Sinapupunan (2012)

Senin, 31 Desember 2012

Sinapupunan (2012)

Sinapupunan (Brillante Mendoza, 2012)

International Title: Thy Womb

Sinapupunan (Thy Womb) opens with a woman giving birth. Shaleha (Nora Aunor), a midwife, accompanied by her husband Bangas-an (Bembol Roco), assists the soon-to-be-mother in delivering her child. Shaleha then routinely requests for the baby’s umbilical cord. She brings the keepsake from the afternoon home, hangs it alongside all the other cords she has collected from the many mothers she helped. The hanging cords in her home are ostensibly a record of her noble profession. Ironically, it also serves as a painful reminder of the one nagging imperfection of her marriage with her husband, which is her inability to bear children for him. Nature has fated her with infertility. However, her culture has given her the opportunity to remedy it. By finding another suitable wife for her husband, she is able to fulfil what for her is the most essential of her familial duties.

Mendoza strips the film of most external conflicts, concentrating instead on the nuances of infertile Shaleha’s relationship with her husband as she sets out to find a second wife for her husband to bear a child for him. Set in Tawi-Tawi, the Philippines’ southernmost isles which have become infamous for being torn by warring government and Muslim secessionist forces, the film valiantly avoids sensationalizing war and instead delves into the human condition of a people who have grown accustomed to military presence. At one point, a wedding dance is abruptly stalled by violence. When the shock and confusion dissipates, the dance continues, almost as if nothing happened. Mendoza has effectively created a believable world wherein military conflict has weaved itself into the culture by sheer familiarity.

Sinapupunan indulges in its depiction both nature and culture. Mendoza does not hide his fascination, relentlessly breaking his storytelling to make way for gorgeous images of endless seascapes and colorful tradition. He takes time revelling at whale sharks under the sea, or turtles’ eggs hidden dearly beneath Tawi-Tawi’s remote beaches. He stages elaborate Muslim ceremonies and rituals. Surprisingly, the film never feels as if it is treading too closely to exoticizing its subject locale. The overt visualization of both nature and culture seems essential to Mendoza’s goals of exploring the interactions of culture and nature and the people who rely heavily on them for both sustenance and identity.

Henry Burgos’ screenplay is admirably spare. It is unafraid of being judged not by the lyricism of the words spoken by the depicted ordinary folk, but by the measured silence. It allows the couple’s relationship to simmer, to take root, to emotionally attach to the peering audience, before exposing the fissures that will unavoidably grow bigger. It masterfully orchestrates heartbreak, without any hint of artifice or machination. It gives Mendoza enough breathing room to scrutinize the world, which he does so without hardly any hesitation.

Aunor, who has been absent from Philippine cinema for several years despite being renowned as one of its living acting treasures, is the film’s beating heart. Her dutiful portrayal of Shaleha is both spontaneous and intelligent. She cleverly interacts with her surroundings, not as an actress inhabiting a role but as a human being naturally reacting to very real scenarios. When the film requires silence, she makes use of her eyes, which seamlessly hypnotize the audience to believe her character’s plight and sacrifice.

Sinapupunan is observably quainter, tamer, and more mannered than Mendoza’s previous works. However, it still resonates with the same removed yet still potent anger that only an artist who wants to depict truth from a distance can evoke. The film ends with more questions than answers, as it has to. The story, which is essentially the film’s element that begs for a proper ending, is but a tool for Mendoza to frame the grand ironies that afflict humanity. When Shaleha asks for that final umbilical cord, she has finally severed the tie that has severely burdened her. We can only cry because we are also human.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Captive (2012)

Minggu, 17 Juni 2012

Captive (2012)

Captive (Brillante Mendoza, 2012)

Captive is Brillante’s most political to date, interpreting the kidnapping of several vacationers by Abu Sayyaf members from their resort in Palawan and their months-long hostage deep within the jungles of Basilan. Mendoza has always used the Philippines’ ills as backdrop for his sometimes heart-wrenching but mostly gut-wrenching films. Masahista (The Masseur, 2005), Foster Child (2007), Tirador (Slingshot, 2007), Serbis (Service, 2008), Kinatay (The Execution of P, 2009) and Lola (Grandmother, 2009) are all set against decay and poverty, with Mendoza exploring the intertwinement of such deplorable situations with human behavior, how it forces social norms and morals either temporarily or permanently out of the framework of survival.

Like Lino Brocka before him, Mendoza is being revered not for how he sincerely depicts humanity, with all its faults and misgivings, but for the more convenient of his traits, which is to expose cinematically the base conditions of Philippine society. I believe this has led Mendoza into the same trap which Brocka found himself in when he ventured into more blatantly political fare like Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim (My Own Country, 1985) and Orapronobis (Fight for Us, 1989), exposing to the world, through the prestigious film festivals, the inutility of local institutions that inevitably create the dilemmas their cinematic characters face.

There seems to an abandonment of the profound examinations of human struggle in exchange the convenience of plain reportage. More alarming is that Mendoza seems to believe that it is his advocacy as a filmmaker to thresh out reality from the escapist limitations of celluloid, forcing him to push the envelope further from merely glossing over the graveness of the Philippine social condition through his delicate human stories to putting the social condition to the forefront.

Captive prominently displays this movement by Mendoza to mistake his weakness as an inert but brash advocate as his strength, eclipsing his real strength as a director, which is his ability to observe and portray our very fickle humanity. The film’s best parts are when the outside world, the world Mendoza so excitedly depicts through visual slogans delivering religious hate and military ineptitude, are forgotten and the captives and their kidnappers are depicted away from the circumstance that they have found themselves trapped in. In those scenes, Mendoza weaves little stories, tales that are not unfamiliar because notwithstanding the strangeness of their settings, these stories are so deeply entrenched to what the most ordinary of humans are capable of. The tiniest of gestures, the surprising exchanges of biting dialogue, both the urgent and non-urgent interactions among and between the victims and their victimizers add lightness to Mendoza’s lofty but misplaced endeavor.

Absent the propagandizing, the film finally allows its actors, most importantly Isabelle Huppert, who plays one of the kidnapped victims, the flexibility to flesh out their characters, who on the grander scale of Mendoza’s vision, seem to be just pawns in the overextended network of corruption that is the Philippines. However, Mendoza is also able to showcase his mettle as a director in those quieter moments. Where in the scenes where war is shown, violence is paraded, and intolerance is brandished, Mendoza seems to be channelling a desire for charmless grandiosity, especially with his armaments of explosions and spectacular gunfights, all of which are almost always absent in cash-strapped Philippine filmmaking, in the quieter scenes, he displays his capacity for compassion and understanding of the capacity of men and women to be both kind and depraved.

While Captive clearly ambitions discourse on the troubles of Mindanao, it only succeeds in forwarding a concept of the conflict that is problematic in the way it is depicted and from which perspective it is depicted from. Mendoza’s take on the conflict is undoubtedly taken from an outsider’s point of view. The film’s politics is hard to pinpoint precisely because it is draped in inconsistencies and ornamented with cues that are meant to agitate. Bibles are thrown into the sea. Christian icons are destroyed. Muslim captors scream their lungs out, praising Allah, as the news about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center are reported from their transistor radio, unmindful of the queries about the number of people who perished. It paints a picture of a religion that is either the proponent of intolerance or a harsh misunderstanding of a people. The problem lies in the fact that this black and white approach in portraying the conflict is ultimately dangerous, as it disenfranchises an entire ideology that deserves more than the token shades of fair humanity that Mendoza gives its champions.

In the end, Captive is a film only proves Mendoza’s ability to mount productions that are bigger than what he usually does. It still manages to astound as there are some gems of scenes, mostly involving Huppert struggling physically and emotionally through her dire situation, that succeed in mesmerizing and bewildering. Unfortunately, the bad taste of the film’s erratic and possibly damaging posturing counters most of its merits.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Lola (2009)

Kamis, 08 Oktober 2009

Lola (2009)

Lola (Brillante Mendoza, 2009)
English Title: Grandmother

Lola (Grandmother), made only a few months after director Brillante Mendoza was awarded the Best Director prize in the 63rd edition of the Cannes Film Festival for his unfairly maligned Kinatay (The Execution of P, 2009), struggles with its geriatric pacing. Scenes are stretched, sometimes to the point of tedium. The film opens with one of these staggered sequences of seeming pointlessness, as we observe Sepa (Anita Linda), along with grandson, walk the streets of Manila, from a church to the foot of a steel bridge where she ceremoniously lights a candle despite the disagreeing wind. She rides a passenger jeepney (where she temporarily becomes background to a woman who is on her way to a job interview only to be derailed by a cellphone snatcher who eventually meets his unfortunate fate under the hands of a street mob) to meet her daughter in a funeral parlor, whose manager is too eager to the point of callousness to her mourning and penury to show his expensive coffins. We learn that her grandson just died, and that she needs to raise money to pay up the expenses of the funeral. Sepa’s demeanor, seemingly stoic from the endless travel, changes as she accidentally glances at her dead grandson in the funeral parlor’s morgue, revealing repressed pain and infinite confusion in an otherwise irrepressible exterior.

Mendoza continues to deliberately and patiently unfold his tale. When Sepa arrives at her grandson’s employer to collect donations, we learn that her grandson did not die naturally. The seemingly unrelated crests (the candle-lighting ritual, the attempted snatching of the woman’s cellphone, the look of pain and confusion in Sepa’s face) in Sepa’s seemingly monotonous trip start to make sense: Sepa’s grandson was killed while trying to stop a thief from snatching his phone. The cellphone thief is Mateo (Ketchup Eusebio), the grandson of sidewalk vegetable vendor Puring (Rustica Carpio). The tale seamlessly shifts attention from Sepa to Puring, as she persists on against the heavy rains at night with her other grandson (Jhong Hilario) to plead her community leader to help her grandson. They end up unrewarded, as they arrive at the leader's home only to be rebuked and ordered to come back the next day, when the leader has waken up from his night's slumber. Despite the evident impossibility of her self-imposed task, she indefatigably finds ways to earn the money, both mischievous (like cheating one of her customers the few pesos of change) and noble (like mortgaging her house as collateral to a hefty loan), just to complete the settlement amount and rescue his beloved grandson from rotting in jail.

Mendoza explores repercussions of the crime on the families of both the offender and the offended. That the film manages to stagger its insistence on the evident dullness of living even after an event as momentous as the death or the incarceration of a loved one makes the individual instances of resilience notwithstanding a suffocating backdrop of obvious poverty and oppression more resonant. In one scene that recalls the same harrowing display of human desperation as staged by Akira Kurosawa in Seven Samurai (1954) where the villagers from a bandit-invested hamlet pick up the individual grains of rice that they are offering to their prospective samurai protectors from the wooden floor panels, Puring scampers to pick up the coins that were scattered on the grime-filled street when the police suddenly violently chased the sidewalk vendors away. In another scene Sepa, riding a makeshift boat that will transport her through the perpetually flooded streets of Malabon, begs for donations from her neighbors. These subtle but clearly cinematically motivated sequences become more emotionally laden and more pertinent in the film, especially considering that Mendoza’s consistently mundane and unadorned handling of the narrative conceit pushes these very few instances of overt sentimentality as his beacons of humanity in an arguably inhumane world.

Lola’s insistence on centering on the stories of the often marginalized elderly enunciates the often incompassionate and soulless bureaucracy and inefficiency of the Philippines’ criminal justice system. Sepa’s unfortunately embarrassing experience in court, where her futile search for a working comfort room leads to her wetting herself, pushes the irony that the courts, the symbol of civilization because it supposedly humanely provides a semblance of justice and order in society, is without the very basic necessities of human living: a working comfort room. That painful irony as vividly pointed out in that scene, ludicrous if you think about it from the perspective of one who has all the comforts in the world but very real, is a consistent theme throughout Mendoza’s filmography. Mendoza has consistently examined, to the point of being accused of peddling his nation’s overt poverty to foreigners, the recurring ironies that exist in a country that is supposedly Catholic (but as in the unapologetically filthy interiors of the aging movie house in Serbis (Service, 2008) is just an imagined moral concept), democratic (but as the conclusions of Tirador (Slingshot, 2007) and Manoro (The Teacher, 2006) dictate, is a futile concept), law-abiding and civilized (but as the hellish horrors of Kinatay explicate, is easily discarded). Lola’s depiction of abject poverty is more than just an instrument to draw sympathy for its two struggling grandmothers, since it stresses the sheer severity of the human condition that masquerades its shortcomings with establishments of order and equity.

By differentiating the two grandmothers with their respective struggles and experiences after the murder, Mendoza creates a palpable distance between the two, characterized by the anonymity Sepa has for Puring’s incessant pleas for settlement. However, underneath their conflicting positions is a shared responsibility, and from that responsibility, a shared tenacity to achieve their respective goals, and from there, a meeting ground. The two meet in a restaurant; and quite unexpectedly, instead of discussing in detail the specifics of their planned settlement, they chatter about their age, aching backs, arthritis, unhealthy food and finally, their stubborn husbands. The scene, shot by cinematographer Odyssey Flores with the same inconspicuous manner as the rest of the film, recalls the facet of humanity that Mendoza has fluently explored over and over again. In a world that has been consumed by an unbelievable brand of reality as imposed by poverty, it is not the very few triumphs that would inevitably connect us, but our common ability to first accept, and then survive pain and suffering, and still push on and just exist.

Kinatay (2009)

Minggu, 13 September 2009

Kinatay (2009)

Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza, 2009)

English Title: The Execution of P

The crowning glory of Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay (The Execution of P) is the ominous van ride that Peping (Coco Martin), a recently-married criminology student, decides to take to earn a few thousands of pesos to jumpstart his family life. The van ride connects dream with nightmare. The dream, lush with colors popping out of the perpetually busy and populated alleyways and public spaces, is shot in film. Night beckons the nightmare, shot in digital video and characterized by an enveloping darkness that gives way to more alert sensibilities to sounds, sights, and feelings. The van ride has Peping in the innermost space of the vehicle cramped by his experienced companions and their hapless victim, a prostitute named Madonna (Maria Isabel Lopez) who could not pay the money she owes the gang’s leader fondly referred to as Kap (Julio Diaz), because he is in fact a captain in the city’s police force. Scant illumination is provided for by the city’s neon lights, the headlights of passing cars, or the scarce street lamps that line the highway leading to Madonna’s execution place. The perspective that Mendoza forces us to take is discomforting, for the reason that cinema thrives with stimuli, and this forced deprivation of light and logic, orchestrated by Mendoza, is suffocating.

The little we know (that there is a victim, there is a destination, and there is an atrocity that we are forced to witness) compromises our perceived humanity. However, the littler we know, the more we understand Peping and his eventual fall from grace. That Madonna is a mother, a breadwinner for her extended family, a few weeks away from amassing the money she owes Kap, are all immaterial information. Nor it is material to know the motivations behind the callous violence that primarily characterize Kap’s set of trusted thugs. It is easier to define them as one end of the moral spectrum, individuals whose experiences in debasing human life has left them to treat it routinely, with every guilt or burden the inflicted atrocity has created momentary eradicated by showering and changing to a fresh set of clothes. With the limited perspective that Mendoza provides his viewers, he was able to enunciate the ramifications of witnessing and taking part in a single act of depravity, how it engulfs us completely and changes us forever.

I understand the hatred for the film (when it premiered in Cannes where notwithstanding Mendoza’s winning the Best Director prize, the film was met with harsh critical receptionc) but I don’t necessarily subscribe to it. In Mendoza’s quest to depict reality, he tramples upon established concepts of what it is to be human. He relentlessly maps the transition of man to monster, and given the straight-line matter-of-factly process that the film explores, the transition is as easy and automatic as night turning into day. Unlike in Mendoza’s other films where poverty is a blatant motivation and a nagging visual motif, in Kinatay, while we know that Peping is poor, poverty remains a subtle omnipresent force. What is explored in the film is not how poverty destroys us, but how humanity is too fragile, that by a mere twist of fate where we succumb to merely surviving notwithstanding the repercussions of our minor and major delinquencies, we are forced to relax it and inevitably decide to lose it.

Manila is a city of blatant ironies. In a city that dazzles with high rise buildings and affluent lights, beggars roam the highways that are motionless with its nightly traffic jams. Atop building are reminders of the persisting Catholicism that characterize the population, but beneath these high and holy signs lit in the brightest of reds to make sure they are seen from the farthest distance are whores, pimps, drug peddlers, addicts, and murderers. The cops are the criminals. Humanity is as pertinent as butchered meat. These are not directorial conceits formed by of Mendoza’s mind, but pieces of realities, strung together in what essentially is a road trip to hell to dictate a choice severed by fear, desperation, the four walls of the van and the kilometers of cold concrete, that are essential in understanding the predicament that plagues Peping. Morality remains a farfetched ideal, plastered in t-shirts and slogans. When push comes to shove, the most human thing to do is to go with the flow and transform.

Mendoza is preoccupied with Martin’s face, devoting a substantial portion of the film staring at it as it transforms from jubilant hopefulness as he waits to be married to Cecille (Mercedes Cabral), the mother of his baby, in a modest but charming civil ceremony, to wretched surrender as he goes home to his family after spending the night taking part in the grisly murder of a woman he barely knew for a couple of thousands of pesos that will presumably feed his family for the next couple of days. It’s a transformation that is too damning to witness because it occupies a much too familiar territory that we are ashamed to admit; that every little infraction scratches our moral stance, which is similar to Peping‘s situation where he essentially does not take part in the actual murder and dismemberment of Madonna, but his inability to shun it, grants him a position of equal culpability in the eyes of our collective morality and in his perception of his own humanity. Mendoza’s appreciation of our corruption may be too simplistic or too outrageous to resist but that he does not shy away from exposing the frailties instead of the triumphs of out universally shared humanity surprisingly makes Kinatay a human and humane film.

Tirador (2007)

Rabu, 02 Juli 2008

Tirador (2007)

Tirador (Brillante Mendoza, 2007)
English Title: Slingshot

In Brillante Mendoza's Manoro (The Teacher, 2006), Jonalyn, a young Aeta girl attempts to teach her tribe to read and write so that they can vote during the upcoming elections. Along with her father, she traverses into the wilderness to look for her grandfather, the lone Aeta whom she needs to convince to be taught how to read and write. The grandfather only appears near the end of the film when Jonalyn, alone and defeated, sits by the voting precinct. Along with the wild boar which he caught while hunting for days in the wilderness, the two of them go back to camp to celebrate not the fact that almost the entire tribe has for the very first time voted, but the fact that they have food to eat and that they are alive. Manoro, for all its extraneous advertising of Jonalyn's heroic efforts to have her tribe take part in the Philippines' democratic process is actually about the insignificance of democracy. The film can be aptly summarized by the grandfather's parting words: "that doesn't make me less of a man," referring to his having failed to take part in the elections.

Tirador (Slingshot) is the urban equivalent of Manoro. While the two may have dissimilar milieus (the former is set in the filthy slums of Quiapo, Manila; while the latter, in the pristine forests of rural Pampanga), energies (the former relishes in its perpetual state of motion; the latter is far more relaxed), and predisposition (the former is bathed with gloom and cynicism, the latter is more hopeful), the two films nevertheless share the same lack of trust and apprehension for the Philippine political and democratic system.

Tirador opens during the dead hours of the night, where couples are noisily fucking each other with only plywood walls separating their moans from the cries of the neighbors' startled baby, junkies are taking crystal meth out in the open, and hustlers are busy servicing their clients. A man walks around the slums to warn the dwellers about the impending arrival of the cops, causing the crooks on the run to scramble towards convenient hiding places, which include filthy canals and narrow alleyways. Once the cops arrive, the film starts to burst with energy, with the camera rapidly capturing every sensational bit of action as each resident is persuaded, threatened, pushed and forced to be lined up in the basketball court for proper identification, and eventual imprisonment. The following morning, the men are freed by a political candidate, hoping that his gift of temporary freedom will be remembered by the crooks and their families once the day of elections arrives.

Tirador continues on that note of despondence. Survival, the film's vocabulary which is unfortunately limited to words that connote pessimism, is devoid of any of the euphemism humanity has attributed to it, but primarily exists in its most basic, most animalistic sense. Men prey on men, comrades cheat on fellow comrades, and virtues like honor, respect, and honesty become misplaced in a community where the nagging urge to just last another day reigns supreme. The film bounces from one resident's petty crime to another, usually examined with the intricacy, frankness and vigor of an enterprising documentarian. Much has been written about Mendoza's visual style, frenzied yet voyeuristic and observant (the last two descriptions basically differentiate Mendoza's camera work with Paul Greengrass' famed visual incomprehensions). The camera never allows itself to rest as it eternally races along with its several dangerous subjects to what feels like grating repetition.

The result of Mendoza's virtuosity with the handheld camera and the seemingly endless narrative may feel tedious, most especially because the film seems to be perpetually bathing in a formidable atmosphere of danger, depression, and grimness. It is precisely because of this intended inhumanity that the film manages to accurately approximate this soulless and heartless dimension of humanity, arguably endemic in a nation wherein democracy, religion and extreme poverty miraculously coexists.

Tirador concludes with a prayer rally which is graced by several politicians who have prepared speeches about their virtues and their promises for change for the thousands of devotees, all of whom are potential voters. Among the devotees are Mendoza's subject slum dwellers, complete with candles and authentic looks of pious hope. Before the credits roll, the camera catches something that is both startling yet unsurprising: one of the slum dwellers' hand reaches down the pockets of an unsuspecting victim. There is no change, there probably will never be change. In the midst of the heights of democratic and religious exercise, nothing can ever qualm the alarming need to for food, for sex, and for a brand new set of dentures.

Serbis (2008)

Rabu, 25 Juni 2008

Serbis (2008)

Serbis (Brillante Mendoza, 2008)
English Title: Service

Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis (Service) is hardly a perfect film. In fact, it is so riddled with flaws that it would utterly be improbable and impossible for me to enumerate each and every one of them. I have a faint understanding as to why it has caused such a divisive uproar when it was screened in Cannes, where critics and viewers either absorbed it or delegated it as pornographic trash. Perpetually swimming in a perpetual cacophony of traffic and chaos, Serbis details a day in the life of the Pineda family, owners of an Angeles City movie theater that screens soft-core pornographic films to hustlers servicing gay men in the comfort of the theater’s damp and dark interiors. Even absent portions of the two explicit sex scenes (one involving a man and his girlfriend making love despite the discomfort of a boil in the man’s buttock, and another involving the projectionist receiving a blowjob from one of the theater’s patrons), which the local censors forced the film’s producers to cut for local exhibition (a blatant undermining of Constitutional safeguards in protecting due process, as completely explained in my paper which calls for the abolition of the obsolete law that created the present censors board), the film elicits a legitimate response of either disgust or fascination

I was undoubtedly fascinated. Serbis seems to be Brillante Mendoza’s most ambitious and most intriguing work. Serbis is a film that can be both seen as a traditional network narrative that juggles the stories of the residents of the decrepit movie theater, and a film going experience itself, since it seems that it was purposely meant to titillate, arouse and shock to replicate the characteristic sleaze of these ruined movie houses that have been transformed into cruising spots for the horny and adventurous.

Serbis takes its cue from Jeffrey Jeturian’s brilliant Tuhog (Larger Than Life, 2001), also scribed by Serbis-screenwriter Armando Lao. Tuhog details the tragic tale of a barrio lass (Ina Raymundo in her most believable performance to date) who was raped by her father, a story that is sold to unscrupulous movie producers who transformed it into an exploitative parade of boobs and butts in several acrobatic sex sessions. As structured (with the first half of the film detailing what really happened to the lass and the second half screening the movie based on the lass’ experience), Tuhog makes apparent the psychology behind the exploitation, eliciting a response of pity and disgust to the blatant commercialization and bastardization of other people’s tragedies.

Serbis, from the moment its opening credits takes the appearance of an overused reel before opening with the sight of a girl (Roxanne Jordan) completely naked in front of a mirror while whispering I love you’s in a seductive tone to its end where the “reel” burns at the moment wherein we are overhearing what turns out to be a negotiation between an old homosexual and a young bystander for sex services, is aiming at mixing reality and fiction and blurring the fine line between film viewing and voyeurism, the same way Tuhog examined the hurtful discrepancies of crossing that same line that divides life from film. What differentiates Serbis is that Mendoza’s film works best as an experience, which brings to mind the numerous walk-outs the film has elicited, which to my mind is a result of a lack of acceptance of this film’s goal of replicating the atmosphere in these dilapidated porn theaters that dot urban centers in the Philippines.

The film's plot crisscrosses to and from the dilemmas of the individual members of the Pinedas, a family characterized by strong women and inutile and irresponsible men. Nayda (Jaclyn Jose) tends to both the theater operations and the problems of her family, which includes Alan (Coco Martin), who got his girlfriend (Mercedes Cabral) pregnant but is hesitant in having everything end up in marriage; Ronald (Kristoffer King), the film projectionist who is busy being serviced by transvestites while exchanging sticky longing looks with Nayda; Lando (Julio Diaz), Nayda's gullible husband who is tasked in managing the canteen while doing other household chores. The storyline is as complicated as the labyrinthine corridors of the theater, with the characters not necessarily explicating their existences through traditional narrative structures. Instead, these characters are products of their settings, rotting at the same time as their beloved theater, and rapidly escaping from the clutches of Catholic morality just like the theater's patrons have abandoned the normal premises of privacy and decorum.

The final representative of the past's fading splendor is Flor (Gina Pareño), the family's matriarch who miserably laments the failure of both the theater and her family. She alone adamantly stands with grace amidst the deterioration that drapes the setting, a deterioration that has almost completely eaten up her theater and her family. As Flor, veteran actress Pareño gives a brave and glorious performance, allowing Mendoza and cinematographer Odyssey Flores to expose her at her lowest and most vulnerable. In one scene, we see Flor taking a bath, Mendoza's ever-present camera eagerly lingering behind her naked body, evidently aged. It's a scene that might be argued as unnecessary but in reality, merely showcases the character's trajectory from utter disgrace to undaunted resilience. She dons a splendid black dress, as all memory of her recent failures temporarily erased, and then replaces Nayda in the ticket booth, glowing with the dignity of a near invisible past.

In Serbis, Mendoza and Lao lace their neo-realist intentions with lovely moments of absurdity: of a police chase that extends to the theater's interiors and abruptly ends with the snatcher hanging for his dear life, of a lost goat suddenly interrupting a film screening, and of an unsightly boil that has turned sex into an uncomfortable chore. It is this deadpan humor that is probably the only similarity Serbis has with Tsai Ming-liang's beautiful and elegiac Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), a film that is also set in a rundown theater that has become the setting for several dubious activities. The two filmmakers have differing mindsets. Tsai both mourns and celebrates cinema with the final screening of Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1966) on a movie theater's final night of commercial existence. Mendoza, on the other hand, fathoms the extent and the repercussions of deterioration of culture, and the way the same interacts with the lives that are affected (the Pineda family) and the audiences (the inattentive patrons depicted in the film and us, as enchanted or disgusted viewers of this film) that feed on such mutated culture.

Serbis is not Mendoza's best film, a distinction that still belongs to one of Mendoza's most neglected films, Manoro (The Teacher, 2006), a heartfelt tale about a young Aeta girl who taught her entire tribe to write in time for the presidential elections but fails to convince her own grandfather to vote. However, it is undoubtedly his most complicated film to date, one that works in so many levels that each viewing would surely elicit a different reaction, response and understanding.

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This is my contribution to the Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon at goatdogblog.