POSAS (Lawrence Fajardo, 2012)

Like a visual motif threading the film, the camera fixes on these ministerial words on the sides of patrol cars, on the walls of a police precinct: to serve and to protect. Transpiring in a matter of a day, Lawrence Fajardo’s crime thriller, Posas, demonstrates the terrible irony of such a fighting cry. It begins with the commission of one petty crime and ends disturbingly with a terrible mug shot of a well-entrenched culture of higher crime and corruption. At film’s end, who gets served and protected gets unmasked yet again in a society where law is no deterrent but, paradoxically, an expedient that serves the unscrupulous.

It all starts with the simple theft of a cell phone in Quiapo. A pickpocket operating in the vicinity, Jestoni Biag, is caught red-handed and identified by his victim. At this point, the police procedural unfolds with the customary manner of the genre, from the finger-printing of the suspect to his moment at the fiscal’s office. But as the proceedings wear on, the brutalization of the petty thief takes hold. The thief’s denials are easy pickings for the brutal police who force a confession out of him. The police secure him his pardon, but not before utter pain, not before anguish, not before a Faustian bargain for his soul.

If nothing else, Posas depicts the pecking order of crime and corruption: from the street-level thief to the fence to the police to the unseen voices on the phones. The entrenched nature of this breeding ground for crime ought to be a chilling proposition but the treatment by Fajardo is sadly too impressionistic and epidermal. Instead of enlarging on his stories, he sometimes gets caught up in the improvisational skills brought in by his actors. He seems to be aiming for a documentary immediacy, although it is bound to pale in comparison to, say, the rawness of TV Patrol.

But that is not to say that the film has failed in his purpose. Although most of this material is mundane knowledge, it has its moments. For one, there is an almost imperceptible rearing of ugly heads here: corruption almost sneaks up on us. What might start as a routinary questioning of the suspect turns gradually into obscene dehumanization. What might seem like a complaisant handling of a pretty victim’s case, turns out to be an insidious ploy by the police all along: a calculated act of evil that is too practiced and fluid not to achieve its ends.

Fajardo also contributes to this genre the psychology of the criminal. Like the corrupt policemen around him, he is getting adapted to the technicalities of the law. He latches on to the loopholes, and even his family starts to reason like him. But as pecking orders go, he remains the bottom feeder. Posas, then, retells the tragedy of the small fry who at the end of the day will get the bad end of it. And here as in real life, he fails to get his day in the sun. Instead, he must suffer the ultimate loss of his soul. Here as in real life, he must reside in the shadows of the bigger and monstrous forces who manipulate and circumvent the law.   

Title in English: Shackled   

AMOK (Lawrence Fajardo, 2011)

The city is on a hair-trigger. In Lawrence Fajardo’s unsettling and unnerving feature debut Amok, a new day starts out like any other day in the metropolis. The hustle and bustle registers with little divergence from our own conceptions of the city. We can recognize the faces. Pedestrians ply the overpasses and pavements, vendors and hobos scatter, vehicles honk in gridlock. This day seems like any other day. On the soundtrack, however,  cautionary lyrics ring out, a song rapped by a group of young street kids. The frictions borne out of our proximities, the words suggest, can be dangerous.

Shot in crisp and vivid broad daylight, Fajardo’s film may telegraph oncoming violence, but its plausible choreography gives us pause: this can indeed happen. Or at least this film earns it:  it takes an elaborate construction of disparate urban stories to get there. Like an Italo Calvino novel, it weaves together beginnings of stories with only spatial and temporal proximity as their connection. But his clutch of stories has one common and damning pay-off, unless the very admonition betrays us.

The stories are everyday and novel enough. We recognize the characters, so their fates are all the more astonishing to us when it is over. A father and teenage son wait for the bus ride home to the province, their talk filled with filial intimacy. An uncle and his nephew hurry off to a job interview. An aging stunt man awakens with thoughts of better days, while a prostitute sleeps in his bed. An aging matriarch reproaches her driver for being caught in traffic. A talent agent and his new ward have an altercation with a disobliging taxi driver. And a game of billiards plays out with much heckling among street layabouts. Soon there is gamesmanship, one-upmanship, and with money on the line, the nerves start to fray.

Fajardo is a patient and polished operator. He has the assurance of an old hand and shows a flair for thrilling action. It helps that he has assembled an ensemble of tried and tested veteran actors to give life to disparate characters. Mark Gil’s aging erstwhile actor is pure effete perfection, and when his sexy prostitute sports an Adam’s apple, Gil nauseously exclaims how it would ruin his career. Hilarity ensues. And his preening behavior before the camera at the end alleviates the astonishing events. The altercations here are almost just as charged and inspired. The taxi driver and gay talent agent’s verbal exchanges are humorous but dangerous. Dido dela Paz as a gunrunning thug has the leer and offending parlance that will embroil him in trouble. At every turn, he is making enemies.         

In Amok, violence may not just be threats to corporeal being but  the final expression of the pent-up inflictions on our private psyche. When the time is ripe, the setting turns into a city at war, where all rules of common decency are suggestions. However, he does not posit the usual suspects. Fajardo implicates one and everyone in his cynical city. Unintended casualties should disabuse us of our complacency. And violence, when it erupts, is like a bullet that won’t pick its victim. In its illustration of extermination, Amok is almost like a statement of threat, a deterrent. We are not beyond violence. And yet Fajardo seems to overplay the angle of suspended civility,  too much that Amok becomes a cynical movie. Still, Fajardo, if he so wishes, can invoke our checkered history. Heck, human tendency is behind him, for that matter.