YANGGAW (Richard Somes, 2008)

 

At its most stark and fundamental level, Yanggaw has all the earmarks of a regular horror movie, replicated as it is in the double mold of the monster and phobia variety. Actualizing our primal folkloric fears in the aswang, it features at its centrifugal center a rural family named Villacin, who discover that their migrant daughter has been afflicted with a contagion that turns her into a yanggaw, a gruesome, anthropophagous monster. All the scary signifiers are there, her monstrous transformation and the taste for blood and guts, on one hand, and on the other, the socio-ethical crisis that threatens to shred the unity of this family apart. 

But Somes’ feature debut operates on weightier levels of interpretation other than the prognosis of supernatural fears. For one, it posits territorialism in a highly segmented society -- that of provinces, of regions, of governments, of landholders -- and thus the trauma of negotiating its demarcations: a commentary on the fear of the unknown, of seemingly transgressive migration. The disease that afflicts Amor happens in a place where "no one is supposed to wander," a place of known contagion. Soon enough it creeps closer to home, the Villacin house itself, depicted as it is with bleak shadows: it effaces the heads of characters, the frame often bleeding into dark dissolves. The interiors of this abode exude an eerie feeling and true enough, situate in the end an untoward and gory crisis. Cordova, a fictional backward town in the Visayas, is where most of the onscreen violence, murders and killings happen – whether by vigilante justice, the folkloric beast or the people in power.

Corollary to positing the fear of migration is a purposeful attempt by Somes to depict the streak of violence pervasive in our culture, born out of centuries-old divide et empera, the internalized reflex to be divided, to be hostile: everywhere is thus enemy's territory. In one of the opening sequences, Junior Villacin and his son chase a man through their lands alleging him to be a thief. They mete out justice with the butt of their weapons, with extreme prejudice. Junior Villacin himself believes in the curse of the aswang so that he always keeps a bronze bolo by his side. Dolpo, to whom he lost a fraudulent local election, is a Machiavellian political minor who patrols the night with a quick trigger. His advice to Junior sums him up: “You should be willing to kill in order to achieve your purpose.” 

Yanggaw excels as a psychological horror as much as an action one. Somes does it both ways with sheer atmospherics of evocative visuals -- at once lush (of thick foliage and leafy surroundings) and austere and spare (of dramatic trajectory) -- lubricated by heart-pounding and unnerving soundscapes. The austere, shoestring aesthetics, for one, encompass bare expressions -- anguished faces, or one with darting, protuberant eyes signaling a monstrous transformation, a reference to the therianthropy in werewolf movies. Textured so frightfully this way, however, it would all come to naught without its powerful portrait of a family undergoing its own unpredictable transformation – now familial, now social and moral.

But it is worth remarking that the sociological and political aspects of Yanggaw are almost as powerful and immersive as those forces that affect the Villacins. Somes relates this family unit to a wider, yet no less violent village. The family's dilemma is how to align the welfare of their daughter with the safety of their unsuspecting community. Meanwhile, Junior, in dire need of money to hospitalize Amor, is advised by the political pragmatics of Dolpo -- to secure money by running in the elections – implying the common practice of instrumentalizing government positions for private ends. Even the witch doctor by the name of Lazarus plays a kind of politics and demands that he remain the sole dispenser of healing to the yanggaw. 

In this heavily coded scheme of things, Amor is true to form and semantics -- the epicenter of love but with the double occupancy of terror. She seems to represent not just the Jungian shadow but perhaps the negative form of anima, fangs and all, of her patriarchal father, who must decide whether to keep her (the feminine aspect) in chains or mercifully release her, and when worse comes to worst, ultimately what to do with her.   

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (Hong Sang-soo, 2012)

 
Certain poets, it is said, are fated to write one and only one kind of poem during their entire artistic lifetimes. Implicit in such an adage is that they are doomed to produce nothing but simulacra, a body of work consisting of iterations and repetitions: variations on a singular, obsessive theme. On the face of it, the South Korean writer-director, Hong Sang-soo, may appear to fit into this mold of narrowness, engaged as he seems in a film practice of redundancy and tautology observable in the many commonplaces permeating his films. Granting for a moment the plausibility of this reflexive assertion about Hong's work, is this destiny such a misfortune? Does the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, for instance, ever receive the critical flak for his recurrent return, time and again, to his theme of familial dissolution? Does variety in theme or subject ensure a filmmaker's greatness? What about Louis Malle who has been critically punished and ignored for not pursuing a common, identifiable style and thematics in his otherwise excellent career? Suspicion surrounds the ambidextrous. Instead, a focalization on a common vein and constancy running through an artist's work is what distinguishes him and immortalizes him in the end.

Outwardly it may be true that Hong returns again and again to many striking commonalities: protagonists are all too often artists and intellectuals (e.g. poets, actors, painters, film directors), often caught at rest or at play, sightseeing or wandering around, often temperamentally embroiled in embarrassingly confrontational and heated arguments during merry-making or drinking sessions, often on the lookout for sex, thus suggesting the pivotal role of women, to be "stripped bare by her bachelors," but often the more evolved "future of man." 

However, such characters, narrative patterns and set pieces pervading Hong's work are well-calculated and well-deployed, serving to dramatize an intricate web of interconnected themes and subjects: the fallibility of man and the relative apotheosis of woman. From masculine sexual obsession and eros (On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002)) to romantic triangles involving jealousy and rivalry (Woman is the Future of Man (2004), A Tale of Cinema (2005), Hahaha (2010)) to Nouvelle Vaguish depictions of invariable repetition of female destiny and reptilian male tendency (In Another Country (2012)), Hong has featured his own tropes and topoi around male and female dynamics. Whether or not they are reflections of the Korean man or woman, it must also be noted that his own conceptions of man run parallel to those of Antonioni's or Nuri Bilge Ceylan's depictions of anomic protagonists, even as Hong admits, self-deprecatingly, that his work simply reflects "the attitudes of men" he has encountered while amplifying them with his own traits and idiosyncracies.

Absent such a prior knowledge, an appraisal of Hong's contribution to cinema may be misleading, wanting in perspective and penetration. What Hong brings to Asian cinema is unique and unprecedented in its capacity to harmonize and reconcile classicism and modernism. In this light, Hong may even be said to transcend the cinematic contributions of the modernist but rigid minimalism practiced by such filmmakers as Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien. The works of these Taiwanese auteurs, it must be said, reflect an obsessive engagement with stylized and mannerist aesthetics, sometimes too caught up in self-conscious formal and technical devices, like the long take and the disavowal of close-ups, sometimes to the detriment of crafting a well-rounded narrative. 

In a significant and crucial contrast, Hong never neglects the classical definition of a full-fledged drama. However, here's the twist: Hong runs away with it, plays around with drama's old-fashioned definition. He knows the rules -- or at least the rules he has learned, by his own confession, from having read Robert Bresson's Notes On The Cinematographer prior to conceiving and shooting his first film -- and thereby breaks them. After each of Hong's films, one comes away with a feeling of a narrative satisfaction, a sense of not being fictively shortchanged. And yet an enigma slowly dawns on him: a process of estrangement is  at work when one tries to describe its inner workings, recomposing his memories of the said film he has just seen until its mechanics become ineffable and inexplicable. This indescribable transformation that Hong's films undergo is a complex one that David Bordwell attributes to Hong's "geometric narrative structures," his dramatic designs (oddly enough, he calls them "non-narrative" structures, owing perhaps to their protean nature) that instantiate anachrony and therefore defy a straightforward and linear description. 

From his first film, The Day A Pig Fell into the Well (1996), Hong has fiddled around with the rigid idea of conventional chronological sequentiality and synchronicity. He couches his stories, what he modestly calls "fragments", in several defamiliarizing ways: dreams (Night And Day (2008)), film within film (A Tale of Cinema (2005)), figments of imagination (In Another Country (2012)) and reminiscence (Hahaha (2010)). Most of the time these anachronies have no forewarnings -- for instance, no black-and-white or sepia sequences for memories, nor are there dissolves -- so that the effect can be jarring but often enough self-clarifying. Not content, Hong complicates and subverts linearity by an episodic narrative structure, introducing and foregrounding one or two characters at a time (The Day A Pig Fell into the Well (1996), The Power of Kangwon Province (1998)), their paths crossing briefly or by episodic themes or timetables (Night and Day (2008)).

This time around, Hong returns to his affinity with the film mecca of France. Catalysed by his fast friendship with Marin Karmitz, the French movie mogul, his Night and Day (2008) was predominantly set in Paris. In Another Country may be set on home ground, but the film looks, sounds and feels indebted to French New Wave director, Eric Rohmer. In this way, it is unlike any other Korean film, with most of its dialogue delivered in English. The script warrants it – with the presence of Isabelle Huppert in each of its three looping and recursive storylines, making the lingua franca necessary. This is easily Hong's most artifice-laden film of all -- a macaroni of languages and influences permeates it -- or at least the most self-conscious in the potentially double-edged barriers and games that language may wittingly or unwittingly create: Language as an almost musical and unmusical locus of Hong's modernity.

In Another Country foregrounds the self-reflexivity and inorganic nature of a foreign language, almost like a musical gone wrong, something that he avoided in Night and Day, where even in Paris, all characters remained Korean. But again Hong constructs episodic geometries, and again, in trademark fashion, centers on women, not one, not two, but three women – the axes around which Hong's male characters crazily revolve and spin. This time it’s Isabel Huppert, the illustrious French actress of many world classics, who plays three characters, similarly named Anne to our confusion, almost uniform in character to our added bewilderment, and to cap it off, only capable of communicating in English. She is the almost oblivious constant -- a beguiling creature to beady-eyed men -- as in most of Hong's films. The composite of a flawed man is straightforwardly caricatured yet again, lust-driven, prowling for sex. But this time, Hong elides the display of uncomfortable, mechanical sex and the verbal violence, or at least tempers it with comicality, opting for a sometimes-singsong, sometimes-stilted delivery of lines in an attempt to domesticate the foreign tongue.

Hong's latest film may best be noted for many dramatic ironies born of language, the sometimes unnatural diction of which is almost like a satire of perfect Hollywood English: the three Annes  -- whether in the person of a French director, an abandoned, divorced wife, or "a charming Frenchwoman" meeting her famous director lover in a tryst  -- has never learned, by virtue of her provenance or insulation -- the Korean language and is therefore never privy to the conversations around her, whether hurtful, impolite, public or personal. Huppert plays all her three characters with breezy and tongue-in-cheek uniformity, perfect for the seaside town she repairs to in each of the three segments, only distinguished with almost imperceptible touches like an umbrella or a different expression or gait, which adds to our sense of delicious bewilderment born out of the absence of narrative linearity. By the time the end comes, the three Annes have conflated confoundingly into one and the same.
 
Central to this film is the leitmotif of similar recursive dialogue in the borrowed language. At one point a character points it out and self-consciously asks, “What is this play with words?” Nuances of Hong's Korean dialogue in the past have often regrettably been lost in translation, but here much of the ludic play on words is rendered in English, making it one of the most transparent and humorous of all Hong’s films, the most joyous to watch and to listen to. At one point Anne the abandoned wife has a tete-a-tete with a Buddhist monk and it leads to a humorous and burlesque banter of existentialist questioning. Yet another dramatic irony does not spare Hong's usual targets: the lustful, amorous male. In one episode, a Korean colleague who warns Anne, the French director, of the Korean males' lusting after foreign women, turns out to be such a man. Meanwhile, sexual musical chairs are ongoing in the background.

Elsewhere, instead of Hong's usual genuflections to Antonioni's theme of ennui, there are nods to Resnais' themes of memory and synchronicity, nods to Jacques Tati (Monsieur Hulot), nods to Charlie Chaplin and Federico Fellini (Chaplin's mannerisms and Giulietta Massina’s demeanor are evoked by Huppert) and Luis Bunuel (in a reverse of That Obscure Object of Desire, where two females play one character) among the identifiable and noticeable references, expanding and enriching this film into something more far-ranging and playful than usual in a Hong outing.

But In Another Country, a story essentially about female consistency, is once again surrounded by male irresponsibility and turpitude. The story of the three uniform Annes is but a figment of the imagination of one teenage girl, passing time by writing a screenplay as she awaits for word on her criminal uncle. This is her last diversion and solace, confounding yet entertaining, as in the wildest of imaginations, her only remaining freedom, in a young but stigmatized life. 

ANACBANUA (Christopher Gozum, 2009)

 

Somewhere deep in the night in distant Middle East, the present year, a Filipino writer, burning the midnight oil, is suddenly seized by a creative paralysis, a profound crisis of identity. He is a poet of a dying breed, as if being a poet is not a losing battle in itself, laboring as he does to write in his mother tongue, Pangasinense. We get a sense of his literary interiors by the books at his elbow: The Age of Reprieve by Sartre, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, The Stranger by Camus. There seems to be the streak of the existential loner in him – a foreign legacy that doesn’t sit well with his antipodal upbringing. 

At a crucial climacteric of his creative life, the poet decides drastically: abandon his overseas job and return to his faraway roots, literally and figuratively, in order to retrieve his generative bearings. Accompanied by no one but his sullen Muse, the poet surfaces in Pangasinan, brooding about his spiritual estrangement, thinking he is the last Filipino poet writing in the vernacular amid a welter of borrowed languages. Starting on this fairly worn premise -- the artist in creative limbo -- Christopher Gozum’ feature debut proceeds to a literally poetic and lyrical odyssey in the life of an embattled poet, as he tries to retrieve himself through an exploration of his native Pangasinan, its culture, its artisanal and creative industries. 

Will the poet recover the heartland that underpins his creative spirit? What illuminations and epiphanies are in store for him? The poet journeys from town to town, Bayambang, San Carlos, Lingayen, among others, his destinations dictated by the salient features and textures of Pangansinan: the Agno River, its plentiful rice paddies, San Roque Dam, the baroque edifice of the provincial capitol, the brick makers, clay pot factories, the bagoong industries, the metalworks specializing in cleavers. 

Anacbanua complements what the camera sees with fighting words and poetry. The first Filipino film to be shot entirely in Pangasinense, the soundtrack is a groundswell of sonnets and villanelles (the fiery an-long of Pangasinense poet Santiago Villafania) as though to document the creative and spiritual struggle and resurgence of the poet and the tempering sway of the Muse. Pangasinense has never sounded so fierce and fascinating, sacred and earthy. 

There is a mystical and metaphysical edge to how the journey influences the poet. His Christian background, for instance, seems to make him confess to his sense of sin, his affinity with the fallen angel. His Muse in the meantime is impelled to make ritual offerings at the Sacred Agno River. Epiphany comes at the mere vision of paddy fields, and sets him into running like a child in boisterous, euphoric circles. Is he any nearer to the "Caboloan of old," that "parnassus of Pangasinan"? 

Director Gozum's experimentalism, thankfully, eclipses the didactic and overly hortatory summation of Villafania's poetry at the end. The director's eye for the poetic seems attuned to the work of visual stylists like Sergei Paradjanov (tableaux vivant compositions) and Bela Tarr (the textural qualities, the tactility of the images, and the monochromatic photography). The film's imagery forms a disparate diversity that ultimately finds cohesion in their theme of renewal, regeneration and creation. 

Tonight, at the 2009 Cinemanila International Film Festival Awards, Christopher Gozum marked his feature debut with an auspicious bang: Anacbanua won the Lino Grand Prize, the grand prize for the Digital Lokal category, besting five other entries including Armando Lao’s Biyaheng Lupa. The director, who conceived, shot and performed practically all aspects of post-production, made it a sweet double by bagging the best director award. It’s a pity he is not here but in faraway Saudi Arabia to receive his much-deserved prizes. Distance must indeed give this director perspective, in addition to what we presume are pangs of homesickness contained in Anacbanua. The great artist must indeed suffer for his art.

reviewed: October 23, 2009

MELANCHOLIA (Lav Diaz, 2008)

There is, up to a certain point, the exclusion whereby we short-circuit those who are sick and reintegrate them in a sort of marginal circuit, the medical circuit.

                                                         - Michel Foucault

Melancholia, the latest masterwork from revered Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, smolders with the embers of black emotions and delivers on the promise of its portentous title. A film about bereavement and loss, Melancholia documents the tragic plight of desaparecidos, those forced to disappear, and those dispossessed by their disappearance. While there is a dark lingering on personal and private sorrows, the sorrows emanate and resonate equally from social and ideological solicitudes. 

Running at a meditative and heavy 450 minutes, Melancholia proceeds ponderously and woundedly in this saga of the bereaved and the disappeared, recalling such films on the same theme and subject as Luis Puenzo's The Official Story. In Melancholia, however, there is the likeness of a double madness -- one born out of the sorrows of its characters and the other born out of their artificial efforts to overcome these sorrows. Meanwhile, the imagining of the dead is close to idealization, sheer heroes in the fictive mind (romantic even to the very end). So there lies the emotional crux of the living in this film: how to move on, how to forget, against the cruel tenor of memory. 

Memory here is conscience itself, a burden but a necessary evil. It is not just an unshakable scourge that will not let up, but a kind of register, a document of history that will never let injustice go uncommented and unvindicated, certainly not those inflicted by the muscular fascism of a government. Here, the coercions of artificial solutions such as psychology – a kind of ideological state apparatus, Orwellian and Althusserian, that returns those who deviate and dissent to the control of society – is no match for the inexorable onslaught of painful remembrance. There is no forgetting. Time, with all its clichés, is no healer.  

When we meet them at the outset, the bereaved are not unlike fugitive characters from a Pirandellian play, converging on the amphitheater of Sagada: Alberta, Rina and Julian, all bereaved by the loss of their revolutionary spouses. They have sought refuge in psychological treatments, as well as support groups meant for their kind, but they remain tormented by grief and and anguish. Immersed in one character after another, Alberta as a prostitute, Rina a nun, and Julian a pimp – all assume characters in the hope of reorienting and reconnecting with life. By any appearance, their experiments are ill-advised: Rina is inconsolable with despair and uncertainty; Alberta breaks down in tears while in bed with a customer; and Julian has scrambled his moral compass, assuming the persona of a procurer, a character straight out of his fantasies. 

Characters in Melancholia – like the learned and literate artists in Death in the Land of Encantos – have a literary cast to them. There is little chance of encountering them in everyday life. But for once, it is reassuring to see a filmmaker redefining what is possible in film, and the splendid thing is, his characters are convincing in their sharp individuations, whether they be artists, writers, widows, or rebels. Through long, unflinching takes in unrelieved monochrome, these characters take shape and come full circle, full of fierce wit and learning, raw feeling and emotion, dark bile and vitriol, making their own tormented humanity much more tragic and lacerating to witness.  

Thus we find Melancholia’s characters reassuming their real lives in the capital. Far from the prostitute of Sagada, Alberta is the youthful principal of an elementary school while Julian is an established writer and the proprietor of a publishing house. Rina, by now, is prematurely dead, presumably of suicide. Between Julian and Alberta, who must also reassume a difficult role as a mother to Hannah, a young girl also orphaned by the disappeared and severely traumatized, the dynamic of hope and capitulation will play out. As Melancholia traces the threads of its dark denouement, we sense that many of its expositions are no less important and relevant. 

Here, as in its companion piece, the equally vitriolic and similarly themed Death in the Land of Encantos, Lav Diaz uses various mouthpieces to lay bare his various indignations and convictions, personal and social, ideological and political. Diaz has no want of strong opinions prompted by the abuses of the establishment and the entrenched. In Death in the Land of Encantos, there are stinging rebukes against the fascistic military, thieving government officials, and even artists blatantly lobbying for the National Artist Award. This time, aside from skewering the big targets, Diaz levels his criticism against the corruptions in the educational system and those in the realm of commercial cinema.  

But, while crying injustices remain, and while towards the end of Melancholia, repressive state apparatuses are overwhelming and ruthless, Diaz tries to leave us with subtle reassurances. We see a quiet and lyrical imagining of how Renato, Alberta’s husband, must have coped with the prospect of death. Trapped on all sides in a remote forest by advancing military troops, he lays down his gun by his side as rain falls like a reprieve. Exchanging it with pen and paper, he writes a letter never to be sent, a haunting letter about his greatest sorrows. About the fate of his country, its numberless pains, never seeing Alberta again… Thereafter, a bittersweet moment as we see his remains, and those of his comrades, borne in a procession by villagers on his way to a modest burial. There is no better way to die. Let his sorrows be our own too.

reviewed: January 6, 2010

DEATH IN THE LAND OF ENCANTOS (Lav Diaz, 2008)

 

For madness unleashes its fury in the space of pure vision.

                                                    

                                                               - Michel Foucault

Persistent rain falls, reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s rains, supplied by dark, ponderous skies overhead. Desolate landscape, stark diorama: Rock, sand and boulder. These are, in truth, a wasteland of lava and volcanic debris. Farther behind looms Mayon Volcano in the background, an imposing, threatening monolith of nature. Here and there, trunks and stumps of trees stand, battered, windswept, leafless and lifeless. Suspicious calm, suspicious rondure of newly turned terrain: something else fattens and bloats this land. Except for the percussion of rain, nothing now stirs, until we see a speck of life in the distant background, a man we learn shortly, slowly making his way across difficult terrain. This man is Benjamin Agusan, a former activist and a poet of some renown, returning from a long exile in Russia to his hometown of Padang in the Southern Luzon region of Bicol. We see him weeping, disconsolate, not unmoved by the dark spectacle he has witnessed, and the grave irony is: these are his last, desperate days of sanity and reason.

Understand that this man returns to an unrecognizable land in the aftermath of a natural catastrophe that has devastated his native ground and much of the neighboring countryside. Understand that he returns with a heavy personal freightage: the dead of the past, the deceased of the present, the onset of madness and the madness of conscience. Like a ghost, with no fanfare, he returns to the bosom of childhood friends, Catalina the sculptor, a former lover, and Teodoro, a man of many artistic talents who has opted for a simple life as a family man and a fisherman. Each one has sustained a familial or personal loss in the wake of this calamity, but we gradually realize through the thicket of dialectical discourse, their favorite pastime, that their sense of loss is made doubly bitter by intense resentment with a corrupt and callous regime.

Filmed in stark and brooding black and white, Death in the Land of Encantos catalogues not just the casualties of natural calamity but the casualties of state repression and dereliction. Enacting the tragic but possibly heroic story of one Benjamin Agusan with many personal and political overtones, writer-director Lav Diaz intersperses his 9-hour epic with damning actual documentary footage taken in the aftermath of Typhoon Reming, a super typhoon that unleashed not just its own fury but Mayon Volcano’s destructive wrath. What these footages invariably paint, through a series of interviews with locals in December 2006, is a portrait of a people devastated by wrathful nature, degraded psyche and dehumanizing regimes. This is the Bicol region, but it could just as easily be Basilan or Baguio in this miserable archipelago, it wouldn’t have mattered. 

Benjamin Agusan’s story embodies a story that is all our own, his is the allegorical tale of one long-suffering nation. Little by little, we learn through snippets of flashbacks and exposition about the painful verities of his life: his mother going mad and dying in an asylum, his sister subsequently committing suicide; his father abandoned to die alone; and Hamin himself, while sojourning in Russia, developing the symptoms of lunacy. We learn through Hamin’s confrontation with a shadowy military operative that his activism and political poetry have earned him arch-enemies among the military. We learn of his torture at the hands of this same man. We learn of the probable death of Amalia, Hamin’s lover, at the height of the typhoon. Hamin is embattled on all sides, his tormentors encompass all kinds: man, himself, nature. 

The descent into madness, thus, figures prominently in Death in the Land of Encantos. Madness here is not a simple determinism of heredity but a function of unbearable witness. What overwhelms Hamin is not just the anguish of personal tragedies but that of havoc on a nation. He is not a faultless soul, but we witness that neither is he a poet insulated in an ivory tower. Towards the end, the strain of madness becomes more frequent. We see him sleeping in ungodly spaces, wedged between rocks, sprawled on waysides. We hear him literally addressing his ghosts. We hear of him wandering aimlessly in various stages of unreason. But his last few moments of lucidity are defining, none more so than what transpires at denouement: a recitation not of his poetry but of his most profound creeds and allegiances. 

Against this backdrop of mental collapse, of death and devastation, however, is the story of friendship. Hamin, Teodoro and Catalina are veritable kindred spirits: friends and ex-lovers who know each other’s darkest secrets and even recite poems to each other. These friends virtually talk in codes, their conversations are the stuff of scholarly discussions. They may have outgrown some of their idealistic ardors but they remain socially attuned: theirs is a bitterness against “crocodiles and rapacious kind” who prey on the country. They deplore the latest political killings, but what of their involvement? Token? Gestural? 

Corrupt artists, as much as corrupt politicians, come in for stinging critiques here. Cultural ciphers, seekers after fame, socially myopic – these are what artists are, according to Catalina and Teodoro. Beyond heroic commitments to causes and ideologies, artists merely seek the cult of the self. Yet there is a strong suspicion of a redemptive moment at the end for Hamin and what he stands for. In Heremias, Diaz, with almost didactic intent, gives his title character a defining moment to salvage and transcend his passive soul and he obliges. Here, in Death in the Land of Encantos, redemption has an ambiguous edge: as Hamin braves the last moments of torture, he recites the most defiant poetry he knows, the National Anthem. Whether this is a martyr’s act or his death wish as imminent madness confronts him, the truth might just vindicate him.

reviewed: January 27, 2010

REFRAINS HAPPEN LIKE REVOLUTIONS IN A SONG (John Torres, 2010)

The films of John Torres are forever striving and aspiring for intimacy, it seems. They are not unlike an ongoing series of cinematic billets-doux meant for a secret addressee, defying the impersonality of communal viewing spaces. All of Torres’s films, so far, prompt such an impression, confirmed by the position of privilege given to his speaking voice. In an era of stylized aesthetics, depersonalized poetics and large-scale logistics in filmmaking, the gesture of this speaking voice is a rare virtue that should not be altered, tempered or faulted. It is a meditative and reflective presence that contributes to a cinema of confession, of a persona laid bare, of sincerity. To quote the late Alexis Tioseco: (Torres’s voice)… is deliberate in its cadence but always sincere—and that sincerity is the key. It unlocks the secret to the beauty of John as a filmmaker, but also John as a person. It's a sincerity so tangible, so real, that it's disarming. 

Hardly surprising then that Torres has chosen to valorize a voice, a shibboleth of sorts, that fabled and mellifluously singsong timbre of the Ilongo language, in his latest film. At the outset, the director makes it clear, however, that everything is grist for the creative mill, that even speech and language are sheer premise in the filmmaker’s modus operandi of playing with cinematic forms. Refrains Happen like Revolutions in a Song is not simply meant to uphold the orality and epistolarity of his chosen tongue (s) but to put a premium on the many cultures that underpin it. It is the director’s most ambitious work so far, as it also attempts to transcend the confessional material of his previous films (though he has been quoted that certain aspects of this latest film struck a very personal chord with him) and explores, instinctively, matters as hefty as the study of native signs, and the vitality and utility of culture in the face of acculturation and other threats.

His point of departure is the mythical island of Panay. Torres essays the role of a poetic sort of benshi who makes an epistolary dedication at the start to a complicit other – perhaps a twin, a lover or an alter ego? – with whom he inhabits the liminal, interstitial spaces within myth, history, folklore and the pertinent arenas of the abstract. Intertitles soon inform us about the oral tradition of the Sulanon tribe of the island: how certain female children are made to learn the Hinilawod epic by rote and by heart, essentially a love story between two elementals who meet only in dreams. This commitment to memory takes many years to master and the child is kept away from society, and is hence called a binakod. Her consecration to her calling somehow idealizes her in the eyes of common folk and is hence mythicized as much as the elementals.

In present-day Panay, the focus is on a beauteous lass named Sarah, who uses her charms to perform the ruthless job of a debt collector. But her job entails much waiting and frustration, so that she and her assistant while away the tedious time by telling stories – with Sarah assuming the role of a binakod, and later on, a tamawo, the elemental in search of her love. This role-playing, these make-believe moments are not too-far-fetched owing to the nature of insularity. Panay islanders remain steeped in and attuned to a mythic/folkloric collective imaginary that permeates everyday idiom and vocabulary.

History then weaves another thread into the film's story. We read about anecdotes of two factions of revolutionaries fighting for leadership of Panay Island at the start of the 20^th century, while American colonizers try to crush or pacify them. These accounts feed the imagination of Sarah, a welcome distraction as she goes from one job to the next. The intertitles soon inform us that Sarah becomes intertwined with history and saves the lives of revolutionaries. Toward's film's end, she disentangles herself from work, and heads to the cane fields of La Carlota, looking for the man she has never met except only in her dreams. Much like the myth she enacts in make-believe.

Much of the film translates as a conundrum, starting with its title in Filipino. Ang Ninanais may be translated as “the desire” or “the intended,” an adjectival noun whose very intention is left a question mark. In semiotic terms, this film can also be entitled "the signified," whose cognitive or concrete identity, again, proves elusive. This titular referent could be a variety of things: an elusive other as much as an elusive gesture or an elusive abstract. As in much of the film, one is continually kept guessing – the temporal collapse connects the past and the present, the world of abstraction and the world of the concrete are commingled as the ontological and epistemological boundaries are erased – to the dangerous edge of losing the point and the plot completely.

Skeptical minds could be tempted to dismiss this filmmaker’s methodology as verging perilously on free association. To wit: he takes two disparate narrative or ideational elements, and weaves an arbitrary connection between them, and repeats the process all over again. Valid, perhaps. What is undeniable is the difficulty of pulling off this improvisatory propensity with conviction, and somehow there is enough sleight of mind and heart from Torres to eke out a worthy film.

If Todo Todo Teros and Years When I Was a Child Outside focus on overtly personal hurts and human failings, Refrains Happen Like can be said to be more inclusive, more multifocal: It explores dualistic conflations (past and present, myth and reality, history and contemporary) and parallels of ontological and epistemic phenomena (the tracing of contours of the collective ethnic imaginary/unconscious and how it threatens to obsess Sarah's own life), which give a glimpse into the difficult but rich, inner lives of multicultural and multilingual Filipinos. There is a wealth of phenomena at work here, the collapse of the past and the present, the mirroring of the historic and the contemporary, the mythical and the folkloric, the make-believe and the real – all illustrating the complexity of establishing human identity – and perhaps illustrating the difficulty, if not the improbability, of human connection and intimacy.

Refrains Happen Like Revolutions is a film of ever-changing, protean forms and guises. One is never too sure where he or she stands as realities interpenetrate. Torres just manages to weave together an ontological and epistemic quilt that reveals the complexity of Filipino identity and psyche, while remaining true to his experimental nature. The balancing and juggling act of this film is a difficult task -- a fact that, in turn, may confound viewers -- but even as a transitional film for the filmmaker, it is a much more layered and much richer work than any analogous film ever attempted -- even, say, that well-regarded Thai film, Mysterious Object at Noon, by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul.

Title in Filipino: Ang Ninanais
reviewed: August 5, 2010 

MONDOMANILA (Khavn dela Cruz, 2010)

These body fluids, this defilement, this shit, are what life withstands… Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility.

                       
                                  - Julia Kristeva, An Essay on Abjection

This is not another masterpiece by Khavn dela Cruz. This is not guerilla digital filmmaking at its finest. This is not the stuff of cinema: Certainly not about the high-jinks of the juvenile and the poor; the foisting upon audiences of the taboo and the abject; no, there is no subversive import lying just beneath the surface. No, this is not a film by Khavn dela Cruz. This is not his 28th film. This is not Mondomanila Filmfest Motherfuckers. 

Leaving aside frivolity, Mondomanila represents one of Khavn’s best films to date. Here is a flower of evil plucked from the fertile dung of the margins, blooming among the dregs of society; here is a work of uncompromising and unwavering vision, a film that was almost stillborn, but now here in our midst, jumping out at us like a jack-in-the-box, thumbing its nose at us who cower behind blinders. In a word, be prepared for a frightful but rollicking ride through a no-man’s land that we, the coddled, hold our breaths against and turn away from.

At the rotten core of Mondomanila are teenage layabout Tony and his juvenile posse, Paranoid X, pleasure-seeking delinquents without a future but never to be taken for pushovers. Here in their neighborhood of slums and garbage dumps, they are kings, and the cameras observe them in very close proximity, rendering them through hallucinatory filters, washed-out colors, split screens and strange lighting. These Bunuelian olvidados exhibit few inhibitions: young, brash and compliant, they mouth their syntax of obscenities and perform outrageous acts that straddle the lines of morality. They sing and rap, some of them break-dance, some hold small jobs, some don’t, but what makes them gravitate together, what defines them, are common misery and drug-induced fantasies. 

Much of their adolescent fantasies, predictably, revolve around sex. Among them is a compulsive masturbator, who uncontrollably does his thing even in the group’s presence. Another literally engages in bestiality: easing himself on a live, squawking goose, just before he chops off its head. Lumped together, their sexual obsession is even worse: they peep on fornicating midgets and lesbian twins. Meanwhile, menace lurks in the background: Whiteboy, a Caucasian pedophile, makes no bones about his perverse ideology and submits the young kids of the neighborhood to “sexual slavery.” Soon his deviancy hits very close to home.

Figuratively, yet all but literally, one gets buried neck-deep in Mondomanila’s proverbial bodily fluids. The immoral. The criminal. Few taboos remain unscathed here. Combining the abrasive aspects of his recent films namely Squatterpangk and The Family that Eats Soil, Khavn transvaluates Julia Kristeva’s notions of the abject and turns it from a source of horror to something darkly humorous. Instead of horrifying us and making our skin crawl, Khavn numbs and etherizes our sensibilities into a catharsis: blood, piss, excrement, bestiality, sodomy, and mutilation are here in plentiful doses that erode our guards. At some point we start to laugh; we wallow and luxuriate in it. Numbed and etherized in the abject, Khavn paves the way for his film’s subversive end.

Cunning murder, hypocritical revenge, to borrow Kristeva’s words, this is what the film deems its logical coda. Guile, cunning, hypocrisy are exactly the words that befit the crime, subsequently a composite of several crimes. The fact that the crime is compounded raises the acts to the level of the abject, many times over. We laugh nervously and must do a double-take, as the so-called heroes dance and sing for joy after the fact: We realize our rank complicity, our blurring concepts of right and wrong. We argue curiously: But doesn't the crime -- done as it is at the expense of someone draped with neo-colonial trappings -- translate to a symbolic act of patriotism? And how to explicate the aggravating actions after the crime? Reparations? Somehow it is so morally wrong; somehow it is so viscerally right.

Alternate Title: Mondomanila Filmfest Motherfuckers
reviewed: December 6, 2010