeling that the existent material, as it stands now, can be further rendered more compactly and freed of extraneous matter, and work just as effectively as a short-to-medium-length film.

AMOR Y MUERTE (Ces Evangelista, 2013)

There is more than a titillating hint that Amor Y Muerte is meant to be a vehicle for the exploitation of Althea Vega’s shapely and buxomly body. The film is constructed in such a way that her character named Amor, a free-spirited native Tagala married to a repressive Spanish insulares named Diego in 16th century Bulacan, has multiple drawn-out sex with different men. Not only does Vega’s character have numerous steamy -- noisy, for everyone to hear -- bed scenes with her husband, she also has indiscretions with a g-stringed Tagalog native in every conceivable nook and cranny: there's even the all-but-compulsory moment against the backdrop of a cascading waterfall: "artistic sex," so must think its director. After all this sexual galore, however, one is left with a static and stagnant affair: its temporal setting is sketched with monotonous exposition; its mise-en-scene -- a few native houses in a leafy, watery rural backdrop in the Tagalog region -- is a given even to this day; but its thespian cast are acting tyros who can't shoulder the onus of authenticity necessary for this film.

These deficiencies are only symptomatic of the systemic failure of the film. The main crux of its problems seems to be undue diligence, its over-reliance on the fragmentary, unholistic literature from and about those times, as filtered through European eyes. Most, but not all, of what we know of precolonial times are derived from the handful of books left behind by Pigafetta and de Morga. These European prisms suspiciously appear to be what the film's researchers rigidly used as their frame of reference. Rizal's annotations may help to some degree, but it must be noted that our hero himself was not immune to his European education and imaginary. Thus a predisposition to exotica and Orientalism can be discernible in Evangelista's film.

More of archetypes than flesh and blood, its characters bear these traces of Asiatic exoticism and othering. "Carnality" is supposedly the main attribute of pre-colonial women. Amor obliges and embodies this typification, converted to Catholic faith but without a sense of sin. She seems cut out of the erotic and sexual natives Pigafetta claimed to have witnessed in orgies during Magellan's expedition and passage through Cebu. (Another Pigafetta footnote that makes it into the film is the supposed use of sexual toys and accessories by pre-Spanish natives.) But the telling question is this: Does Amor really love her husband as she claims while committing infidelities with another man? Monogamy was already practiced and well in place, it must be noted, before Spaniards arrived. The motivations for Amor's actions are amorphous if not incriminatory; her actions are indiscretions in all their promiscuous erotics, and thus not equate to virtue, let alone a metaphor for native rebellion, as the filmmakers may wish to imply.

Amor’s aunt, meanwhile, is another Christian convert but who secretly practices pagan convictions. She is also in cahoots with Amor’s father, a local rajah who conspires with Lakandula's revolt. Apitong, Amor’s lover, is an unthinking cipher who converts to Catholicism, and incriminates himself and Amor through a Christian confession. Here the native characters are either idiotic, treacherous, scheming or depraved, motivated with unvaryingly unsympathetic traits.

All of these details seem to create an intractable picture of the times. The characters are uniformly created as rebellious, but none of them show an ounce of redemptive quality. The motivations of Amor are inscrutable and contradictory in the way she professes love for her husband but is not beyond committing infidelity. Amor's father brazenly lies to his son-in-law about Lakandula's revolt and affirms that he is "his son" now. Amor's aunt double-deals even in matters of faith -- hinting at her sense of duplicity and expediency.

Amor Y Muerte repeats proud contemporary assertions that the pre-colonial natives were rebellious towards Spain, but that is only half the story. Pre-colonial natives also freely and willingly collaborated with them in order to battle common enemies. This film simplistically, one-dimensionally depicts those times. Meanwhile, the thrust of the movie is obviously elsewhere – towards the loins. Alongside the unnatural performances, a movie meant to have a handsome period and costume sweep descends into amateurism and bathos. 

By the time, the movie winds up in a violent and bloody conclusion, there is less than a dramatic urgency to be felt and be moved by. Despite the omnipresence of sex and a smattering of violence, there is just too great a deal of lethargic action, not the least worsened by the somnolent delivery of dialogue -- whether in Spanish or Tagalog. The supposed rebellious freedom of its characters is thus ironically hampered, constrained by the lack of thespian capacity and presence.

Amor Y Muerte. Sex and violence, in other words, and then where are we? Even the ending – a freeze-frame in the middle of Amor’s vengeful wrath  -- is a sorry symptom of an overall directorial aporia.

BABAGWA (Jason Paul Laxamana, 2013)

Babagwa, simply put, is a film about just deserts, comeuppance, the punitive consequences of the immoral, et cetera. To cut to the chase, the inevitability of reversal and retribution in Laxamana's film about deceptive cyberspace fantasies is too telegraphed even before one is midway through the movie. The virtual world it constructs shows characters manufactured with anticipatable illusory trappings. The illusion of the handsome and the beautiful: we are made abundantly aware of this set-up, through the online reveries of its main character and henceforth we are long prepared for the eventual erosion of make-believe. This gives the movie the patina of predictability that taints it. Sufferance is the overriding emotion one experiences in this spider’s lair that doesn’t stick nor pin us down. The web of unfolding lies and deceit, the foreseeable confidence trick ending in inversion, consigns Babagwa into a match-box of sorts meant alone for child-like ignorance which still keeps the silk of spiders, liable to be carried around in a dark, forgotten pocket.

What’s wrong, for the most part, is the film's predictable Catholicism and its retributive dictates upheld by its filmmakers. What’s wrong is its schematic causality, how the characters are too predictably dastardly not to deserve what’s coming to them at the end. What’s wrong is how it patronizes customary morality. However, its moral diktats are more than a century late. The era of Nietzsche, de Sade, Baudelaire and Artaud has long been upon us in their imaginings of the transgressive. Maybe the whole concept of a genre movie mongering in "a web of lies and deception" is just too wearisome for words, a plot-line whose main thrust is sex and more sex. Which is, all too predictably, in Babagwa’s agenda.

About its central protagonist, Greg (Alex Medina) is a facebook scam artist who virtually styles himself as a rich, philanthropic kid, with the elaborate con leading to him and his conspirators raking in money through some fake emergency scenario. (In real life, he is a malcontent who gripes about his small cut from this online racket. In real life, he seems too naive for a slick operator to never suspect and second-guess the wiles and ruses of his prospective victims. A con man being conned is, by now, too pat.) The rest is a mop-up job that hides the spoors of his cyber crimes. His accomplices are no less odious, Marney, a gay man in dire need of money (Joey Paras) serves as the brains orchestrating this virtual fakery, the community of bogus accounts revolving around the fake rich-kid persona. A third but subsidiary character serves as the owner of the bank account.

Maybe our inner moralists will go gungho for this movie. Crime doesn’t pay, the golden rule, karma, et cetera, they will agree has had a hand in it. In short, the microcosm of Babagwa is too orderly, too tractable, too docile even, in its sense of the wrong and the immoral. Me? Maybe I’m just looking for something novel, or maybe I’m still flirting with the Nietzschean transvaluation of all values. The Baudelairean flower of evil. The Artaudian devaluation of values.

Maybe when one looks at it through rose-tinted glasses, it can serve a cautionary purpose. Don’t be fooled by virtual illusions, it may wish us to pay heed. Maybe if you are a wide-eyed teenager, and naively prone to believe in the imaginary world of cyber prestidigitation, the so-called machinations of this movie might resonate. Heavens forbid. Like a miniscule spider, this one's for the beaks of birds. 

My other beef with it is that it takes a facile shortcut and presents an artificial dilemma at the end: what if instead of the rich, "spinsterish" woman at the other end, she turns out to be an immoral, insufferable beauty instead? Someone with all that, plus a glorious and irresistible past -- like say in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. As Wilder shows, that would have been a nightmare scenario. Even as Babagwa ends open-endedly with the con man being conned, what will keep him from bolting? The crime he has already acknowleged? The crime he is more than willing to take the fall for? The movie is trapped in its own artificiality. It only goes back to the film it is so desperately trying to channel and draw upon. Big difference: Sunset Boulevard goes straight for the jugular, the illusion and enchantment is plausible and established from the get-go, irrevocably, inescapably so: the characters go cheek-by-jowl in all the bigger-than-life illusion of tinsel enchantment and fantasy. 

None of this flimsy gossamer you can flick aside just like that.

Title in English: The Spider's Lair