'Merika (1984)

Kamis, 11 September 2008

'Merika (1984)

'Merika (Gil Portes, 1984)

Mila (Nora Aunor), a Filipino who has been living and working both as nurse in a hospital and aide in a convalesecent home in New York for years, wakes up to the voice of the radio commentator announcing the weather for the day before starting with the day's biggest local news: the recall of a line of transit buses that will inevitably lead to a reduction of available transport for commuters. She goes about her morning rituals, turns on the television to watch the morning show, which promises to tackle American politics and the latest film to screen in theaters. On her way to work, she looks at the people around her, none of which look and speak like her.

Aunor, within the first few minutes of Gil Portes' 'Merika, gives us an ample glimpse of what is happening in Mila's mind. Her barren stares are reflective of the disconnect she has with New York and her gestures tells of a discontentment of her present situation. Mila is tired of her life and is on the verge of making that crucial decision to let all the financial rewards of working in America go just to be back to the Philippines where the faces, the language, the issues are familiar and pertinent to her.

'Merika does not revel in its setting. It reveals New York from the perspective of a Filipino who has resided there for years. Thus, we see New York, notwithstanding the occasional sidetrips to more famous landmarks (atop the Empire State, or the Trump Building), as plain and ordinary and at times, boring and uninspiring. On the other hand, we are never shown the Philippines but the mental images that we get are overpowering. Through the letters and calls that Mila receive from Cora, her friend who chose to stay in the Philippines, the latest showbiz rumors from tabloids imported from Manila, or the reminiscent and colorful discussions between Mila and her elderly ward (Cesar Aliparo) about the Philippines, the city becomes even more drab, the chronic disconnect Mila that experiences in America becomes even more apparent, and her longing to go home gets more persuasive.

Of course, Mila is surrounded by fellow Filipinos who, in their own ways, are struggling in the foreign land. Her roommate and best friend Violet (Marilyn Concepcion) is on her nth attempt to pass the nursing exams. Danny (Marshall Factora), the lab technician in the hospital where Mila is working, preaches about ideologies that traces back to his student activist days, but is unable to do anything more than lecture to his fellow migrant Filipinos. When push comes to shove, life in America has become too much of a redundant necessity for the Filipinos living and working there; and with families to feed back in the Philippines, a country that is in a constant state of economic and political disarray, the idea of repatriation seems ludicrous. Much more for Mon (Bembol Roco), who relocates from California to New York and eventually starts wooing Mila to marriage, partly for love but mostly for her papers.

Portes tells the story (written by Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr. and Gil Quito) of the Filipino émigré without the usual embellishments of trite melodrama or vapid sensationalism. Instead, he paints a picture of loneliness in a foreign land that is both moving and memorable. Against the autumnal-hued (cinematography by Ely Cruz, who also lensed Mike de Leon's phantasmagoric film Itim (The Rites of May, 1976)) backdrop of back-breaking work and occasional acquaintances in a foreign land, Mila's metaphoric isolation is even more affecting, even more gripping. In the end, she abandons America for whatever unassured future that awaits her in her homeland. Before concluding with a shot of Mila boarding her plane back home, Portes indulges with a montage of the people Mila has left behind, continuously struggling on amid the mundaneness and moroseness of living the American dream. 'Merika is a wonderful portrayal of that elusive American dream, absent all the fantasies and illusions that have draped it ever since.

Adultery (Aida Macaraeg Case No.7892) (1984)

Minggu, 25 November 2007

Adultery (Aida Macaraeg Case No.7892) (1984)

Adultery (Aida Macaraeg Case No. 7892) (Lino Brocka, 1984)

Adultery (Aida Macaraeg Case No. 7892) is not one of filmmaker Lino Brocka's best works. It definitely cannot be lined alongside masterpieces like Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed But Found Wanting, 1974), Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975), and Insiang (1976). At best, Adultery is a well-made melodrama that puts a social issue, that of marital infidelity as escape from poverty, at the center of its affairs. Jose Javier Reyes' well-crafted screenplay (the story is credited to Aida Sevilla Mendoza) is supposedly sourced from a real life account, but one wonders if convenient happy endings (which the film unfortunately struggles with) exist in these kind of cases, especially ones as emotionally charged as in the film. In the Philippines, adultery cases stretch for years and any emotion resembling marital love and concern is replaced with scorching hate, the primary ingredient that fuels litigation.

Aida (Vilma Santos giving a very mature performance) is the sole breadwinner for her family, consisting of a bedridden father, a nagging mother, a good-for-nothing brother, his unemployed wife and baby. Unable to bear the hardships of living with her family, she takes the offer of her boyfriend Carding (Phillip Salvador) to simply live together, resisting his invitation to marry him despite the possible scandal that might arise out of their living arrangement. Carding gets caught peddling prohibited drugs and gets imprisoned, leaving Aida all alone to fend for herself. Years later, Carding gets released from prison and finds Aida, now a mistress of a wealthy executive (Mario Montenegro) and mother to a child that is not his. Aida is then sued for adultery by Carding, which if she is proven guilty would separate her from her son.

There's one sequence in the film which clearly shows Brocka's mastery. Aida visits Carding in prison, telling him of her pregnancy. Carding again offers to marry her, fearing that their child would be a bastard child. Supposedly out of pity, Aida agrees. The marriage is solemnized then and there. The prison chaplain officiates the ceremony where Aida is draped in an ordinary dress while Carding wears the orange colored uniform. Around are the witnesses of their marriage, felons all donning the same orange outfit Carding is wearing. Of course, these are mere background details, emphasizing the sullenness of the event that is ordinarily jovial and lively. Brocka concentrates on Aida. He closes up on her face, worried about the uncertainty of her future: she is after all pregnant and now married to a convict with absolutely no source of income. It is Aida's point of no return and Brocka understands it as such, thus he presents it with understated elegance; no dialogue, just Lutgardo Labad's swelling music and Brocka's emphatic close-up of Vilma Santos' apprehensive face.

The film attempts to criticize marriage, which is depicted not in its traditional sense (as the key to life's bliss) but as a harrowing cage where women are left with no choices. It seems to advocate infidelity, especially when the requirements of life overtakes the facile concerns of societal and religious norms. Interestingly, Brocka does not antagonize any of his characters. Aida is a hardworking woman who we first see as the selfless sufferer who is charged with her family's survival, a mere victim of fate and circumstance. Also, one cannot doubt Carding's affection for Aida. His decisions in life may have been off, leading to his incarceration and Aida's continuing suffering, but it is clear that his love for his wife is indubitable. The blame does not go to any person but to the social institution that is marriage, its sometimes shallow roots and the unbendable veneration the law and society gives to it to the detriment of the unique needs of individuals.

I am impressed as to how Brocka directed the courtroom sequence, without the usual pomp and unnecessary drama. The courtroom sequence gives the impression as to how the justice is bookish and blind to personal plights. One lawyer asks Aida a question, and she shies away saying that the question is too personal. Of course, the judge demands that she answer the question, which she does unwillingly. In the eyes of the law, emotions, circumstance, fate, and needs are denied materiality and relevance. Under the law, Aida is guilty and deserves the penalty that would have been dealt to her. This should have been the instance wherein we'll fall for Aida's plight: that despite her being guilty for adultery, she does not deserve to be punished for she was merely forced to infidelity not by an innate evil but by circumstances that are uncontrollable in her life. However, instead of dishing out an ending that would operate as the culmination of such criticism, Brocka and Reyes decided to succumb to sentimentality. Husband forgives wife. Wife gets her son back. Everybody's satisfied. Unfortunately, reality, which the film tried so hard to emulate, isn't anything like that.

Yellow Earth (1984)

Minggu, 11 November 2007

Yellow Earth (1984)

Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984)
Mandarin Title: Huang tu di

The parched landscape, so prominently displayed and magnificently shot by cinematographer Zhang Yimou in Chen Kaige's film adaptation of a novel entitled Echo in the Deep Valley, is more than just a setting for the tale of a Communist officer who lives with an impoverished farming family. The arid valleys paint an accurate picture of a people where poverty and misfortune has been so ingrained, it has seeped into their culture as their songs are melancholic and woeful, and their traditions (wooden fishes are served during weddings since they cannot afford real fishes) have been etched to exemplify the extreme austerity they have been accustomed to.

Chen's Yellow Earth, regarded by many as the quintessential film of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers (it also voted as the fourth best in a list of the best one hundred Chinese films ever made), speaks through these images of dried-up lands and cloudless skies and painfully wailful songs. It speaks of a people who despite their mournful situation has come to be contented of that fact of life, that there will be times that the sky will withhold precious rain and the crops will stop growing. It's a cyclical truth they have, for so many years, endured. The solutions they have crafted for the ingrained poverty are hardly novel, like marrying off their daughters to wealthier even if older villagers, or for dire situations, performing a rain ritual to appease pagan gods. Despite the seemingly inhumane and unmodernized facilities that make living somewhat more bearable, it has become a way of life that is accepted, undisturbed and somewhat satisfying for its resulting ironic bliss knowing that their fate is beyond their paltry will.

Gu (Wang Xueyin) is an idealistic Communist officer. He beams with pride of the task he carries, to collect folk songs for the army fighting off the Japanese invaders. His exuberance is uncharacteristic of the pitiful and dry locale, who politely exchange his queries with respectful smiles and answers. The family he lives with consists of a widowered farmer (Tan Tuo), his fourteen year old daughter Cuiqiao (Xue Bai), dreadful of her impending wedding to a wealthier man, and his son Hanhan (Liu Quiang), selectively quiet. They are at first cautious and careful with Gu, hospitably preparing his foot bath and other amenities inasmuch as they can but Gu's enthusiasm breaks the barriers of forced politeness, and the family opens up to his detailed stories of the Communist campaign: of the equal opportunities for men and women in the army, of the primitivity of the longstanding traditions that the poor village have accustomed to (especially of the forced marriages), and of modernity of thought. These ideals spark something within Cuiqiao: a chance for escape, a rekindled hope that there is life beyond the desert-like land that is ironically entangled by the Yellow River.

Bitingly ironic, Cuiqiao drowns while rowing against the currents of the river on her way to the capital to join the army, singing and barely finishing the verse "It's communists who save the people." Despite the political undertones (the film is very strongly critical of the government), it was never banned in China unlike Chen or Zhang's later films; perhaps the message was so subtly enveloped by the wailing songs of the villagers, the panoramic vistas of the desolate land, and the hopeful enthusiasm of officer Gu's stories that the film felt more like propaganda than anything. The film is set during the Japanese invasion, but the living standards of rural China when the film was made haven't changed, making the promises of Gu and his government even more severe. It is that hope rekindled by the promise, ultimately betrayed, that is destructive disturbance that Yellow Earth so eloquently tells us of.

The promises are drowned along with the girl who banked her future on them as the rest of the villagers succumb to what they know best and stay put and pray to their gods to cure their land of that infernal drought. It's a fitting conclusion, instead of wrapping the film with Cuiqiao's depressing demise. It puts a closure to the harmful disturbance Gu has introduced to the village's consciousness, very volatile to any semblance of hope. That to rely on the promises of a government whose only presence is an officer who siphons songs to boost army morale is utter futility, and that reliance on that traditions that have been carried on from one poor generation to another to merely survive the cruelty of the land is comparably not all that bad.

Snake Sisters (1984)

Kamis, 04 Oktober 2007

Snake Sisters (1984)

Snake Sisters (Celso Ad. Castillo, 1984)

Like Elwood Perez's Silip (Daughters of Eve, 1985), Celso Ad. Castillo's Snake Sisters has gained some sort of international notoriety. The film lasted only nine days in its local run before being censored and left unseen, except for a few enterprising film enthusiasts worldwide, for several years. The reputation the film has gathered over the years is not very surprising.

Snake Sisters, is at first glance, quite a shocking picture. Throughout its running time, we see its three female cast members (actresses whose names were creatively crafted after famous carbonated beverages, Pepsi Paloma, Coca Nicolas, and Sarsi Emmanuelle) prancing around the pristine beaches or the virgin jungles in the near-nude, with only a g-string to cover their pertinent body parts. They play primitive siblings thriving in the wild. Their provisions include wild bullfrogs, lizards, and birds (all shown by Castillo's uncompromising camera being caught, skinned, and eaten with ravenous gusto by his pretty actresses).

Its premise is actually more intriguing than its curiously sensual visuals. The three siblings are actually unique hatchlings of a group of snake eggs, who instead of being the typical slithering creatures turn out to be in human form. One morning, they discover blood in their vaginas; their father (a snake with a human head) eases their shock by informing them of the normalcy of the situation, that the blood represents a phase in their lives. He warns them, however, that accompanying their adulthood are carnal temptations which would lead to sin which would cause them to turn into snakes, as punishment for their transgressions.

The film is accurate as a portrait of sexual awakening. Castillo was able (quite a miracle at that, since he is working with very sexy starlets) to invoke an endearing innocence or naivety early in the film. At play in the beaches with their pet monkeys, you can hardly grasp any sexual indication despite the abundant nudity. The three sisters, more than what their adult anatomies suggest, bring about a simplistic folly, a wonderment that lacks the worries and temptations of adulthood. This makes their discovery of menstruation all the more alarming, the palpable surprise and fear in their faces all the more understandable, and their search for answers to the opening curiosities and mysteries of humanity all the more compelling.

Their awakening is fastforwarded when they rescue a tattooed man (played by Ernie Garcia), who they see floating along with a piece of wood. The man represents the typical macho who upon landing, climbs the beach's highest peak, and quick to impress, brandishes his blade to forage for food (first, by breaking open a few sea urchins then unsatisfied beheads the sisters' monkeys and roasts them). He is the film's phallic symbol, the source of temptation and of sin. He is unwavering in his manifestation of his superiority, shown in the way he delights in showing off his control of fire, or the way he repels any idea of control over him. Observe how in every moment of defeat, he purposely claims back superiority by an act of violence and invasion. It is, he believes, his natural right to dominate, which is reflected by his incapability to accept defeat or succumb to the wills or strengths of the people he thinks are subservient to him (the sisters, and the tribal woman). At the moment of embarrassment, he retaliates or in absolute defeat, he asserts his dominance with loud and angry threats, until he meets his metaphorical doom, his castration.

Castillo's mythological world is primitive and the behavioral motivations of his characters are primal, sex and violence. The law of the land, of the sisters' doting father, is very simple --- for every transgression, there is a punishment. It is the law that requires no concept of civilization, just a working philosophy of right and wrong. It is a law that the tattooed man misunderstands. He after all, represents civilization or that creeping acknowledgment of control over the land; natural law does not bind him as it does his three victims. What binds him is human law, flawed and ridden with prejudices. The punishment dealt on him by his human comrades is the one he explicitly understands, one that quickly establishes fear in his soul.

Castillo differentiates these concepts of sin and retribution, the one imposed by nature and the one imposed by humanity. In a way, he implicitly distinguishes the two, a difference which marks the film's motivations as something more than mere exploitation and thrills. It is, as dissected, a film about awakening, not only sexually but also to the crude intricacies of human life, its varied rituals of affection and sex, its harsh, crude yet real concepts of sin and punishment.

Boatman (1984)

Selasa, 17 Juli 2007

Boatman (1984)

Boatman (Tikoy Aguiluz, 1984)

The first thing we see in Tikoy Aguiluz's Boatman is the gleaming revealed blade of a balisong (a switchblade knife made in the province of Batangas). A group of prepubescent boys line up to an old man carrying the blade and a stack of leaves. The bravest one presents himself as the first boy to be circumcized. Tikoy Aguiluz allows us to see the details of the ceremonial passage to manhood: the old man pulls the foreskin from the penis and attaches it to the implement before slicing it off; the kid then spits the chewed leaves before jumping into the river. Aguiluz cuts to the same river, and appearing from the river is Felipe (Ronnie Lazaro), presumably the brave kid many years later now grown into an ambitious boatman who delivers tourists from town to the waterfalls of Pagsanjan.

The tourist spot invites a lot of people including a movie crew which Felipe convinces himself as his way out of limited opportunities of Pagsanjan. Pandy (Jonas Sebastian), a gay man who is busying himself on an idea for a book on how a probinsyano (provincial man) would live in the tempting streets of the big city, eyes Felipe for his literary experiment. Felipe thus falls to Pandy's invitations and becomes a torero (live sex performer) in Manila.

Aguiluz paints the lives of the toreros with astute details. During the "practice" sessions of Felipe (his stage name is Boy Toro VI, we get a glimpse of how many have fallen into such flesh trade) and his partner Gigi (Sarsi Emmanuelle), a tinge of theatric artistry is fused with the prurient show (the several positions are shown with witty commentaries: around the world is when the girl does a 360 degree turn while fucking; more funny is the scenarios when fucking the wife of a friend who is working abroad). The partnership between Felipe and Gigi evolve into something symbiotic. Their sweaty lovemaking transcends the voyeurist qualities of their rehearsed acts. The eroticism divides the reenacted and the spontaneous.

I've always thought Boatman is a harsh critique on the Filipino macho. From the moment of circumcision to the ending, we witness a man trying to keep afloat while traversing his path to his ambitions. Observe his several relationships with his women; first, with his girlfriend (Susan Africa) in Pagsanjan who he leaves in a whim and an unassured promises of the city; second, with Gigi, whom we can observe in a quasi-marital relationship with all the intriguing quirks of a distinctly patriarchal Filipino marriage (Felipe brings home the money while Gigi spends it; more disturbing is the added value of their profession wherein Felipe is allowed to fuck around with many women but Gigi is exclusively Felipe's).

Lastly, with Emily (Suzanne Love), who is the first woman to pierce the fiction of Felipe's imagined male superiority. Felipe's ambition hinges on his relationship with Emily, and his illusion of subjecting her to his male prowess. The result is of course tragedy; and it is Felipe's simplistic view of the world that invites such tragedy.

The wrap-up the film completes Felipe's journey in the city in shocking climax. That ending succeeds in putting more disgrace in the profession wherein Felipe's primal mindset is so well-suited, and also gives the film's intro an ironic relevance to the film's themes: that it is circumcision that brings Felipe to this manly world, and a similar (although much more violent) act would completely erase his mark in the world. The punchline of the film is that Felipe is a man who thinks, acts, and earns with his prick; and thus, his significance and existence ends when his prick has lost its power to fuck.