Quick Change (2013)

Selasa, 13 Agustus 2013

Quick Change (2013)

Quick Change (Eduardo Roy, Jr., 2013)

Dorina (Mimi Juareza) is a retired entertainer who now plies the streets offering her cheap, quick cosmetic fixes to other transgendered men. Lacking any medical experience, she is nonetheless "doc" to her grateful patients, whose faces are sculpted to look like the glittering faces of popular local celebrities. Her patients then don extravagant and colorful costumes, sashaying on makeshift stages, pretending to be beauty queens with their plastered smiles and generic retorts. At night, Dorina satisfies her boyfriend (Junjun Quintana), a performer in a pageant show that caters to foreign tourists. She then starts to satisfy herself discretely lest she incur the wrath of a boyfriend who prefers not to be reminded of her persisting masculinity.

Eduardo Roy, Jr.'s Quick Change is all about facades. It obsessively dissects the culture of transsexual women, their infatuation with youth and beauty. Seemingly aimless in its meanderings in between the redundant struggles of its fading protagonist, the film attempts to sensitively shed light on the ills of a specific repressed subculture, those that have been masked excessively with thick make-up and fake collagen.

Roy's challenge is obviously enormous. He has chosen to tackle subjects that have often been marginalized or exoticized. Roy attempts to dodge the traps, freeing himself from focusing on the usual themes of discrimination which gives him the opportunity to observe his subjects' conflicts in identity, how they struggle in between being male and female, being religious and morally compromised.

Although Roy would sometimes indulges in the humor that has been stereotyped as part and parcel of what makes transsexuals so irresistible to Philippine popular media, he would nevertheless depict them not as oppressed individuals, but as individuals who have found a certain niche that they have become comfortable to live in. Roy mostly succeeds in his endeavors, betrayed only by the need to frame his grand intentions within a narrative that only attempts a certain degree of subtlety to its obvious didactics.

Roy missteps when, midway, he shifts his focus from his transsexual muses to the actual crime of conducting clandestine cosmetic operations. Quick Change deflates into something quasi-noir, propelled mostly by Roy's compelling depictions of the horrors of makeshift cosmetic surgery than by its advocacy or its narrative force. Thankfully, the film is consistently visually fascinating, with Roy and cinematographer Dan Villegas creating morbid and ominous images out of the plain and banal.

Much of the film's perceptive style is reminiscent of Bahay Bata (Baby Factory, 2011), Roy's impressive debut about several mothers overcoming the inhumanity of giving birth in a crowded government-run maternity hospital. As in Bahay Bata, Roy, for the most part, fashions himself as a passive observer of Dorina, following her as she flies from one cheap hotel room to another to conduct her dubious cosmetic operations. He then exposes Dorina's cornered morality, constantly being splintered by both an economic necessity and her community's insistence on being defined in terms of outward appearances more than anything else. 

Avoiding labeling Dorina in terms of good or bad, black or white, Roy conceives a society for Dorina where morality has been rendered obsolete by its impracticality. After all, in a world where consumerism is god and those who are incapable of paying make do with what they have, morality can never pay for food or more prominent cheekbones.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Bahay Bata (2011)

Sabtu, 06 Agustus 2011

Bahay Bata (2011)

Bahay Bata (Eduardo Roy, Jr., 2011)

English Title: Baby Factory

A pregnant woman, notably without a husband to keep her company and more notably with hardly an emotion on her face, walks to the maternity hospital. She arrives at the hospital, revealing a queue of other pregnant women, waiting for their turn to be examined by the physician who determines whether or not the mother’s are about to deliver and should be admitted into the hospital. In the delivery room of the hospital, several women are giving birth together, side by side, seemingly oblivious of privacy and other things that make that most important moment in motherhood immeasurable unique and special.

With its unflinching depiction of the brutal conditions of an overworked and overcrowded public maternity hospital, the opening sequence of Eduardo Roy, Jr.’s Bahay Bata (Baby Factory) enunciates how poverty has pervaded and probably tainted what should be sacred. It’s a literal baby factory, where mothers are herded in assembly lines, and doctors go through one mother after another, delivering babies with astounding but unfeeling efficiency that is not unlike that of a trained and skilled factory worker.

The images that Roy was able to capture within the maternity hospital are evidence of the gnawing overpopulation that strangles the country’s economy and therefore making the cycle of poverty ever more apparent and inescapable. In a country that is in the middle of a seemingly never-ending debate on overpopulation and governmental regulations to put a stop to it, what Roy has strung together is politically and socially relevant, an intelligently rendered disclosure of the failures of the status quo, and a signal of a need to graduate from a stagnant culture of useless charity and temporary solutions to something more progressive.

Fortunately, Roy does not succumb to the temptation of being overtly political. From the shocking images that Roy sets the tone and feel of his film with, he moves on, focusing on the very human stories that miraculously still exist despite the hospital’s pathetic conditions. Because of that, Bahay Bata succeeds in painting a very tender, very delicate, and beautifully non-judgmental picture of mothers at their humblest and most vulnerable.

From the nurse (Diana Zubiri, in a surprisingly heartfelt performance that is memorable not because there are big acting moments but because she was able to communicate the minute changes that happen from the first time we see her until the last) who is suddenly faced with the decision of continuing a pregnancy that is borne from an illicit relationship to the mother who is unable to lactate and breastfeed her thirteenth child, the stories that Roy and screenwriter Jerome Zamora found in their research which they wrote into the film are mostly fascinating. Masterfully weaved together by Charliebebs Gohetia’s precise editing work, those stories merge to become a penetrating film that echoes the glistening imperfections that makes motherhood such a beautiful thing, how amidst the blood, sweat and tears of childbirth, there is the truest of pleasure, however momentary, in giving life, how it incites the most pronounced of emotions, whether it be happiness, anger, love, and depression.

Bahay Bata is wonderfully subtle, a description that is rarely used for films that have poverty as a constant and continuous backdrop. While it starts seemingly exploitative of the appalling scenario that the dozens of mothers have to face, it evolves into something extremely close to sublime, a film that can be both agitating and touching, numbing and heartfelt.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)