Otso (2013)

Kamis, 19 September 2013

Otso (2013)

Otso (Elwood Perez, 2013)

Various colorful images of Manila open Otso, Elwood Perez's first film since Lupe: A Seaman's Wife and Ssshhh... She Walks by Night ten years ago. Lex (Vince Tanada), a returning Filipino writer who is commissioned by a director to draft a script for an upcoming independent project, gives perspective to the seemingly unconnected displays of Manila's sights. Nothing has changed. The truths of the Manila that he grew up in are still the same truths that Manila grapples with. After a tour of the unchanging metropolis, Lex moves into his home for the next few months, a remarkable apartment building owned by Anita Linda, a local screen goddess. Otso suddenly switches to stark monochrome.

Otso is perhaps Perez's most impenetrable film. Perez, however, has always demonstrated a flair for experimentation, to break traditional narratives with illogical and unexpected turns. Waikiki (1980), a sordid melodrama about a mother attempting to reunite with her daughters who grew up in Hawaii, is laced with full sequences of actresses gyrating to hypnotic beats and suggestive chanting. In Silip (1985), regarded as Perez's most famous film after being distributed in foreign markets under the title Daughters of Eve precisely because of its outrageous content, he manages to induce titillation within the perspective of sex that exists under very Catholic clutches. Whether fuelled by Perez's actual creative impulses or just fits of adventurism, the films he makes have an energy that arouses curiosity, at the very least.

Otso seems to be beyond comprehension. It's a myriad of perplexing images and incongruent atmospheres. At the center of the chaos is one compelling artifact from several decades ago: Lex's apartment building. It simply could have belonged to another dimension, one that is unrestricted by real world reason and logic. Its narrow corridors are littered with stories and sleaze. Its cramped units are airtight boxes brimming with secrets. It has a solitary lift, a contraption from a forgotten era that is good enough to transport fragile Anita Linda into her private roost where she keeps an eye on each and every one of her tenants.

The building manager (Vangie Labalan), an old maid who busies herself campaigning for her political candidate, becomes impossibly infatuated with Lex. Lex, on the other hand, fancies Sabina (Monique Azerreda), the mysterious woman who is either the mistress of an incumbent congressman or the doting granddaughter of Alice Lake. Sabina may also be having an affair with Hans (Jordan Ladra), one of Lex's neighbors whose wife is severely ill, leaving their son (Gabby Bautista) to become Lex's constant companion. Elsewhere, a pimp and his hookers attempt to stage one of Jose Rizal's famous stories, and politically-motivated goons are on a rampage for votes.

Perez's motivations are defiantly unclear. There are traces of noir, of Lex's guileless writer stumbling towards a web of crime and politics. Then he steps out of the stereotypical gloom, and starts playing peeping tom, indulging in the imagined escapades of his neighbors. Madness ensues. The film escapes conventional reason, and just becomes a series of scenes tied together by a figment of an idea. It transforms with every twist it takes, never really cohering. At one point, it arrives at the climax of a mystery it so vividly paints, before abandoning all that to become an unhinged tribute to the great Anita Linda.

By its very end, Otso never really succeeds at being anything except a nagging riddle, one that begs to be solved despite the scarcity for any real answers. The film's belated revelations, coupled with what could be purposeful haphazard filmmaking and histrionic acting, point towards a message of caution from the maverick filmmaker about being drunk with too much freedom, too much truth, too much fantasy, and too much cinema. In a building where Anita Linda lords over desperate writers, amateur performers, prostitutes, and political lackeys, it is that sober grey area between cinematic fantasy and reality in which the ancient actress so comfortably lives in that is the unwonted cure to life's infectious confusion.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Waikiki (1980)

Minggu, 06 November 2011

Waikiki (1980)

Waikiki (Elwood Perez, 1980)

It is undeniable that Filipinos are addicted to migration stories. In a way, despite the far-flung locations of these tales, there is always a strand in the tale that would be instantly relatable, either because immigration has been a common ambition of the ordinary Filipino or immigration has been vicariously experienced through a loved one. From Gil Portes’ masterfully lyrical ‘Merika (1984) to Lav Diaz’s slow-burning Batang West Side (2001), the Filipino diaspora is always depicted with a discontent and ennui, of a gnawing longing for the homeland, of a certain pride for being rooted in a culture despite being detached from its source for so long.

Elwood Perez’s Waikiki is different from these migration stories because its main character, Edad (Alicia Alonzo), a mother who was separated from her husband and two daughters who migrated to Hawaii, is the outside, the seeming trespasser, to the stories of the migrants that her loved ones have become. Left behind because of tuberculosis, she waits for the day when she’ll be able to be reunited with her family. When she gets to Hawaii however, she discovers her daughters (played by Rio Locsin and Lorna Tolentino) adversely changed, with morals looser than what she would’ve expected, with husbands and boyfriends whose attachment to family is less grounded than hers. She finds her husband (Raul Aragon) with a different family, putting that final nail in the coffin of her own American dream, forcing her to go back to the Philippines, with her dignity more or less intact.

Instead of dwelling into the sordid problems of migration, Perez peeks into the specific life of someone who was left behind, expectant of joyous reunions with the loved ones she knows through happy memories when they were still together but instead was greeted with indifference and alienation from loved ones obviously changed through the passage of time and the sudden shift in culture. Alonzo portrays the mother’s coming to terms to the fact that her precious family has been shattered by the American dream with believable intensity. She fights until she no longer can fight, and her eventual surrender to the realities that have literally hit her in the face is quite heartbreaking.

The mother’s story however is just one half of the film. The other half features Mikaela (Alma Moreno), Edad’s eldest daughter who decides to stay behind with her ailing mother, falling from her mother’s graces when she decides to work in a nightclub as a dancer. With the help of her doting neighbor (Bella Flores), she discovers the practical functions of her sexuality, parading in grass skirts and dancing a bastardized and overly-eroticized version of Hawaiian dances with scantily clad Ricky Belmonte to the beat of drums and suggestive chanting of the word “Wai-ki-ki,” subliminally evoking images of what is kept hidden by those strategically placed shards of dried grass.

Despite the obvious erotic undertones of the dances, Perez withholds from designing the scenes to be plainly lewd, plainly objectifying Moreno’s womanly curves in compromising rhythms. Instead, Perez injects the scenes with some sort of feminine empowerment, where men are beholden to the hypnotizing grooves of the show’s main attraction. Waikiki, despite being advertised as a sexy film in obvious reaction to Moreno’s sudden rise to fame as a sex symbol especially after her stints in Joey Gosiengfiao’s Bomba Star (1980) and Nympha (1980), is actually a film that features strong women amidst a world of men made frail by very real circumstances.

Waikiki is deceptive in a sense that it allures with exoticization of female sexuality, of a very foreign land, of the migration experience, before exposing very familiar truths of how families are pulled apart by the Filipino diaspora, how there is an immense divide between traditional mores and the virtues of progress and modernity. Perez, by adeptly juggling the commercial requirements of studio filmmaking and his own artistic impulses, has created a film that is strange because it almost always works in all its attempts to be whatever it needs to be. As a sexy film, it does not fail to arouse. As a melodrama, it does not fail to force out tears. As a portrait of the Philippines then and now, it does not fail to impress with both its astuteness and simplicity in expressing its points.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Silip (1985)

Jumat, 06 April 2007

Silip (1985)

Silip (Elwood Perez, 1985)
aka Daughters of Eve

Elwood Perez's Silip has that ball-grabbing opening. It is that sort of opening that immediately catches your attention to either go on with the film with much more curiosity and gusto, or to just leave it be and consider yourself salvaged from further moral damage. The film begins with Simon (Mark Joseph), the village butcher, hitting a live carabao on the head. The carabao collapses as the man keeps on hitting it on the head. It's a savage sequence. Perez makes use of a real live carabao, probably a lot cheaper than an animatronic one (Perez didn't really had to worry about animal rights activists back then) which is later on killed, disemboweled, beheaded and butchered right in front of our eyes. The carabao, supposedly the pet of one of the village boys, is pleaded by the village kids to be spared. Headstrong Simon disagrees and preaches about the practicalities in life: what makes their carabao different from the rest, that the beast will die anyway, and that the village requires that he do the brutal act so that everyone can eat.

Silip (its literal English translation is Peeping) was released outside the Philippines as Daughters of Eve. The film was peddled as bizarre curiosity from an exotic land, a softcore (or described as near-hardcore) pornographic feature; and quite rightly so. The film features an onslaught of sex scenes, both titillating and disturbing, and long stretches of time wherein all we see are naked bodies prancing around the village. Yet there seems to be something else brewing beneath the film's flesh-colored celluloid other than mere titillation. Silip is very rebellious in its themes and even in its production.

Made in 1985 during the decline of Ferdinand Marcos' dictatorship in the Philippines, Silip was one among the many soft-core to hard-core (locally referred to as pene films because it featured actual penetration) that sneaked through the uncharacteristic laxity of the local censors. Unusually though, Silip, unlike other sex-themed features like Peque Gallaga's Scorpio Nights(1985) , did not try to dent governmental institutions or just to make a quick buck out of the nation-wide depression and dissent, but instead sought to arouse questioning of that other important and prominent institution in the Philippines, the Catholic Church.

The film features two sisters, Tonya (Maria Isabel Lopez) and Selda (Sarsi Emmanuelle, one third of the trio of sexy actresses named by their managers after soft drinks). Tonya teaches catechism to the children of the village while the parish priest is recuperating from an illness in another town. However, Tonya has a secret sexual attraction for Simon, who is currently bedding Maria (Myra Manibog, whose surname an obvious pun on the Tagalog word for "horny"), elder sister of the young lad from the opening (now holding a grudge against Simon for killing his carabao, and having sex with his sister).

Selda just came home from the city with an American lover. She's the exact opposite of Tonya as her views on sex is more liberal and less guilt-filled. Amidst the apparent disagreement between the two, a similarity surfaces: that both of them are in a state of heat. Tonya tries to ease the lust by rubbing herself with salt or sand while Selda, on the other hand, beds any man she sees while desperately eying Simon.

Scripted by Ricky Lee, who has achieved revered status as the Philippines' best film scribe, the film features several sequences of remarkable bravura. Perez, who alongside the late Joey Gosiengfiao has ushered in Philippine films with cult exploitative flavor, knows the value of shock. Silip may in fact be regarded as numerous eye-opening and sweat-producing scenes stringed together by drab and lengthy connectors; which is probably why the film feels far too long. The opening scene can only be topped by the film's astounding conclusion: a gang rape that appears to be a sweaty, greasy and undoubtedly un-arousing orgy inside a bamboo shanty. Each big scene is an attack on valued principles and norms of propriety; it's actually quite easier to digest the film as mere exploitation than actual art. Art dictates a semblance of truth while exploitation is for mere sensual pleasuring.

The inclusion of religiosity within the context of the characters' flesh-starved existence complicates matters. It seems to beg the question of that difficult balancing act of rigid faith and the natural call of the flesh. It definitely is not a masterpiece as Perez's filmmaking is quite too elementary to raise the film's level to heaven heights. However, it cannot be considered as mere curiosity, or even definitive of Philippine cinema during that era of governmental turmoil and public discontent. The film is Pasolini-esque in its irreverence and Bunuel-esque in its social absurdity.

******
This post is my contribution to The Bleeding Tree: The Trashy Movie Celebration Blog-A-Thon.

Mondo Macabro has done an excellent job in restoring this unique film. Previously, one can only view this film, dubbed in English and subtitled in Greek, through the many bootlegs that roam the black market and the internet but with the loving dedication of the guys behind Mondo Macabro, we have with us a 2-DVD set, with the original Tagalog track and a bevy of extra features.