The Healing (2012)

Minggu, 26 Agustus 2012

The Healing (2012)

The Healing (Chito Roño, 2012)

Chito Roño’s The Healing is afflicted with a chronic case of indecision. It is viciously a horror film, one that stretches the limits of good taste with very visual and shocking depictions of violence and morbidity. In fact, the film holds the record for being the first Filipino film to be granted two different ratings by local censors, one for the trimmed version that is presumably more suited for teens and another for the version that displays all the acts of depravity Roño’s creative mind can conjure within the limited range of popular cinema.

However, Roño apparently has more ambitions for the film other than trite terror. The film is specifically designed, divided into various parts that are differentiated from one another by color schemes, beginning with white, then blue, then red, and yellow. Such designs are too obscure though. They are more puzzling than elucidating, more annoying than enlightening. The experiments only succeed in diluting the scares, bewildering the sense with what essentially are artsy indulgences that are either infuriatingly empty and shallowly motivated or too inexplicable to matter.

The film opens in a remote village where faith healer Elsa (Daria Ramirez) is busy receiving a crowd of sick people. Seth (Vilma Santos) has brought her father (Robert Arevalo), a stroke victim, for healing. Seth’s father miraculously recovers. Inspired by the miraculous recovery of Seth’s father, her sick friends and neighbors decide to take the trip to Elsa’s house to urge her to also heal them. Cookie (Kim Chiu), the daughter of Seth’s ex-husband who is desperate for a cure for her cancer, also joined the group going to Elsa. They eventually get what they wished for from the faith healer. However, one by one, they become brutal and violent, killing as many as they can before committing suicide.

The Healing spends a great deal of time needlessly attempting to make sense of the plentiful contrivances it filled its plot with. Simplicity is not one of Roño’s priorities. The film indulges in so many points that require tiring explanations and expositions, some of which seem too farfetched to be believed or to be appreciated. While the genre relies heavily on the supernatural and the unexplainable, Roño’s story seems too all over the place, forcing everything to cohere seamlessly like a completed jigsaw puzzle. Unfortunately, the film’s insistence on forcing the details mostly backfires, creating a story that meanders a little bit too much.

The key to good horror is not necessarily what is overtly shown and depicted but the quality and the extent of what is left to the imagination. Roño invests a lot in The Healing’s visual design. Practical effects are abandoned for computer-generated effects, allowing grislier and more deranged sequences to exist with absolute ease. Instead of heightening the tension, the computer-generated effects only deflates it, inviting humor with how closer it resembles cartoons than macabre realism instead of fear. The acting is also unnecessarily pronounced and hysterical, despite the characters’ unnatural reaction to impending amorality and death. There is just too little left for the audience.

The film is just frustratingly cluttered, serving details and elements, motivations and reactions, all of which do not necessarily fit the material they are forced to support. The Healing is commendable only for the fact that it attempted to stray from the inanities of uninspired horror cinema that has occupied Philippine cinema for far too long. It bears ideas and an execution of such ideas that evince an ambition and effort to break away from tired conventions. Sadly, everything ends up in forgettable confusion.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Emir (2010)

Selasa, 15 Juni 2010

Emir (2010)

Emir (Chito Roño, 2010)

"To invest funds and other assets in such activities or undertakings that shall directly and indirectly promote development of the film industry, including the production of films and other terms and conditions as it may deem wise and desirable;"

- Section 3 (9), Republic Act 9167 entitled "An Act Creating the Film Development Council of the Philippines, Defining its Powers and Functions, Appropriating Funds Therefor, and Other Purposes"

Chito Roño's Emir, a seventy-million peso endeavor by the Film Development Council of the Philippines, with generous funding from the President's social funds and other government sponsorships or partnerships, looks exactly the part. Set in the most picturesque locations in the Philippines, from the grandiose Banaue Rice Terraces to the rustic Paoay Church, and Morocco, the film is mostly lovely to look at, exactly like moving musical postcards from various touristy destinations. The film also sounds expensive, with the several musical numbers utilizing full orchestrations to sweeping and rousing effect. It seems that every peso of the film’s unusually hefty budget was appropriately spent.

The question remains. Is Emir, a movie that tackles the experiences of Filipino overseas contract workers, deserving of such governmental support? Considering that the mandate of the Council is for the development of the film industry and not the promotion of overseas labor or local and international tourism, is the decision to concentrate such a budget on one expensive production a wise one, when it would be undoubtedly more helpful for the development of the film industry if such immense budget was spread to many filmmakers who have films that are just waiting for a fraction of the seventy million pesos to get made? The reasons and rationales for Emir’s existence is of course are in the arena of discretion, discretion that it is of the greatest import to celebrate the accomplishments of overseas contract workers through a film, an expensive musicale that is half-set in a foreign country. Decisions arising from discretion are sadly a very difficult thing to controvert, and suspicious minds can only entertain, well, suspicions. The film has been made, and the issue of whether or not this decision based on the discretion of a government whose past discretions or indiscretions have always been questioned but have never been answered is proper is better discussed in other venues.

Partly based on the true story of a crown prince of an Arab nation who can fluently speak both Tagalog and Ilokano, Emir tells the story of Amelia (Frencheska Farr), the daughter of poor farmers who travels to Yememeni, the fictional oil-rich Arab nation that is on the verge of being invaded by its neighbors, to be able to reverse the fortune of her family. She is employed in the household of a sheik and is assigned to be the nanny of the sheik’s only son. True to her job, she rears the child not only to be appreciative of Filipino culture but to treat that culture as his very own, often interrupting his expected English or Arabic with bursts of fluently-spoken Filipino phrases. While not tending to her ward, she either swoons for a half-Arabic half-Filipino man (Sid Lucero) or entangles herself with the issues of her co-workers.

Admittedly, there is something engrossing about telling the stories of these so-called modern heroes, those Filipino men and women who risk parting with their families and endangering their lives to earn enough for their families back home and whose only connection with the motherland is through these Filipino-made microphone-like contraptions that showcase Philippine vistas while displaying the lyrics to all-time favorite karaoke tunes, through song. However, Emir, even with its string of original songs, cannot muster enough sincerity to even approximate a fraction of the overseas experience. The film seems satisfied in approximating its influences, from its opening number, where hyperactive nurses, construction workers and dancers back-flip and gyrate to the incoherent rhythm of a song about the promises of overseas employment, which feels like a ghastly mix of Disney and Demy, to the lone near-lifeless Bollywood number where non-Filipino employees of the sheik suddenly enter the picture and dance to a pseudo-Arabic ditty, in token acknowledgment of their existence.

Save for O, Maliwanag na Buwan (O, Shining Moon), a high-powered duet that resembles the raw emotionality and the unabashed lyricism of Aegis’ greatest hits, and is sung sublimely by heartbroken Amelia and Tersing (Kalila Aguilos), who at that given point in the film were both left by their men, all of the songs of this musicale are fleeting and unremarkable.

Had its uninspiring musicality been its only problem, Emir could still have been a mildly entertaining diversion. However, the film propagates a dangerous fantasy of a reality that gnaws on the very core of what essentially is a national pride. In Hindi Ko Pinangarap (I Never Ambitioned), the musical number where Ester (powerfully played by veteran singer-actress Dulce), who recently resigned from her job as governess of the house, proceeds to convince Amelia to take the job, she pronounces that the job she reluctantly gave up is the pinnacle of their existences, irresponsibly reinforcing a culture of highly-paid servitude as opposed to self-fulfillment. This is basically the problem with Emir. While it is unwise to blind ourselves to the reality that the Philippines is surviving because it is exporting labor to richer nations, Emir never regards this resignation to this new form of colonization (a near-accurate term especially because this system of economy that relies solely on the fact that other nations are in need of Filipinos’ services and have the capacity to pay for Filipinos’ services result in the Philippines’ being subservient to other countries’ superior wealth), as a serious problem, which it is.

As it is, Emir treats all these, from the very real problems of these immigrant workers to the bigger picture of the country being taken hostage by employer nations, as popcorn entertainment, equivalent to a weekend noon-time variety show and nothing more. The fact that the government, in all its benevolent discretion, decided to go this way in its efforts to improve film production in the country, makes the pain, although forcibly disguised in fancy colors and upbeat tunes, even more resounding.

(Cross-published on Twitch.)

T2 (2009)

Senin, 20 April 2009

T2 (2009)

T2 (Chito Roño, 2009)

The story of T2, written by its director Chito Roño with Aloy Adlawan (whose writing credits include Topel Lee's gratingly noisy Ouija (2007) and Khavn dela Cruz's counter-horror genre 3 Days of Darkness (2007)), is coined from the many different experiences by various individuals from around the Philippines with engkantos (nature spirits that take human form) gathered by the film's researchers during the film's pre-production. To the casual cynic, these stories about encounters with engkantos may seem outrageous, if not downright ridiculous. Tales about normal men and women who are lured into the lavish dwellings of these monarchial beings or punished with severe ailments or disfigurations for rejecting these offers are out of place in this modern world of scientific and medical accuracy. However, the consistency of these stories despite geographical and social boundaries, and the cultural and social repercussions of the abundance of these experiences from all over the country despite the expanding grasp of modernity outweigh the farfetchedness of the storytellers' implausible representations.

The fact that T2 is a tapestry of various tall tales, framed into a straightforward story about Claire (Maricel Soriano), a frustrated childless wife, who escapes from the pressures of her failed marriage by volunteering to escort orphans to their adoptive homes, is telling of what to expect from a film about wraithly nature spirits. The film behooves standard logic, even more so than Roño's recent absurd horror films, Feng Shui (2004) and Sukob (The Wedding Curse, 2006)) . T2 is most effective when it piles enigma after enigma; where the chills are not derived so much from Roño's proficiency for staging visual and aural treats that shock, agitate, and momentarily perturb, but from the lingering discomfort of unexplained occurrences that despite their impossibility maintain a stranglehold over our common cultural imagination. The film's cryptic opening, where a young man who is in search for his lost goat encounters a strange apparition of an airplane descending down an airport in a metropolis that suddenly appears out of the starless night, sets the tone, although unsustained, for Roño's more inconsistent and intriguing horror film to date.

T2 is curiously concerned with travel: the airplane that zooms past the young man in the introduction; Claire working in a travel agency; her philanthropy concerning transporting orphans from one place to another; and the initial half of the film being told in various forms of travel. Roño portrays the act of traveling with such repose that allows him to infuse it with an ominous unease, inflicted by intertwining emotions like fatigue, despair, depression and hope that consume Claire after evading from her severe domestic predicament. Humanity, ungifted with any natural weapons, opts for the logic of flight when faced with crisis. Adopted in our modern world scenario, vacations remedy work-a-day stress and inter-country migration is believed to be the cure-all to the inadequacies of an incompetent government. It is this fundamentally human trait of escapism that birthed the cultural phenomenon of engkantos in the Philippines as the common denominator of these stories is the possibility of escape, being offered by these spirits, from the hardships of the real world.

Roño clearly acknowledges this by creating travel and escape a constant thematic concern, with Claire using her mission of accompanying orphans to their new homes as a distraction from her pressing marital problems; or the fantastic offerings of leisure and comfort being utilized by the engkantos to lure Angeli (Mika dela Cruz), Claire's ward, into their realm; or the little gestures that Claire does to momentarily forget or evade her troubles like turning off her cellular phone or drowning her sorrows with bottles of beer. By emphasizing the ugliness of the real world (the dilapidated and overpopulated tenement that becomes the stage to the film's climax) and the interminable troubles that hound his characters, Roño facilitates the allure of abdicating worldly affairs for the promise of painless existence with the consequence of losing the ability to feel human emotions. However, T2 never fully explores this dichotomy since the film clearly prefers simplicity over analyzing the national malaise through the horror medium, by establishing clear lines that divide good (humanity) and evil (the scary engkantos that offer empty comforts). Roño shies from portraying the gravity of the human condition, preferring to limit earthly concerns to emotional turmoil and familial inconveniences, which are not enough reasons to facilitate the blurring of moral lines and make permanent escape a feasible, if not entirely logical choice.

This is what differentiates T2 from Guillermo del Toro's far superior Pan's Labyrinth (2007), which clearly influenced Roño. Del Toro paints Fascist-era Spain with viciousness, violence, and depravity, that makes escapism the only means for the film's desperate heroine to survive. In comparison, T2 feels insignificant and petty. This brings me to Roño's biggest miscalculation, which is to filter from the stories the social element that binds these tales no matter who tells them and no matter where the storyteller comes from. By constricting the film within the melodramatic trappings of a distressed wife and a parentless little girl who is hounded by engkantos, Roño waives making a film that transcends pure commercialism. Instead of crafting a horror film that explores a grave national ache inflicted by decades of poverty, corruption and oppression to the point of causing a nationwide malady of escapism through fables, fantasies and tall tales, Roño comes up with a competent and effective horror picture, filling but will ultimately leave you wishing it were saying something more.

Caregiver (2008)

Kamis, 29 Mei 2008

Caregiver (2008)

Caregiver (Chito Roño, 2008)

In an early scene in Chito Roño's Caregiver, we see Sarah (Sharon Cuneta) peek into the bathroom where her mother (Marita Zobel) is giving her Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother (Anita Linda) a bath. The mother sees Sarah peeking and gives her a warm comforting look. Sarah's younger sister (Mickey Ferriols) then enters the bathroom to help dry and dress up their grandmother. Sarah, out of familial sensitivity, closes the door, granting her grandmother the privacy any human being deserves. It's a lovely scene, made even more resounding with gestures that summarize exactly why the Philippines has ended up as the world's foremost supplier of domestic helpers, nannies, nurses, and caregivers. The Philippines is a nation of caregivers: of daughters and granddaughters who remain compassionate to those senior to them; of grandmothers and mothers who respond with genuine attention to their sons or daughters; of siblings taking care of siblings; of wives keeping up with their husbands.

Caregiver begins in the Philippines, where Sarah, a schoolteacher who spends her nights studying the intricacies of caregiving, gets ready to leave for London, where her husband Teddy (John Estrada) works as a nurse's aide. While most of the film happens in London where we see Sarah go through the joys and pains of a caregiver, suffer through a slowly deteriorating marriage with her husband who is wallowing in self-pity, win the respect of a wealthy yet extremely moody retiree Mr. Morgan (Saul Reichlin), and take care of a misdirected youth (Makisig Morales) she first encountered shoplifting in a grocery, it is during the moments in the Philippines that are most poignant.

Director Roño and scriptwriter Chris Martinez paint a very clear portrait as to what Sarah is willing to sacrifice for her job as a caregiver in a nursing home in London. Most moving of the sacrifices Sarah is willing to take is the possibility of leaving her lone son (John Manalo) without any parents. The film takes utmost pains to detail the waning relationship between mother and son, with the latter stoic and rebellion amid the threat of being left alone by his mother, and the former exercising her maternal instincts even up to her final days in the Philippines. Their reconciliation is handled deftly, with the two of them expressing their emotions in the middle of a playground where homeless orphaned kids sleep (a visual expression of how they are still lucky despite their circumstances). Sarah then shares her son's bottle of beer, a subtle expression that they both share the same fears, and it is thus pointless for them to separate with hardened and hurt hearts.

Sarah's experience in London is standard melodrama, with suffering wife overcoming the odds to come out strongest and admirable in the end. Touched deftly are the repercussions of displacement. In fact, the most significant character in the film's London scenes is Sarah's husband who has deteriorated into a pathetic alcoholic mess, more so because his masculinity is greatly disadvantaged by the fact that Sarah was able to find success when he cannot do so. Caregiver brings into the forefront the humiliation, the pride-swallowing, the ludicrousness of this forced migration due to the laws of economics; where successful professionals (doctors, nurses, teachers, etc.) are forced to downgrade their professions because of the indubitable economic gap between nations. The film expresses that caste systems exist not only within specific cultures but also in the family of nations, where citizens of third world economies are delegated lower status notwithstanding skill, expertise, or intellect.

But since Caregiver dwells more on human stories rather than lopsided world politics (although there's one scene where the ludicrousness of such politics is exemplified, where a Filipino ex-doctor (Jhong Hilario) is sacked from the hospital where he's working as a nurse for disobeying his superior although that act of disobedience saved a human life), its agenda is much more simpler: to venerate the Filipino overseas worker. It's an endeavor that has been done and redone in Philippine cinema ('Merika (Gil Portes, 1984), The Flor Contemplacion Story (Joel Lamangan, 1995), Milan (Olivia Lamasan, 2004), among others), with different levels of success. What Caregiver accomplishes is something deeper than trite veneration. That veneration is in fact an assertion of a mutated hierarchy of values inflicted by an age of financial necessity in a country that has been relying on exporting professionals to other nations to work for better pay but with menial tasks.

When in the end, Sarah chooses to stay put with her work in London, presumably following the lessons she learned from Mr. Morgan, it feels like Sarah has championed her individuality (or for feminists, her ability to make a decision on her own), besting the pathetic whims of her husband, and presumably realizing her dreams of financial freedom. In the larger arena of things however, her decision is one that champions complacency, one that can be regarded as a tacit acceptance of her role in the world no matter how unjustly such role is rendered, one that confirms such mutated hierarchy of values and in fact celebrates it as a virtue. What Caregiver affirms is that the Philippines has a sorry place in this world of ours, and all we can do about it is accept it and cry (the last action an inevitable result of Roño and Martinez's effective machinations).