La Paloma: Ang Kalapating Ligaw (1974)

Jumat, 03 Agustus 2007

La Paloma: Ang Kalapating Ligaw (1974)

La Paloma: Ang Kalapating Ligaw (Joey Gosiengfiao, 1974)
English Title: La Paloma: The Lost Dove

In La Paloma: Ang Kalapating Ligaw (La Paloma: The Lost Dove), Joey Gosiengfiao stages a three-way war for the estate left behind by Don Lorenzo, who died supposedly by suicide. Anida (Vina Cansino), the pious and righteous widow, Paloma (Celia Rodriguez), actress and paramour of the deceased, and Soledad (Mona Lisa), Lorenzo's mother. They all have their reasons: Anida, to get what she thinks she deserves as suffering wife to a philandering husband; Paloma, to concretize the amor in her love affair with Don Lorenzo; and Soledad, for mere survival since her stay in the estate was merely tolerated by Anida.

It's quite an elegant picture, still hilariously funny but succumbing to vaporous wit and indulgent humor. It offers a satirical stab at the hypocricy of high society (at those times, very much coinciding with fervent religiosity). The moment Paloma steps into the mansion, tensions rise. Anida finally finds a formidable competitor (probably tired of pushing Soledad around with her mean gazes and vicious remarks). The rest of the mourners are even more shocked that a scandalous paramour has the guts to invade on a familial ritual, and probably scared that a woman of ill-repute (Paloma is an actress in Manila, and was rumored to be involved in several illicit affairs) would pollute the religiosity and purity of their town. Soledad, on the other hand, finds her trump card and cements her bargaining position.

Gosiengfiao has always been compared to foreign camp-master such as Pedro Almodovar or John Waters, but this early Gosiengfiao proves that his canvass is far more richer. La Paloma has Gosiengfiao playing with Buñuelian surrealism --- when Paloma walks at night to find Lorenzo's garden crawling with cockroaches and toads (elaborate statues and fountains are desecrated by those creepy crawlers), you know that Gosiengfiao is working at another level. Even the interiors of the mansion, with its high ceilings and staircases, have a sense of depleted morality --- empty, cold, and on the verge of both physical and moral deterioration.

Joel (Orestes Ojeda), a traveling gardener and guitarist arrives one day and offers his services to the embattled household. Anida's test is rather simple: make one flower bloom in the doomed garden. Joel instead turns his attention on Paloma, exhausted in defending her love for Lorenzo, and on the verge of a conversion to piety orchestrated by Anida, which practically consumes the life out of the free-spirited Paloma. Paloma is in the middle of that tug-of-war between Anida's persistent exorcism of Paloma's past and Joel's manly and amorous serenades.

The heat of the war culminates in court (there is literal heat as there's a lot of perspiring, fanning, and jeering crowds) where Paloma defends her stake in Lorenzo's estate and heart, and Anida uses her state as grieving widow to a philandering husband as a plea to the sentiments of the righteous mob. The several testimonies are all defiantly delivered pieces of oratory; which makes the entire judicial exercise exciting. Themes are weeded out from the film's extrinsic kitsch and humor --- we become aware that there's more to Paloma's character than a clawing and greedy diva; that she hides an emotional void that only the men she loved can fill. Gosiengfiao climaxes the film with a well-executed twist, ending the film with appropriate murderous intentions from the battle's rotting participants.

I make it sound like La Paloma is serious art. I don't think it is. It is however distinctly Gosiengfiao (and the numerous exchanges of elitistly witty and funny pieces of dialouge between the widow and the paramour (or at times, the mother) would make any audience rolling with laughter; or Joel's seductive poses (complete with suspenders and a guitar on his back, and a badly-rendered song to boot --- all preceding the Latino gardeners of Desperate Housewives)) --- commercial fare but surpasses the limits of being an object of commodity by the director's cinematic flair.

Bedspacers (1980)

Kamis, 02 Agustus 2007

Bedspacers (1980)

Bedspacers (Joey Gosiengfiao, 1980)

The late great Joey Gosiengfiao is more than a director of campy movies, he is also a very fascinating filmmaker with an eye for structures compounded with a sincere heart for his art (which translates very well into his films). There's no denying that the man has both wit and humor (as anybody who has seen Temptation Island (1981), with its shipwrecked characters and their palpable lust for both flesh and food, would agree). There's something more to Gosiengfiao though than the glamor poses of his bikini-clad beauties and the witty one-liners thrown with elitist stance.

Bedspacers is Gosiengfiao's favorite work because it allowed him to explore the wealth of themes that compounded college life (which he has fond memories of). The film juggles the stories of several university students --- Nadia (a sublime performance by Alma Moreno), who gathers funds for her schooling by prostituting herself; Margot (Rio Locsin), a social climber who parades around in posh parties to integrate herself in that exclusive social stratum; Dindo (Mark Gil), a student-thespian who is struggling with his stage role; and a lass (Amy Austria) plucked from the province to study in the city and balances the the needs of her boyfriend and her very conservative ways; and their respective partners (played by Al Tantay, the dazzling Deborah Sun, and Orestes Ojeda).

It is of course, like all of Gosiengfiao's films, has scenes overflowing with camp, like the three-way cat fight that leads to Margot's wet blouse being torn into bits; or the several episodes of all-male or all-female bonding in their respective dormitories; or when Nadia is slapped in the rain; or when Deborah Sun's professor steps on the roses given to her; or that sequence wherein Margot sneaks her way through a posh party (where she mistakenly refers to chicken as Peking duck) with her facade of elitist snobbery.

What impresses me is Gosiengfiao's very structural approach to the film, both thematically and visually, and sometimes all at once. The film is easily dismissable because of its juvenile settings and its preachy demeanor, but there's a hint of brilliance in Gosiengfiao's filmmaking here. The term bedspacers refers to those tenants (mostly students or young workers) who merely rent beds in overcramped dormitories, the purpose of course is to save money. It is that concept of proximity that astounds me: these tenants literally sleep a few inches from each other; share a communal bathroom; the male and female dormitories divided by a narrow alleyway (the bedspacers can literally see what's happening in the other dormitory).

Gosiengfiao breaks these perceived proximities. Education is supposedly the equalizing factor in a democratic nation. In Bedspacers, Gosiengfiao attacks the institution for its elitism and hypocrisy --- he, of course, takes the side of the students and unfolds their dilemmas with sympathy. More specifically, Gosiengfiao dissects his scenes with detailed reverence to enunciate severance and emotional distance: observe how he separates his characters during key sequences --- in that tender scene wherein Al Tantay's character discovers Nadia's whoring (Gosiengfiao uses a division in the wall to literally separate the two characters); or when Amy Austria's character tells her boyfriend she is pregnant (we only see the characters faces in the circular mirrors of the bar, there's a literal space in between the two lovers); or when Margot disowns her mother (we see Margot's face through the mirror, while the mother is shown in a different space); or when Lindo professes his adoration for his professor (the two are separated by a bookshelf, and later by that distance made by their ladders).

There's a visual and thematic elegance to Gosiengfiao's filmmaking that gets overshadowed by the labels we have given the man (King of Camp, etc.). True, he defers to directors Lino Brocka or Ishmael Bernal in tackling issues of supposed import and relevance (such as poverty or politics), but in that overcrowded niche of commercial filmmaking (which is most probably the reason why his praised are received belatedly) wherein he worked comfortably and at ease (with producers and other filmmakers), he has excelled and made works that transcend the limitations of profit-making. I've only seen a fraction of Gosiengfiao's ouvre, but Bedspacers definitely is one of his most accomplished works.