Raya Martin’s Possible Lovers, a ninety five minute film introduced by five minutes of silent vignettes of Manila in 1919 segueing to around ninety minutes of a ridiculously long take of a man watching another man sitting on a couch and ending with a self-referential stab at itself, could be anything. The title suggests a romance. The screen suggests a one-sided romance, from the gazer (JK Anicoche) and the subject of his gaze (Abner Delina), a sleeping man wearing a coat and a top hat. The man’s gaze towards the sleeping man, considering that nothing could attract such long a gaze except what could be the beauty of a face or the possible intrigue of what is happening within the sleep, is an act of selfless adoration. Nothing else happens. They remain only possible lovers within the scope of Martin’s film, a film that is far too short to appreciate beyond the possibility of that possible love.
“They made movies in 1919,” states the intertitles that separate the vignettes of old Manila from the extended shot of the two men. The clips are deteriorated, made overtly imperfect by the decay of the film source over time and the effects of digitalization. Hardly the movie that the intertitles speak of, the clips are but phantoms of an existence or the possibility of the existence of such movies. Given that what’s left is a mere reminder of what was or what could have been a cinematic past, the cinephilic adoration morphs into what essentially is a fetishistic attachment for the dead or the near-dead. Is the man wearing a top-hat really a man but a ghost of the unobtainable past? Is the gaze really a romantic gaze of affection or a suffering gaze of patience, longing, regret and psychotic expectancy for specter wearing the top hat to wake up from what seems to be an eternal slumber?
Teresa Barrozo’s sound design accompanies the near-static image with the promise of movement and action. Sounds of horses galloping, of motor vehicles on the move, of men making passage through grass, create an atmosphere of unrest that is discordant with the steady visual. Are these the sounds from the movie that the audience supposed to be watching? Are these the sounds from the movie that the man is watching?
“We were two possible lovers, waiting for the film to end,” concludes the film. At first glance and probably at second, third, and fourth to viewers who cannot get over the fact that they were just watching a man watching another man, the coda seems to play like the punch-line to the film’s overextended practical joke. However, the coda succinctly summarizes the subtle anguish that Martin bares in the film. It is anguish attributable to an unfulfilled need, like a love affair infinitely stalled because of the utter impossibility of the receiver to reciprocate a fervent love being offered. As the man with the undying gaze is in the middle of a possible love affair, the audience is also stuck staring on a possible cinema, only to be reminded by the abrupt coda that there is actually no end, no conclusion. We all remain waiting, possible lovers of that possible film.
For Martin, love and cinema, both of which are for him indisputably personal as all of his films, where both are interchangeable themes, can attest to, are perpetually connected. Possible Lovers, within the span of ninety five minutes, majority of which is spent in teaching the audience the art of the expectant gaze, articulates a pain common to both those who are hopelessly romantic and those hopelessly in love with cinema.
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Olivier Assayas' delicately magnificent Summer Hours is bookended by two gatherings in a rustic summer house that is located a few hours from Paris. The film opens with children hunting for treasure. The children, offspring of siblings who have been separated by a rapidly globalizing culture and are only reunited during important family events like birthdays or funerals, run and play around the house, apparently oblivious of the intricacies of what’s going on with the adults. It is the 75th birthday of Hélène (Edith Scob), the family’s matriarch and safe-keeper of the estate of her late uncle, a famous painter who has amassed a collection of valuable art pieces. The celebration, seemingly warm and sun-drenched like the summer house, is more than meets the eye. The family reunion, beneath the token gift-giving and the heartfelt well-wishes, is a precursor to Assayas’ astute discourse on mortality and immortality, as exemplified by life and its limits, and the things, both tangible and intangible, that humanity leaves behind.
Hélène dies. Her children, Frédéric (Charles Berling), an economist living in Paris, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), an art designer working in New York, and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), a factory manager residing in China, have been left with the decision of what to do with the house and the treasures therein. The dilemma is seemingly straightforward: Frédéric wants to preserve the estate for gatherings in the future and for their children, while Jérémie and Adrienne, who foretell their inevitable disconnect with France given their jobs abroad, opt to sell everything. As the pieces are sold and hauled away from the house, values are revealed and sentimental attachments are disclosed. Assayas, who fascinatingly documents the goings-on with astounding near-objectivity and hardly any emotional attachment in display, crafts a resounding elegy of legacy as opposed to estate, the former being objects inherently co-existing with memories formed with them and the latter being objects appreciated only for their utilitarian value.
Summer Hours, while fundamentally a family drama that tackles the most intimate of familial interactions, reaches further to comment on the current world of globalized culture where factories in China, ran by a French expatriate, are manufacturing Puma shoes to be sold in the United States, or design houses in New York are conceptualizing vases to be sold in Japan, or an unpaid mortgage by Californian blue-collar worker triggers a global financial crisis. Globalization has seeped into what is believed to be the proudest of cultures; as the staple American influence, from the preference of wearing a pair of Converse sneakers instead of China-made Pumas to having your children be educated in the English language, have found themselves not only in the extremities of familial reunions but in the utmost core of decisions. The Berthiers, coming from a line of cultural workers with the great grand uncle being a famous painter, have succumbed to the globalization malady.
Further manifested through showings of how cheapened culture is being turned into via its commodification through auction houses and other institutions whose capitalist intentions simplify culture to maximize financial worth and nothing more, Assayas’ subtle lament becomes more meaningful. In the guise of democratizing appreciation for what is advertised as cultural or artistic heritage, placing the Coron and Redon paintings, the Majorelle and Hoffman furniture, and the Bracquemond and D’Auteuil vases in museums for everyone’s limited and momentary pleasure, the meaning and essence of these objects dissipate as they are relegated the sole function of time capsules to everyone, from the previous owner who acknowledges these pieces as soulless outside the summer house that housed the memories that they keep to the random passerby whose appreciation for the object is limited to what is written in the label or what is mentioned by the paid lecturer.
By communicating conflict through minute gestures instead of grand emotional displays, Assayas has created a film so elegant and graceful it seems to belong in another era. Conflicts are enlarged not by what is visible and immediately felt, but by what are merely suggested: Hélène’s monologue, which caps her 75th birthday, fades out to after her death several months after the reunion; the housemaid who parts with the summer house from the outside looking in; the long conversations between the siblings which end with Frédéric crying alone in the dark. Civility has never been this tenuously depicted, as if a sudden burst of violent disagreement would function to sever ties forever. Outbursts are quick and apologies, even quicker. Aches, experiences and reminiscences do not make opulent appearances. They only function as defining moods and nuances, sources of understandings and misunderstandings, the very thing, fragile and incorporeal as they are, that keeps the family a family.
Ultimately, Summer Hours feels like a swansong to an era that was and is still beautiful but is being rendered obsolete by a world that is so fascinated by materialism. Yet, survival dictates that humanity move on and adapt. The film ends in the same house where the children of Frédéric are throwing a party before the sale papers are signed and the summer house transfers ownership. This is the torch being given to the next generation, where the opening’s gathering is pastoral in its simplicity and gracefulness, the ending’s gathering is rowdy and noisy. Assayas seems to suggest an ominous future where the next generation are nothing more than uncouth, uncultured, and unappreciative lots. However, Assayas slows down and allows a glimpse of the next generation, a glimpse that the entire movie seems to have neglected in giving. Frédéric’s daughter, in a surprising sincere expression of somber regret, tells her boyfriend of what her grandmother has told her and the value of the house to her. Promises were broken. Objects fade. Memories remain. Memories are all that we share.
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In black and white, a solitary angel stands against a desolate background of sand and rocks. Motionless and emotionless, she mechanically recites several prophetic messages in Catalan. The actress playing the angel, we later learn, gets her monologue on the spot from the director who is only a few meters away, communicating to his actress and his crew via walkie-talkie while conjuring words out of thin air. It's a grand but overly familiar metaphor --- that a director on his set is god --- but it has never been as aptly fleshed out in film as in Mark Peranson's Waiting for Sancho, a fortuitous documentary that covers the filming of Albert Serra's Birdsong (2008), a contemplative take on the journey of the three wise kings to meet the newly-born messiah.
Using a consumer-level HD digital videocam which he only learned to operate while on the airplane to the Canary Islands, Cinemascope editor Peranson, who plays Joseph in Serra's film, shoots Serra and his cast and crew both at work and at rest, capturing a volatile creative dynamic that is mostly supported by fostered relationships. Inside the hotel rooms, while driving to the desert, and while shooting vital scenes, interactions, which are mostly banal banters, dry discussions, jests and jokes, comprise most of Peranson's documentary, which if it is not unraveling the mysterious mechanics of "auteur filmmaking," for lack of a better term, is grounding one of its components who, in this case, is non-actor Lluís Serrat, the Sancho (a nickname he got from playing Sancho in Serra's Honour of the Knights (2006)) of the documentary's title whose heft and lack of physical prowess literally makes everybody wait for him during the filming crew's long and arduous desert hikes. If only for how it humanizes filmmaking, as compared to the needless and predominantly dishonest making-of documentaries that are mere supplements of their over-budgeted subjects, Waiting for Sancho deserves much more attention than it is currently being given.
In his introduction, Peranson states that he never intended to make a film. However, out of the more than five hours of footage he procured in and out of Serra's Birdsong set, he was able to come up with a distinctly immersive film, providing an insider look into the creative process of a unique filmmaker who, aside from several other eccentricities, requires that his actors be actually tired when filming. Thus, Waiting for Sancho requires more than patience as it indulges, by necessity, to extended moments where absolutely nothing happens.
Peranson's aesthetics however betray his lack of intention to create anything more than a video-diary of his collaboration with Serra. The documentary is quite beautifully shot. Peranson's visual compositions are often surprisingly elegant, persistent long-takes of endless deserts and people that are uncharacteristic of the hand-held camera that he utilizes. Given that Peranson often includes actual scenes from Serra's film, the documentary then poses as a high-definition colored surrogate to Serra's stark black and white photography.
The implications of Waiting for Sancho's connections as a simple making-of adjunct, a companion film, critical commentary, or parallel reality to Serra's Birdsong are infinitely intriguing. As such, it gains a life of its own, ultimately independent of Serra or his film. One may doubt the film's pertinence considering that very few have seen or are aware of Birdsong or Serra, for that matter. However, the trend as filmmaking becomes a democratized art form, especially with the advent of relatively cheap equipment and audiences who cater to personal visions rather than pomp and spectacle, more and more filmmakers (like Serra, Lav Diaz, Raya Martin, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more) whose methods may veer further from tradition to serve their own intents and nobody else's are gaining serious attention.
Having said that, Waiting for Sancho, with its near-nebulous foray into Serra's oft-dysfunctional film set knowing that the result of the on-set ramblings, tantrums, and doldrums is an arthouse darling,may very well be this generation's Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, 1982) or Hearts of Darkness (Fax Bahr & George Hickenlooper, 1991), only it goes further than simply tackling the eccentricities of a filmmaker or the hardships of the filmmaking process while still maintaining a quietly charming modesty that lends well to the very intimacy that fuels these small-scale yet worthwhile productions.
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The opening sequence is vital. The requisite black of the opening credits gives way to a cloudy gray sky, which is partially covered by the back of a man's head. A lone gull slowly flies across the frame and it punctuates the gloomy atmosphere, an atmosphere that is predominantly supported by the deafening rhythm of an unpredictable breathing. We essentially feel what Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) feels after what seems to be an unfair turn of events. Director James Gray momentarily removes us from Leonard's perspective, and from a safe distance, we see the character, bowed down in contemplation, walk, arbitrarily drop the freshly dry-cleaned clothes he was carrying, climb the railings of the bridge, and jump into the sea. Gray brings us back to Leonard's perspective: a struggle of air bubbles in the cold seawater; a piercing memory of a perfect love that turned out to be imperfect; a glimmer of light in the distance and indistinct shouts from the surface. Leonard is eventually rescued, walks away from the crowd with hardly an expression of gratitude to his saviors.
Leonard is all at once a very familiar and unfamiliar man. From the safety of a cinematic distance, his case seems unique: a suicidal thirty-something man from Brooklyn who after another failed attempt at ending his life, suddenly falls in love with a new neighbor, who is herself in love with a married man, while entertaining possibilities of romance with her father's business partner's daughter. However, Gray insists on depicting Leonard as an everyman, a personification of our own stubborn insistence on the fantastical notion of the existence of a grand romance, a figment of what we used to be or what we refuse to believe that we are. That is why the opening is vital. It is what invites our eyes to see the world through Leonard's incongruently hopeful and jaded point of view. The opening does that as it establishes a connection: that more than being approximated how it is to live like Leonard, we are approximated how it is to nearly die like Leonard. This is a connection that is enough for us to understand him notwithstanding the novelties of his circumstance: that he lives with his parents; that he is volatile; that his current predisposition is utterly unsatisfying considering that he is loveless, lifeless, and works for his father's dry-cleaning business when he fancies himself an artist.
The dilemma that Leonard has is hardly gargantuan, although to him and probably the rest of the uncynical world, it probably is. In a curious twist of fate, he is given two avenues to repair his romantically battered soul. Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of Leonard's father's business partner, is your typical girl, the type that suddenly springs in your life with hardly any fanfare, although she starts to grow on you, but never enough to personify a lifelong fantasy. Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), on the other hand, the new neighbor who is troubled by her married lover's inability to fulfill his promise to leave his family for her, is that fantasy girl who, although seemingly disinterested in a romance with you because of several reasons, is far too close to ignore or forget. Gray paints Leonard's dilemma with the casualness that is striking and oftentimes, heart-wrenching. Gray's camerawork, precise in its deliberate movements, fluttering through the interiors of Leonard's apartment or in and out of the brick pillars of the building rooftop, exemplifies an earnestness, a quiet sincerity that gives the intertwining relationships an emotional resonance that is simply too palpable to discard. In that regard, the tender moments, such as Leonard's attempt to kiss Michelle while she is sleeping or the prelude to Leonard and Sandra's lovemaking as backdropped by black and white portraits of Leonard's ancestors and opera that sprung out of Leonard's frustration to win Michelle's affection, are devastatingly beautiful, ravishing brush strokes that complete a masterwork of a painfully real document of the randomness of romantic affection.
Leonard's family is a lingering presence. His familial ties, through the several generations of Kraditors hanging in the apartment, the unavoidable pull to partake in the family business, the Jewish traditions, pervade his intentions to find and gain the love of his life. His father (Moni Moshonov) and mother (Isabella Rossellini), laid-back yet utterly concerned of their son's emotional condition, insist on a hold on him, sneaking behind his locked door to get an inkling of what he is doing and manufacturing opportunities for him and their anointed girlfriend so that they can get together despite his subtle protestations. Leonard, with his indelible familial attachment and his insistence on betting everything on a fantastical appreciation of love, is essentially a man-child, a Brooklyn variation of all the adult yet childish men that have populated Hong Sang-soo's love triangles and who in their drunken and sex-desperate stupor, have dissected the basic intricacies of sexual relationships. Phoenix's Leonard however, with Gray's preference for melancholy and dolor over Hong's deadpan humor, is a particularly moving creation, a man stuck in his unevolving imagination, delighted and fanciful of the fleeting ecstasy of an undefined romance: communicating with Michelle via phone, with the added value of seeing each other through their connected window views; showing off his skills in the dance floor; and charming her friends through his stories and raps.
Thus, the film's conclusion, devastating if viewed from the perspective of a hopeless romantic, gives way to probably the film's truest moment, at least for Leonard. After reeling from a realization of his overboard folly, he returns to his family nest and quietly proposes to Sandra, the girl who represents everything he is escaping from like family, his Jewish traditions, his father's beloved dry-cleaning business, and a life of abject ordinariness. He is rewarded a tender embrace; as Gray's camera follows his face and Leonard suddenly gazes at us, discarding the supposed distance, the object of escapism that cinema was meant for. That peering gaze, laced with a tinge of guilt, an acknowledgment that he knows that we know, a surrender to a real world that consistently rids itself of confused dreamers, is not unique in the film; as Michelle, while on the rooftop after Leonard's heartfelt declaration of love to her, similarly looks directly at the camera as she surrenders herself to Leonard after her realization of the impossibility of being with her married lover.
The gaze mystifies. It bothers. It disturbs because it's just too damned honest. Two Lovers, with its illusion-breaking gazes, its deliberate pacing, its primary use of a suicidal and lovesick man's painfully hopeful perspective, and its atmosphere of colorable melancholy, is, depending on one's readiness to be abruptly made sober of the intoxicating consequences of an infatuation with romance and picture-perfect happy endings, a work of undeniable power. It will lead you on, then break you completely, before curing you back into the banal comforts of this real world.
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Set in the steppes of Kazakhstan, Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan details the efforts ofAsa (Askat Kuchinchirekov), a young man who is relieved from his navy duty and is now living with his sister and her husband, to find a wife, and in turn, earn his flock of sheep and be a step closer to his dreams (as drawn under his navy uniform's collar; a tradition done among sailors, we are told). However, Tulpan, the only girl available for marriage within miles, does not like Asa, despite his tall tales of wrestling with octopuses and his gift of an ornament bought from one of his travels. Persistent in convincing Tulpan to marry him so that they can start their dreams, he ventures the distance to the girl's home, only to be rebuked over and over again by his most elusive prize. Asa's story however seems secondary to the palpable world the film depicts with verity usually reserved for documentaries.
The world of Tulpan is all dust and dull, that the navy blue of Asa's uniform becomes alien. Parading through the desert in a rundown tractor with a cover of The Rivers of Babylon playing in the background, Dvortsevoy's camera starts off with Asa, jubilant after what he thinks is a successful attempt to woo Tulpan. The camera slowly and painfully shifts its attention to survey the area, inflicting the irony of the reggae song that serves as soundtrack to this particular visual (the song was first used in Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1972), set in ocean-bound Jamaica, as opposed to the Tulpan's dry deserts). The endless sun-baked light brown of the film's setting becomes more suffocating especially when the news that Asa is to remains bride-less as Tulpan, whose only interaction with Asa is a shared short glance, according to her stern parents, does not fancy him (she thinks his ears are too big), is told with immense frustration by Ondas (Ondas Besikbasov), Asa's brother-in-law. The island music stops. The smiles are erased. Reality sinks in. There are no more prospects for Asa within miles of desolation.
Perhaps the most interesting thing Dvortsevoy commits in Tulpan is distance, that kilometers of utter nothingness separates people from each other, how it is very real and as a result, forces people to be alienated, how people actually adapt despite how debilitating it is, how it becomes both a struggle and a relief. As Dvortsevoy visualizes the hazards of the film's environs (inevitable dust storms; a tornado in the middle of the desert) and the creatures (a horde of marching camels; a flock of frazzled sheep; a mother camel chasing the veterinarian on his motorbike with an injured baby camel on the sidecar) thriving against the inhospitable terrain, the human element becomes a very pressing concern, and the few instances, mere gestures if taken within the grand portrait of desert life that Dvortsevoy paints, where he allows his characters to feel and live with the vast distance from everywhere else are priceless moments in cinema: scattered candies on the ground are picked up one by one as if they were gold; news on the government's program is heard only from the transistor radio by Ondas' son, and re-broadcasted to the family over dinner; a veterinarian takes days to check on the sheep whose young are born dead.
Dvortsevoy has a knack for ironic humor: The Rivers of Babylon as soundtrack to the desert; the pet turtle in the arid landscape; and the countless pictures of naked women in various compromising positions inside the tractor of Boni (Tulepbergen Baisakalov) in a region where women are scarce; the government's plans of being economically sound by 2020 when as of present, a portion of their population only has access to them through broken radio signals. The humor enunciates the verve against the humdrum proceedings, the subtle indications of governmental daydreaming against the overpowering effect of nature to these nomadic people, the lingering need for a woman's affection against the barrenness of everything else. More than the humor are the pervading themes that are fleshed out from the tender moments that are told under the backdrop of the sprawling landscape. Notwithstanding the immense distance that separates the characters from everywhere else, the often banal and seldom dramatic aspects of these people's lives are depicted with an immediacy and intimacy that is quite affecting. In the film's decisive moment, where Asa, after giving up on his dreams to have his own herd of sheep, walks alone in the desert and finds a sheep struggling to give birth to its baby, Dvortsevoy finally unites his stubborn depiction of the dormant dominance of nature and the story-driven plight of Asa.
The film seamlessly marries elements that seem contradictory: alienation and affection; ambition and actuality; the infiniteness of nature and the finiteness of men; reality and fiction; and documentary and drama. As a result, Tulpan is a grandiose document of these persisting ironies resulting from humanity's continuous relationship with the earth, told in simple yet effective strokes but enough to fill a canvass as expansive as the desert.
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My biggest gripe with regards to remakes, whether they are Hollywood remakes of Asian films or the other way around, is that I simply cannot fathom the unpalatable wastage of both talent and money that is used to merely translate what supposedly is a universal narrative to suit cultural smugness. The once-lucrative business of remaking Asian horror films, those quiet and atmospheric thrillers produced and released in Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Thailand that usually feature long-haired spooks killing people through curses (best examples of which like Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998), Kairo (Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001) and Shutter (Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2004) are often reflections of the malaise of our consistently modern world) into Hollywood blockbusters, more often than not transporting the subject matter of the horror to suit the American landscape (with the exception of the remake to Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge (2004), where he has American expatriates being chased by Japanese ghosts in Tokyo) have produced a number of embarrassing duds. Predictably, the fad has come to its well-deserved rest. This leaves some remakes that were mounted during the tail-end of the fad without any public interest, consequently lessening its commercial viability.
Yam Laranas' The Echo, the Hollywood remake of his own Sigaw (The Echo, 2004), is sadly one of the victims of the dissipation of the fad. Instead of getting a proper run at the theaters, it was released directly to video, except in a few territories where it got a festival run or a few weeks at the theaters. It's a shame. While admittedly problematic, The Echo, assessed independently of its clever source material, is a tautly made ghost story. Laranas, a cinematographer before he ventured on directing (his masterful cinematography for Raymond Red's mysteriously enigmatic Bayani (Heroes, 1992) created for the film an atmosphere of endless possibilities within Red's alternate history milieu), manages to sustain prolonged moments of silence through an assured control of the visuals. The camera (through the film's cinematographer Matthew Irving) wafts through the hallways of the ancient apartment building, observant of each and every curiosity, from its peculiar denizens to its discomforting emptiness, that adds personality to the structure. The story unfolds at a turtle-speed pace; as if nothing is happening until the film's prolonged reliance on sullen mood and atmosphere gives way to a culminating series of shocks, chills, and panic.
Screenwriters Eric Bernt and Shintaro Shimosawa updates the screenplay of Laranas and Roy Iglesias to suit the alienating ambience of New York City. Instead of the newly independent twenty-something (played with matinée idol efficiency by Richard Gutierrez) who purchases the haunted apartment for very cheap, a paroled ex-convict (Jesse Bradford) who returns to the apartment of his mother, whom he abandoned for several years and has died mysteriously, only to be bothered by strange sounds and apparitions. It is quite an interesting update. Bradford's ex-convict is a pathetic character. Plucked from the penitentiary where he spent several years without any contact from the outside world and into the big city, he struggles to regain the life he lost when he accidentally killed a man who harassed his then-girlfriend (Amelia Warner). Just when he manages to get his act together (he lands a job in a car repair shop and somewhat wins his ex-girlfriend back), the haunting reaches a severity that becomes more threatening than occasional screeches and scratches from the apartment next door.
The machinations that lead to the character's fate of being inescapably guilt-ridden is a reminder of the web that inevitably connects all humanity despite our conscious efforts to disassociate; we are essentially bound by the evil that we create and choose to ignore. Where Sigawwas more intimate in its horror, with the ghost choosing to haunt through timelines because of a single individual's indifference (a character from the past that was thankfully completely scrapped out of the remake) to another person's pleas for help, The Echo chose to expand its horrors and becomes accusatory of humanity's inherent capacity for indifference, probably brought about by an alarming level of callousness to evil. Although preachy as placed during the film's revelatory stage, the witness from the building across talks of this undoubted connection between each and every one of us and despite that, the greatest sin this connectivity, especially in a city where people's dwellings are usually separated only by walls, is that humanity has developed a capacity to merely watch, stay connected, without choosing to get involved, probably out of fear, or worse, a general lack of concern.
The film's expansion to indict all of humanity for the sins of the murderously violent husband (Kevin Durand) against his poor wife (Iza Calzado) and kid (Jamie Bloch) seems to have given the ghosts a reason to harm and kill people, an update I thought was only done only to satisfy the requisites of the genre but did not really improve the film (except for certain exceptional scare pieces). It is more unsettling that the ghosts are just there, reminding the people they choose to haunt that they exist, and in turn, turning these people's lives into palpable nightmares (in Sigaw, the couple decides to just escape by watching a movie but even inside the comforting confines of the theater, where everyone else is enjoying themselves, they remain haunted). The several deaths become an excess, completely unnecessary because it pulls us away from the drama of the ex-convict whose life problems are only enunciated by the hauntings. Nevertheless, The Echo, with its sad fate of being lumped together with films that its producers deem unworthy to receive a chance at the box office, is actually quite good.
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Ekechai Uekrongtham's The Coffin starts with a reporter narrating from inside a coffin. The camera zooms out from the enclosed space where the reporter is lying to reveal an impressive visual: thousands of coffins, all occupied by men and women, surround a statue of Buddha. An overwhelming buzz of prayers accompanies the visual, adding an otherworldly flavor to the sequence. The reporter narrates that in Thailand, thousands of men and women would flock to Buddhist temples to take part in a bizarre ritual where they would lie inside coffins to get rid of bad luck and cleanse themselves of problems and ailments. The strange ritual, as it turns out, has gained momentous popularity in these hard times. The basic rationale of the ritual is to fool fate or bad spirits into thinking that the participant has died; thus, giving him a clean slate, without all the accumulated bad karma, in his new life.
Uekrongtham mines into this rationale for his film's central conflict. His two main characters undergo the ritual to rid themselves of their respective misfortunes: Chris (Ananda Everingham) wishes that her Japanese girlfriend (Aki Shibuya) wakes up from her coma; Su (Karen Mok), who takes refuge in Bangkok a few days before her wedding to her beloved boyfriend (Andrew Lin), wishes that her lungs are cleared of cancer. True to the testimonials of those who went through the ritual, their prayers are answered. Chris' girlfriend wakes up from her coma while Su is completely healed of her cancer. Unfortunately, their good fortune does not come without a hefty price tag. Su's fiance dies of a car accident while Chris and her boyfriend are continuously haunted by the ghost of a mysterious woman. Fate cannot be fooled. The ritual only disrupts it, displacing the bad karma of the ritual's participants to the people they love.
The Coffin purports to be a horror film. Thus, littered throughout the film are sequences that are designed to scare. Some work, as when Chris is trapped inside the coffin and within the cramped and dark space that he is occupying, appears the token spectre. Most don't, as when Su is haunted by her dead fiance from the mirrors of the several closets. The Coffin musters tired horror tropes and techniques as ancient as Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998) to satisfy the necessitated commercial aspirations of the film, making the effort a tad forced, if not totally inconsequential. For sure, Uekrongtham garners a few creepy moments here and there, but the overall effort is quite insignificant and redundant, especially considering that the faddish genre is currently in an extended stay in the cineplexes, sustained only by the few gems (like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's subversive Retribution (2006)) that appear every now and then.
Uekrongtham has mastered visualizing human emotions, considering the fact that his previous films Beautiful Boxer (2003), about a transexual boy forced by fate and circumstance into a manly sport and quite humorously, is good at it, and Pleasure Factory (2007), about the several denizens of the hidden red light district of Singapore, are all very human stories. You can somewhat observe his ease and comfort in emphasizing loss and guilt in The Coffin. There are several sublime moments that tend to release you from the unnecessary whittled tension that the several inserted horror sequences provide, as when Su wakes up to discover her fiance beside her, then discovering that her fiance has in fact died, and looks upon her fiance's ghost with an expression of discomforted pity and guilt. The film's denouement, where Chris reveals the mystery of the girl haunting him, is emotionally engaging, filmed with refreshing simplicity and restraint by Uekrongtham with just Chris and the ghost having an intimate conversation over a field of grass that was once the setting of a nightmare.
Had The Coffin been made as intended by Uekrongtham, an examination on death and loss, instead of the confused shapeshifter that it is now, it could have been something more memorable. Unfortunately, that's a prospect that we might never know. As it is, it is merely passable and harmless entertainment. The Coffin is something you momentarily enjoy before burying it the next day to be forgotten for the rest of your life.
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Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim (Khavn dela Cruz, 2008)
English Title: Manila in the Fangs of Darkness
Bembol Roco, from his first starring role as an innocent provincial in a quest to rescue his sweetheart from an abusive Chinese man in Maynila: sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, Lino Brocka, 1975), has evolved as an actor. Physically, apart from his completely shaven head, age has hardened his once-immaculate mug and covered it with lines and curves that dispel any trace of his former youth and innocence. Professionally, Roco adapted to suit his evolving physical features and ventured into playing thugs and villains, a far cry from his portrayal of naive Julio Madiaga, which catapulted him to public consciousness. Despite the vast moral and emotional distance between the roles he plays, he still succeeds, granting the villains he portrays with an ominousness that feels natural, and with a mere flicker of his hard-edged eyes, he momentously evokes either a vengeful depth or a wanton-hungry craze, something that is usually missing from the underwritten foes that Filipino cinema can normally afford.
In Khavn dela Cruz's Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim (Manila in the Fangs of Darkness), Roco plays Kontra Madiaga, a character whose name is derived from two characters from Roco's vast filmography: Julio Madiaga, the wide-eyed protagonist of Maynila: sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanagand Commander Kontra, the ruthless fundamentalist paramilitary commander from Orapronobis (Fight For Us, Lino Brocka, 1989). Much more than the name, Kontra Madiaga is a character borne out of the marriage of Julio Madiaga's stubborn messianic trait and Commander Kontra's intrinsic disregard for humanity in favor of a perceived good. Trapped in atwilight zone-like scenario where he aimlessly follows Ligaya (Ella Cortez), draped in an immaculate white dress, in the dirty streets of Manila, Kontra Madiaga is more of a conceptual creation rather than a character meant to live and breath in a traditional narrative. Speaking through voice-overs, he alludes to the past, depicted through snippets from Maynila, Orapronobis, and other Brocka films like Kislap sa Dilim (Sparkle in the Dark, 1991) and Hayop sa Hayop (Beast to Beast, 1978), and forces the audience to weave these Brocka characters into the confused yet powerful force that is Kontra Madiaga.
Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim is presumably dela Cruz's ode to Brocka's filmmaking. It is an interesting, if not totally surprising, concept, considering that dela Cruz, despite his obvious reverence to Brocka, is a filmmaker who consciously shies from working under the influence of Brocka's school of social realism. The closest dela Cruz has entered into Brocka territory is with Squatterpunk (2006), a silent documentary, usually accompanied by a musical live act, that exposes the paradox that exists within Manila's slums, where humanity survives despite severe poverty, and even there, dela Cruz inflicts the concept with authorial integrity, pushing the boundaries of the medium to evoke the youthful and experimental verve that his cinema possesses. Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim exposes the vast differences between dela Cruz and Brocka's styles.
Dela Cruz filters convenience from Brocka's filmmaking. Maynila sa mga Pangil ng Dilim is a difficult film not because of the palpable violence and apathy, but because its concept is designed to alienate. Rather than being constricted by the requirements of melodrama and social realism, dela Cruz widens his canvass. He utilizes Roco as an actor who has evolved from stubborn innocence to nihilistic assuredness to create a phantom of a character that represents the deteriorating morality of the embattled metropolis. Roco's interpretation of dela Cruz's wild creation is pitch-perfect. He is confused, angry, lonely, and damned; much like the city that has become the subject of dela Cruz's explorations. With chosen scenes from Brocka's films screening in sequence with those directed by dela Cruz, one can only appreciate Brocka's visual, narrative and emotional succinctness: the way he packs fear, insanity, and other emotions within a few minutes of studio-manufactured dialogue and directorial deftness. In comparison, dela Cruz's scenes seem cerebral and impenetrable. The strange combination of Brocka's populist filmmaking and dela Cruz's experimantations only heightens the nightmarish tone of the picture. The crisp digital footage of dela Cruz juxtaposed with the aging footage of Brocka's films evoke a twisted sense of reminiscence. The stylized voice-overs reinforces the existence of Kontra Madiaga as a creature of the imagination rather than a traditional cinematic figure. The purposely incohering soundbits and subtitles forwards dela Cruz's concept of recreating or refashioning Brocka's cinematic figures into a singular character that is the anointed spokesperson of Manila's intrinsic darkness.
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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Mark Herman, 2008)
Absolutely nothing differentiates Mark Herman's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas from any other conventional Holocaust film except for the fact that Herman's film, especially because its protagonists are innocent children caught in the middle of man-made tragedies, reeks of emotional blackmail. While Herman manages to keep the film's affairs told from a comfortable distance, more like a dark fable rather than a historical anecdote (which it is not, since the film is adapted from a novel by John Boyne, and the novel's very premise, about a Jewish kid living and working inside one of Nazi's concentration camps, is a near-impossibility since Jewish children never lasted in concentration camps as they are immediately killed by the Nazis), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas does not graduate from merely reiterating the blatant absurdity of the Holocaust, only this time, without an ounce of subtlety.
That is precisely the biggest problem I have with Herman's Holocaust film. Other than depicting those turbulent times from perspective of an innocent kid (looking back though, Roberto Benigni's syrupy Life is Beautiful (1997), with its annoyingly clueless father Benigni wrote and portrayed, is the top offender in utilizing both innate and manufactured naivete to questionable acclaim from the Academy), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas hardly has anything new to contribute to the largely stagnant genre. To make matters worse, Herman handles the material with such unnecessary reverence, gathered from the overly tasteful cinematography and its ceremonial plotting, that it becomes unbelievably off-putting and quite ironically, rather tasteless, quite similar to being lectured on elementary morality with the intricate yet infuriating flourish of an overly eager kindergarten teacher.
Bruno (Asa Butterfield, pale and wide-eyed, like a wet hatchling), the film's juvenile protagonist who was plucked from the city with his older sister (Amber Beattie) and mother (Vera Farmiga) by his father (David Thewlis) who is a high ranking Nazi officer newly assigned to the countryside, becomes the audience's eyes and ears in the film. We follow Bruno when he, out of curiosity and boredom, sneaks from his new home to the nearby concentration camp, which he mistakes for a farm, where he befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon, whose exaggeratedly pitiful exterior elicits the same predatorial feel from an overly eager mendicant), a Jewish kid from inside the camp. Unfortunately, Bruno is such a feebly conceived character, a character that lazily and conveniently utilizes childhood as an excuse for absolute gullability and dumb curiosity, that following the narrative through his perspective becomes such a difficult chore because his character stretches the bounds of plausible human psychology for the purpose of arriving at its much-awaited glory note.
The film's glory note, a climactic sequence that pits the sad fate of Bruno and Shmuel and the desperate scramblings of Bruno's family, is hardly glorious at all. When the pandemonium, the onscreen suffocation, the dullness and drabness of the reality that Bruno has realized takes over the initial glossy and stately trappings of the film, the shift is so incomprehensibly sudden and forecful that it borders on being ridiculous and laughable. I understand that the finale only emphasizes the grandiose absurdities of the Holocaust, yet Herman's operatic finale, oddly reminiscent of such cult Nazi treats like Tinto Brass' Salon Kitty (1976) or Don Edmonds Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975) where shock substitutes for empathy, only backfires, especially in a way that it seems to be the only entertaining bit in the entire film.
The result I got then is rather confused: when Herman should have elicited empathy, or at least disbelief, shock, even anger, what I got, however, was a guilty moment of befuddled delight. If one needs a reminder of the atrocities of the Nazis without the pseudo-artistry and bluntness of a misguided craftsmen, Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955) is what I recommend. It is only a third of the running time of Herman's overindulgent Holocaust film, but Resnais' meditative explorations of a real concentration camp is haunting and deep enough to leave a lasting dent in one's senses. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, being a tasteless redundancy, is just a waste of time.
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America is not limited to its great cities, those centers of modern civilization that supposedly gave birth to its expansive culture. The Statue of Liberty, symbol of the timeless American Dream, stands as entrance to one of America's greatest cities, welcoming ambitious dreamers from the rest of the world to a land that would serve as stage to their limitless endeavors. However, a great irony enshrouds this perpetuated migration to America: that upon a migrant's landing on American soil, he is immediately bamboozled into a matrix of mediocrity, with his dreams and ambitions frozen in the meantime as he struggles to graduate from the dehumanizing work-a-day world that the real America symbolizes. He is temporarily placated by facile pleasantries, packaged neatly into rows of pretty prefabricated homes that serve as nests to America's perfect families, or so we think. American suburbia happens to be one beautifully perpetuated lie that is slowly blossoming into a dreary nightmare.
Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road is not the first film to have tackled American suburbia as the dangerously engulfing illusion that it really is. Mendes' first film, American Beauty (1999), has earned accolades precisely for its supposedly fearless indictment of the American family for the vices that it tries too hard to repress. In fact, an entire genre has evolved from such cinematic discourse. Ang Lee, in The Ice Storm (1997), is more successful in fleshing out the dysfunctions of a suburban family amidst the worsening weather and the political climate. David Lynch, in Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks (1990-1991), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), blurs reality to create suburban terrains, operating more like inescapable bad dreams than melodramas or satires.
In Revolutionary Road, Mendes tracks a the journey of the Wheelers, a seemingly ideal American couple, from being ambitious starry-eyed lovers to suffocated prisoners of a Pennsylvanian suburb. Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) commutes daily to New York to a thankless job in a sales company where his father also worked for until the day he died. April (Kate Winslet), Frank's reliable housewife, consumes her day with motherly, wifely, and neighborly chores: keeping her two children safe as she maintains the house in a pleasant condition, more to please her nosey neighbors than herself. When it occurred to her that their plasticine suburban lifestyle has stripped them of the virtues that got them together in the first place, they decide to escape to Paris: for Frank to finally figure out what it is that he truly wants to do as April works for the family. The couple's ambition, however, is the opposite of everything that America stands for, and even before the dream nears its fruition, everything falls apart, forcing Frank and April's relationship to crumble as well.
Revolutionary Road, through its chronicling of an American couple's demise to what is essentially a ludicrously staged dead end, summarizes the scathing repercussions of the so-called American daydream, hypnotizing families into a system of monotony and order with the comforts of a boxed and pre-planned life. Mendes hams it up, making sure that all confrontations escalate to grandiose shouting matches, or all the encounters of the couple with John Givings (Michael Shannon), a mathematician-turned-psychiatric patient, are the film's sanest moments. Somehow, Mendes is successful in depicting a topsy-turvy environment, where romance, much more than a give-and-take scenario, partakes of a predatorial relationship, with husband and wife manipulating each other to arrive at an amicable end; and neighbors aren't what they seem to be, establishing relationships that are merely cover-ups for their insecurities, envy, and lust.
Mendes transforms the American landscape into a Darwinian arena, where because migration is rendered nugatory, only the strong survive. Contrary to Darwin's theory however, is that in Revolutionary Road, survival is hardly worth an entire lifetime spent struggling to realize the unrealizable American dream.
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