Anak Dalita (1956)

Kamis, 18 September 2008

Anak Dalita (1956)

Anak Dalita (Lamberto Avellana, 1956)
English Title: The Ruins

Before proceeding with the story, director Lamberto Avellana first allows his audience to immerse in the story's meticulously crafted setting which are the ruins of Manila Cathedral, bombed during the second World War and now temporary shelter to the several families displaced by the war and poverty. The ruins are at once an awesome and depressing sight. The remnants of the cathedral allude to a glorious past, yet the makeshift houses that dot the cathedral's steadfast walls are persistent reminders of the bleak present, where post-war crises continue to haunt the Philippines more than a decade after the second World War ended.

While survival within the walls of the ruined cathedral is daunting, it is most certainly not joyless. The cathedral is teeming with people, as we see during the first few minutes of the film, who have managed to eke a community out of the prevailing scarcity of economic resources. There's a spot for the barber whose lack of a decent stall is not hindrance in his commerce, a corner for the women who share tips and rumors while breastfeeding their babies, another corner for the drunkards who ease their pains with the temporary joys granted by alcohol. The setting provides for Avellana stable grounds to push poverty's dichotomy (the unjust absence of resources and necessities, tempered by the arising virtues of camaraderie and integrity as forced upon by their economic state), which altogether repulses and charms Vic (Tony Santos, Sr.), the war hero who returns to Manila and is forced to live within the ruined walls of the cathedral and among the people who have temporarily resided therein.

Anak Dalita (The Ruins) begins with Cita (Rosa Rosal), a prostitute residing in one of the makeshift houses in the squatter colony, strutting down the slums in carefree fashion, donning a dress that seems inappropriate in the slum's state of deprivation, revealing a bit of her cleavage and her shapely legs. the Against the overt images of extreme penury, her striking beauty and glamorous get-up seem scandalous and sinful. Everything changes when she arrives at her destination: a pitiful shanty that houses a dying old woman whose only wish is to see for the very last time her only son, a soldier who was sent to the Korean War. Vic, whose left arm was rendered useless by a war injury, returns to the Philippines a hero. His welcome is cut short when Cita's younger brother informs him of his mother's impending death. He rushes to his mother's shanty in the slums, greeted by Cita's emphatic stare and her mother's staggered breath. The mother inevitably dies, leaving Vic in the grips of despair as Cita struggles to give him hope and win his love.

Avellana stages the drama and the love story with a subtle emphasis of his carefully set-up milieu of extensive poverty and its difficult virtues. With their impending eviction from the cathedral to make way for its reconstruction, Vic is pushed to exchange sculpting statues for meager earnings for a more lucrative job under Carlo (Jose De Cordova), Vic's former war bud who has repackaged himself into a shady yet wealthy businessman. With the affronts of post-war life's hardships and Vic's hopeless situation, honest living becomes impractical. Thus, his eventual leaning towards Carlo's shady proposition of laundering money to Hong Kong by hiding it inside the statue of Mother Mary he sculpted for the parish priest (Vic Silayan) seems understandable, and his subsequent turnaround, aided by the clever and good-intentioned machinations of Cita, is laudible.

The final set-up, an action sequence where the cathedral's crumbling walls are as necessary as Vic and Carlo's gun-fighting adversaries, caps the film's moral drama with a thunderous jolt. Avellana showcases an adeptness for visualizing kinetic tension, something he'll again showcase the following year in a duel between Santos and Silayan, as Muslim combatants in pre-colonial Mindanao, in Badjao. Avellana's pencant for mixing action and romance in a suitably-characterized settings that enlarges the consequences of the simple narrative is well-pronounced here. Anak Dalita remains to be the quintessential Avellana film.

Badjao (1957)

Minggu, 05 Agustus 2007

Badjao (1957)

Badjao (Lamberto Avellana, 1957)

As a romanticized document of two distinct cultures, the Badjao and Tausog tribes of Mindanao, Lamberto Avellana's Badjao is simply spectacular. It begins with a ritual, probably barbaric and shocking to our homogenized world. A baby is born to the pagan sea-faring Badjaos. The baby is then thrown into the sea, and a couple of Badjao men would dive into the sea to save the baby from drowning. A man would rise victorious carrying the baby and delivering it to the tribal chief (Pedro Faustino); and the baby, newest member is finally presented to the tribe.

We get a feel of their lifestyle through Avellana's curious and meticulous eye: the sense of justice of the Muslim Tausogs (there's a scene wherein the datu sentences a wrongdoer to pay the victim money and to be inflicted a slap that would erase all evidence of the wrongdoing); the intricate marriage vows; the codes of honor and bonds of dignity among and between these people; the clockwork commerce wherein the Badjaos supply the Tausogs pearls, and the latter supplies the rest of the world such pearls through shrewd middlemen.

The story, about Hassan (Tony Santos), a Badjao prince, who falls in love with Bal-Amai (Rosa Rosal), niece of the Tausog datu (Joseph de Cordova), is set in an age of the cultural inequality that has characterized the tensions that divide the two tribes. The vast cultural conflicts would lead Hassan to choose between his heritage and his heart. He chooses his heart and converts to Islam and cleansing himself of his Badjao heritage, and deciding to live as a farmer with Bal-Amai within the Tausog tribe. This decision leads to his banishment from the Badjao tribe.

It's a powerful picture, one that is very universal and human despite being set against the exoticized landscapes and seascapes of Mindanao. It pits traditions of honor, justice and civility of the two tribes, with sources of human fallibility like greed, prejudice and treachery. Characters are tested: Hassan with his decision to withdraw from the Badjao tribe and adopt Tausog culture; the datu who is blinded enough by the allure of money to descend to the level of blunt treachery; Bal-Amai with her insistence of making Hassan forget his roots.

Avellana always fills his scenes with intricacies and details. The Tausog town, with its port of bamboo scaffolds to the marketplace wherein the air of racism is quite apparent, is an impressively built set. Much more spectacular are the boats of the Badjaos: at night, we see these floating boats with their respective lighted torches, like will-o-wisps floating against the night sky. The action scenes are equally gripping: Jiriki (Vic Silayan), the datu's treacherous adviser, and Hassan's duel in the rock beach is nail-bitingly exciting; Muslim kris pitted against Badjao forked staff; and the two fighters end up rolling in the rocks. Avellana understands the mechanics of the fights (the same way he coherently choreographs the early duels in the Tausog town) and commits to celluloid such visceral intensity.

The film's final scene, a revisit of the ritual in the beginning, we begin to understand the rationale and humanity underneath the culture-specific ritual. We become more open to the similarities that bind us as a single people despite the diversity in religion, culture, and traditions. Badjao is a beautiful and intense film, probably the best and most ambitious Avellana made. Avellana, although a Catholic filmmaker and working under the grips of a commercial studio, paints a portrait of both Muslim and tribal cultures with forceful accuracy and affecting sensitivity.

Kundiman ng Lahi (1959)

Jumat, 03 Agustus 2007

Kundiman ng Lahi (1959)

Kundiman ng Lahi (Lamberto Avellana, 1959)
English Title: Song of the Race

The first image we see in Lamberto Avellana's Kundiman ng Lahi (Song of the Race) is the rhythmic grinding of grain to fine flour. There are no extravagant visuals or swelling music to accompany the opening credits. Just that, the sound of repeated pounding and the image of the mortar and pestle being utilized. It's a beautiful introduction, very simple yet appropriate in detailing the overall thrust of Avellana's film wherein a barrio lass who is dealt with fate's repetitive pounding, and despite such, survives triumphantly.

We then hear the beautiful melody of Nicanor Abelardo's song. Through the narration by Isang (Charito Solis), we learn that it is the town fiesta. We see Isang with her sweetheart Tonyo (Eddie Rodriguez) in gleeful celebration before being dealt with news of the impending death of her mother. Orphaned, she is left to the whims and cruel shrewdness of her aunt (Rosa Aguirre) and step-uncle (Joseph de Cordova). In order to pay for her mother's debts and the mortgage attached to the land she has inherited, she first sews, before being lured into the cabarets, wherein she retains her moral uprightness despite the seediness of her profession.

Avellana's approach is clearly genteel, but never prude. There's a subtle sensuality to Avellana's filmmaking: the way he dresses and imagines Isang to complete the picture of nubile and seductive innocence (after the mother's death, you first see Isang dressed in a sexy black dress, her cleavage peeking and her wavy hair overflowing with sensual invitations), enough to make the step-uncle's insistent gestural innuendos (a curious tapping of his fingers in Isang's naked arm, or the momentary yet stolen glances of Isang's cleavage) understandable, and even forgiveable. It is that difficult balancing act that makes Kundiman ng Lahi engrossing: that the sexy vixen is the personification of well-regarded Filipina virtues of domesticity, propriety, purity and innocence.

Avellana also masterfully captures the allure of progress. Jaime (Vic Silayan) takes Isang for a ride to Manila. We see the rapid yet memorable images of the city through the car ride (the bright lights and the rows of car), and more importantly, the fascination of Isang (as shown by Solis' sparkling face and her apt narration). Also, Tonyo forgoes the slow income of working the land to the monthly salaries and the huge machineries of a rock quarry. Avellana depicts progress as an inevitable change that is happening.

How do these Filipina virtues factor in a nation that embraces progress and materialism? We witness Isang traverse the all-too-familiar path leading to corruption (extreme poverty, cruelty by her guardians, being employed in a cabaret, having a rich, urbane suitor). We also witness how she has always survive through the trials by clinging on the same virtues (her regard for familial and marital ties) that is so easy to discard amidst the calls of modernity. Avellana (and of course the very righteous stance of LVN Studios) seems to be establishing that such virtues are not antiquated by progress or the several beatings and hardships that accompany modernity.

The film closes with Tonyo and Isang reunited, with her reformed aunt and their baby. We are reminded of the opening image; that notwithstanding the ease and allure progress has provided them, there's no better way to make flour than by pounding the grain with meticulous rhythm, difficult and painstaking as it may seem. Life is not very different.