Debosyon (2013)

Selasa, 30 Juli 2013

Debosyon (2013)

Debosyon (Alvin Yapan, 2013)

English Title: Devotion

Alvin Yapan’s films have always been influenced by his being both a literature professor and a writer of short stories. They are never empty vessels of creatively plotted stories that are heavily embellished by cinematic techniques and visuals. His films’ charm relies heavily on the fact that the stories are never just stories. They are intelligent observations on gender politics, as in Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (Dance of Two Left Feet, 2011), where a gay love story houses feminist intentions, or in Gayuma (Pilgrim Lovers, 2010), a romance whose two halves articulate love and longing from the perspectives of both genders, and on economic history and Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (The Rapture of Fe, 2009), a supernatural tale where the various inadequacies of the Philippines’ economic growth are represented by various inadequate male characters.

Debosyon (Devotion) is Yapan’s visually sumptuous observation on cultural and religious phenomena. In the film, he frames his explorations within the strangest of romance, one between a young man and a creature of mythology. Mando (Paulo Avelino) is a fervent devotee of the Lady of Penafrancia, a wooden Marian statue that is famed for the miracles it grants to its devotees. While searching the forest for orchids, he chances upon a solitary flower on top of a tree. He falls while attempting to get the flower. He wakes up to Salome (Mara Lopez), a mysterious woman who lives alone inside a hut in the middle of the forest, who nurses him back to health. They fall in love, only to be hindered by Salome’s revelation, one that shakes Mando’s religious devotion to its core.

Yapan tells the story with admirable patience, allowing his story to really take root in the landscape that features very heavily in his elegant visuals. The forest where Mando meets Salome is a character itself. Its trees bleed when axed. Deep in its heart is a pond pristine enough to wash the gravest of doubts. From its hills, one can see the perfect but solitary Mayon volcano, an image of absolute beauty and loneliness amidst plains and farmlands. Yapan understands the topography of Bicol. His narrative makes use of it in a way that it is intertwined with the romance and the mysticism. The beauty of the film is not intended to simply be pleasurable to tired eyes. It is meant to enamour, to give a semblance of the irresistible allure of the land. It is meant to make one fall desperately in love.

From the geography comes the native songs, the lyrics of which speak of loving desperation or pained longing. Mando sings one of the love songs Salome learns from a previous love as an act of courtship. Struggling to learn the song with only a guitar at hand and Salome’s memory for guidance, the song may very well be an expression of devotion, a pleasant tribute from a mortal to a woman whose beauty is venerated. At another point, Mando is warned by roving rebels of the forest witch that eats the souls of the men who are beholden by her charms. He desperately races to find Salome, presumably to see if the rebels’ warnings are true. In the background, another song is heard, lamenting of the hurts one bears for love. Yapan intelligently places the various songs in the vital points of courtship, directing the viewer to understand and digest the familiar lyrics along and melody within very specific contexts ranging from absolute adoration to enduring doubt.

More than just a love story, Debosyon seems to be an ode to Yapan’s native Bicol. It dissects a psyche that has been cultivated by a distinct landscape and the history that has taken place in it. Its mythologies, its songs, its undying devotion to the image of the Penafrancia idol, are to Yapan’s mind, products of a love affair between its people and the mystical land they live in. Religion hardly matters in the film. It is simply not its point, but just a starting to point to uncover a cultural feature. Yapan seems to be more interested in the psyche that resulted in the religiosity that is as intense and involving as romantic passion. Debosyon is profound allegory, a story that puts in a clear perspective a culture of devotion that is more rooted in a people’s pre-colonial conscience than the actual charms of Catholicism.

Yapan ends Debosyon with a summation of both the love story and the allegory. The lovers make passionate love, Mando heavily caressing the serpentine figure of his unlikely partner. People express their love to the Marian image, their little candlelit boats floating along the banks of a serpentine river. Despite the differences, the two images sit comfortably alongside each other. The country’s unique Catholic practices are but reiterations of a cultural devotion that has been shaped by the forests, the mountains, the rivers. “I saw your eyes in the eyes of the Virgin of Penafrancia,” whispers Mando when asked by Salome about his desire that seems defiant of reason and logic. In a few words, Yapan commits the impossible and marries religious fervor with the most primal of human urges.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Gayuma (2010)

Minggu, 24 Juli 2011

Gayuma (2010)

Gayuma (Alvin Yapan, 2010)

English Title: Pilgrim Lovers

Gayuma (Pilgrim Lovers) is a film borne out of love and sheer dedication. Armed with a budget that is minuscule even if pitted against other independent productions, director Alvin Yapan and producer Alemberg Ang ventured on to mount a film based on one of Yapan’s oldest stories, a concept developed and evolved from an exercise among literary comrades in college who dared each other to come up with a story that ends with the sentence “I love you.” The result is evidently imperfect. However, despite its obvious imperfections, the film perseveres with the strength of its story, making it a testament to Yapan’s boundless imagination.

In a parochial Bicol town, a statue of the Sto Niño suddenly started talking and dancing, prompting the town’s parish priest to visit to investigate and to exorcise from the statue whatever spirit that is haunting it. With him is Delfin (Kalil Almonte), his sacristan and assistant, who is advised by the verbose Sto Niño statue to concoct a love potion so that he can easily woo Carla (Mercedes Cabral), a rich girl who is already in love with another man, into leaving her man for him.

The film is divided into two parts. The first half focuses on Delfin who is enveloped by his longing for unreachable Carla and therefore takes the Sto Niño statue’s advice to easily win the affections of the girl. The second half focuses on Carla. Carla, under the spell of Delfin’s love potion, carries Delfin, who mysteriously fell in a coma, through fields, mountains and forests, to a pond that will cure Delfin of his affliction. The two parts are differentiated by mood and feel. With steady visuals, the first half establishes the traditionally masculine conviction and determination of Delfin in his pursuit for Carla’s undivided attention. The second half, characterized by markedly jerky camera movements, visualizes Carla’s stereotypically feminine confusion and uncertainty as she carries Delfin, inspired either by the sure effects of the love potion or true love.

Gayuma is ridden with details that pertain to certain agendas Yapan may or may not be that successful in fleshing out, like a certain extended scene with the gay beautician who fancies Delfin and an extraneous scene with certain rebels who rescue Carla from rapists in the forest (Yapan’s commentaries as to how homosexuals and communist rebels, respectively, are being used in Philippine cinema). It also suffers from lacking polish that could have added a little bit more of dread in the earlier part or dreaminess in the middle part or danger in the latter part.

However, despite the immense gap between what Yapan wanted to say and his budgetary limitations, the film still manages to communicate the harsh complexities of love and loving within a story that is simple yet brimming with color and flourish. There is poignancy in Delfin’s succumbing to ease of romance, and wickedness in Carla’s torturous trek towards the healing pond to rescue the man he may or may not actually love. There are no blacks or whites, just damning greys in Yapan’s peculiar love story. That “I love you” that was whispered in the film’s final second trumps all the “I love you’s” carelessly and emptily spoken, shouted, and written in other films I’ve seen before.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (2011)

Minggu, 10 Juli 2011

Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (2011)

Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (Alvin Yapan, 2011)

English Title: The Dance of Two Left Feet

Ambiguity is such a beautiful thing. It is what makes art free from its artist, allowing the observer of the art part of the art-making. It is what breaks the boundaries of the literal, allowing art to traverse the infinite expanses of the subjective. It is what makes art from being only personal to the artist, to also being personal to the observer. A tear, for example, is ordinarily an object of sorrow. A tear from the eye of a man embracing another man has transformed it from being an object of sorrow into an object of love, suddenly realized. A tear from the eye of a man embracing another man in the end of a grandiose dance production of a famous epic has transformed it from being an object of love into an object of awe.

Alvin Yapan’s Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (The Dance of Two Left Feet) tells the story of Marlon (Paulo Avelino) who is enamored by Karen (Jean Garcia), his literature professor. He follows her after class and discovers that she moonlights as a dance teacher and choreographer. To impress her, he asks Dennis (Rocco Nacino), his classmate and Karen’s assistant in the dance studio, to teach him the dances that Karen teaches in her classes before actually enrolling. A unique love triangle, one wherein the point is to share love and not to exclusively own love, ensues.

Yapan, an awarded fictionist and literature professor, enriches the story with poetry, borrowing the poems of Merlinda Bobis, Ruth Elynia Mabanglo, Joi Barros, Rebecca Anonuevo, Ophelia Dimalanta and Benilda Santos, all of whom are famous feminist poets. From there, the film takes a different shape. The story, without being abandoned totally, becomes the frame for Yapan’s goal, which is to utilize cinema as an extension of his classroom and an invitation to indulge in the limitless scope of literature, dance, and music.

It works. The film dodges any threat of being pointlessly academic by making most of the elements that are exclusive to cinema, particularly cinematography and editing. Its first ten minutes is a masterful sequence that marries dance, dialogue, music and verse. Edited seemingly without regard to narrative succession, it takes the form of a poem film, not unlike very personal works of John Torres that are crafted from found footage loosely strung together with words and melodies. It’s a prelude for what’s to come: lucid discussions on feminist poetry, the poems themselves that are recited in dialogue and in song and beautifully choreographed dances, all flaunted intelligently and at once, written into the film and edited together near seamlessly.

Yapan’s use of feminist poetry is quite subversive since Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa hardly has a feminist agenda. While the film hints of homosexual longing, it seems to conceive romance as absolved from the politics of gender and preference. Instead, love and longing is free. Marlon longs for Karen, notwithstanding the difference in age and position. Dennis longs for Marlon, notwithstanding the difference in sexual preference. It seems that Yapan is freeing the poems of their feminist roots, expanding their interpretations to encompass emotions stemming from males. In fact, Karen, the only female in the film, is the only character who is emotionally separated from the young lovers, consumed primarily by her own lonely and rapidly aging existence.

With Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa, Yapan has choreographed a delicious orgy where various art forms mingle with astounding ease. Its final image will doubtlessly result in complaints, most probably prejudiced by expectations fostered by the slew of romantic and gay-themed films whose love stories are so much more pronounced and so much more obviously plotted than this. However, that final image’s ambiguity is all that the film needs to graduate from being just another gay love story with literary ambitions into a poem that is as potent as the ones it used. After all, a tear is more than just an object of sorrow, of love, and of awe. It is also an object that equalizes all of humanity as it communicates each and every person’s innate capacity to feel and express emotions, whether one be male, female, straight, gay, rich, or poor.

(Cross-published in Twitch)

Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (2009)

Sabtu, 18 Juli 2009

Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (2009)

Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (Alvin Yapan, 2009)
English Title: The Rapture of Fe

According to writer-director Alvin Yapan, Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (The Rapture of Fe) is a "poetic and allegorical narrative of a woman's will to survive in an oppressive environment. The woman here, the titular Fe (masterfully played by Irma Adlawan), is an overseas worker, repatriated by the bleak global economy, and is welcomed home by Dante (Noni Buencamino), her violent and barren husband, and Arturo (TJ Trinidad), her young lover who manages the basket factory that employs her and her husband. Amidst the abuses of her husband and the amorous declarations of her young lover, Fe would regularly receive a basket full of fruits from a mysterious suitor. Dante is unable to provide for her economically, while Arturo is unable to abandon both his paralytic father (Jerry Respeto) and the basket factory. Trapped in between two inutile men, Fe is reduced to desperation to the point of making a drastic decision to escape her asphyxiating predicament.

The simplicity of its narrative is seductive. The sharp observations that its narrative bears are instructive. Yapan explains the allegory with the efficiency of a literature professor, which he really is. His characters symbolize the different players that struggle within the patriarchal Filipino society, beholden to foreign forces because its agricultural sector (symbolized by Dante, whose farmland is mortgaged to Arturo and is left untilled) can no longer provide and its industry (symbolized by Arturo whose factory, while earning, is not profitable) has never matured to be self-sufficient. Within the context of Yapan's allegory, Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe blossoms into an academic but pertinent commentary on the state of the nation given its unique history and culture, as presented in the form of a literary tale where hints of the supernatural are weaved into overly familiar experiences of domestic violence and infidelity.

Yapan is not only a brilliant writer of stories that operate well given the differing depths, motivations, and perspectives of his audience. He is also a very effective director, understated in his aesthetics yet able to marry the ambition of his story with the cinematic medium. Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe works even without its allegorical aspirations. The film is gripping in its depiction of domestic violence, particularly in one scene where Dante castigates Fe out of jealousy, hitting and pushing her before finally raping her. Yapan's camera is conscious of the violence, still yet observant, determined to merely document the supposedly private atrocities and allow the emotions and Fe's undeserved victimization to be the only spectacle onscreen. It is this unhindered fluency of Yapan in visually portraying domestic violence that allows him room to move further, further away from reality and into that delicate borderline where reality, insanity, and fantasy meet.

When Fe offers the fruits that she mistakenly believes to be her husband's peace offering (possibly out of shame for hitting her the night before) to her husband, you cannot help but feel pity for the woman who is simply pleading for the respect and affirmation that she deserves from her husband. Knowing that the expectations she has of her marriage are futile renders her efforts that are not only unreciprocated but irrationally punished more wrenching. When we discover Arturo's repressed longing for Fe, we understand and accept it because despite her physical and economic modesty, she exudes a sensuality that seduces. Thus, It is simply unwise to ignore the performance of Adlawan, who transforms Fe from Yapan's literary device into a character you sympathize, you care for, even lust for. If Yapan's visual frankness is admirable, his decision to cast Adlawan, in a role that allows the criminally underused actress to explore the several facets of womanhood (as victim, object of desire, breadwinner, and prize) without compromising the integrity of the character, is simply inspired.

The baskets of fruit appear, unaccompanied by spectacle. Innocent-looking at first, but when blended with the repercussions of her husband's jealousy and the discovery of her young lover's inability to provide, the baskets evolve into something more suspect. As with Rolyo (Film Roll, 2007), Yapan's well-awarded short film about a farmer and his daughter who travels to the town and back to their farm, the film roll is given layers of importance to arrive at a concluding poignant scene where poverty is playfully depicted with the little girl watching a movie using the film roll used to make a horn, unrolled, and illuminated by candlelight before being turned into a perimeter fence the next morning to ward off birds from their farm, Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe layers the basket of fruits with escalating meanings, thus escaping the object's mundane existence to become first, Fe's temporary reprieve, then, Fe's inescapable punishment, and ultimately, Fe's costly salvation.

Huling Pasada (2008)

Selasa, 15 Juli 2008

Huling Pasada (2008)

Huling Pasada (Paul Sta. Ana and Alvin Yapan, 2008)
English Title: Final Stop

The decision to set Huling Pasada (Final Stop) in Katipunan Avenue and its surrounding environs is possibly out of practicality and economy. After all, directors Paul Sta. Ana and Alvin Yapan are by day, professors in nearby Ateneo de Manila University. Thus, they squeeze out from their and their actors and staff's schedules whatever shooting time they can. The area isn't anything special. While the district is characterized by a row of colleges, universities, and student dormitories, it, like most other districts in metropolitan Manila, is a myriad of residences of both the rich and the poor, huge commercial complexes and small shops, and unsubtle indications of poverty.

Huling Pasada, whether intended or unintended, transforms the otherwise typical Katipunan area into an unfamiliar place. The film's characters are too involved in their respective real-life nightmares that the absurdity leaks into the surroundings, tinging the skies with bleak purple and the streets with jaundiced glean. Thus, the setting is colored with otherworldly hues, producing a particularly incalescent feel, a tinge of inward madness. Much of the atmosphere is due to cinematographer Dan Villegas' topnotch work, shooting from unusual locations, from very low angles in the streetside, making visible what happens below the motor vehicle's chassis, capturing the pavement and whatever limited movement from there; or from behind the glass window of a laundry shop or from across the counter, giving a sense of us spying on private conversations.

The story, written by Sta. Ana, focuses on Ruby (Agot Isidro), a novelist who along with her lone daughter, is struggling from a recent divorce. She writes about Mario (Neil Ryan Sese), a cab driver who is fervently trying to win over an ex-girlfriend (Dimples Romana), who recently returned home from abroad, and on the way, altruistically takes care of orphaned street vendor Jed (John Manalo). The plot teases on the possibility of a connection between Ruby's real life and Mario's supposed fictional life, whether on a purely psychological level or as a narrative and thematic deceit. I was definitely in it for the ride, since Sta. Ana and Yapan masterfully weave the two storylines with masterful ease, playing with ambiguous threads of direction, never hinting of a probable outcome.

At certain points of the movie, especially when the plot has become characterized by pulpy excesses, and the characters have fully realized their archetypal roles, I was immediately reminded of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), where atmosphere overtakes narrative logic in importance. I was even more engrossed. Huling Pasada is turning out to be either a film with an authentic literary feel of a Filipino novel etched in film, or better yet, a film set in what feels like the Filipino version of Lynchian suburbia, where taxi drivers with stalker tendencies, mothers with a psychotic love-hate appreciation of taxis, and other unlikely characters dissonantly intertwine in the roads where roadkill are given special attention.

I vastly enjoyed the mystery. I adored the vagueness in the storytelling. However, Sta. Ana and Yapan ends the film by overtly pointing at a definite connection between the storylines of Mario and Ruby, completely abandoning the thematic implications of fiction being affected by real life and vice versa, betraying the delectable ambiguity, the Lynchian attitude, for a conclusion that attempts at humanism for its mostly desperate characters but is really more of a disappointing contrivance.