Tanging Yaman (2000)

Senin, 16 Januari 2012

Tanging Yaman (2000)

Tanging Yaman (Laurice Guillen, 2000)

English Title: A Change of Heart

After several years away from the Philippines and her already illustrious career as a filmmaker, Laurice Guillen returned with Tanging Yaman (A Change of Heart), a tearjerker that unabashedly showcases Catholic faith not only as an underlying theme but as a narrative conceit. The film was both a commercial and critical success. Perhaps more than a decade worth of films that delighted in sex and naked bodies has given the Filipino audience a thirst for something more spiritual.

Guillen’s crafts her most religious film not from the point of view of one who is holier than thou, but from the eyes of an ordinary person who has most likely dabbled in various sins. Her characters are less than perfect. Loleng (Gloria Romero), the family matriarch, is a devout Catholic and spends her days hearing mass and communing with her fellow faithful. Danny (Johnny Delgado), her eldest son who stays in the family home to take care of her, seems satisfied of his modest position in life. Art (Edu Manzano), the middle child and clearly the most successful and financially capable of the siblings, is quietly jealous of his older brother who has always been the favored child despite his lack of any real successes in life. Grace (Dina Bonnevie), the only daughter who migrated to the United States, is too concerned of her family’s finances that she has neglected the real needs of her family.

When an opportunity to sell the farm, the family’s remaining asset, arose, repressed anger and other emotions start to surface, threatening the already fractured family to crumble further. This pushes Loleng, in a desperate attempt to rescue her family, to sacrifice herself, leading the characters in Guillen’s well-orchestrated melodrama to reconcile and live the rest of their lives like true Catholics.

As with all films that are inspired with overly good intentions, Tanging Yaman is enveloped by an atmosphere that predictably directs the narrative towards its amiable conclusion. From the light effects that drown the face of Romero during her moment of self-sacrifice that has been done and redone in various films for comedic effect to the use of mass songs to provide a sense of overt religiosity in the plot, the film is too littered with significant details that nearly push the film from being merely a portrait of a family nearly torn to pieces by greed and envy into a proselytizing sermon that seeks for its audience a result that is more likely achievable in a sharing session than inside the darkened halls of a movie theater.

Thankfully, the film is balanced enough to be enjoyed even from the perspective of a viewer who has no intention of being pulled into religious didactics. It is exquisitely put together. Guillen, who has always laced her films with a certain sensuality that can only be fleshed out by a feminine mind, only subtly suggests that kind of sensuality here. In one scene, Hilda Koronel’s character talks of her dreams of travelling to the United States to her humble husband, dancing with her husband to the romantic song from the radio. The scene by itself seems very ordinary, but as framed by Guillen, and as acted by both Koronel and Delgado with enough levels of playfulness and domestic mischief, it results in something subtly sweet and tender.

Films with religious motivations are often criticized for being too disconnected with the realities of human imperfections to be of real effect. They cater mostly to those who are already religious, reconfirming for them the faith they have sworn to uphold. Fortunately, Guillen is too much a humanist to overestimate the Catholic faith. Tanging Yaman has for characters men and women who dream, sin, fight, lie, love, hate, forgive, cry, and laugh for all the correct reasons and aren’t judged negatively precisely because of these very human acts. Without the miracles and the preaching that the film relies so much on, the film is just simply a well-crafted, brilliantly-acted, and elegantly directed family drama.

(Cross-published in Lagarista.)

Maskara (2011)

Jumat, 15 Juli 2011

Maskara (2011)

Maskara (Laurice Guillen, 2011)

English Title: Mask

There’s one scene in Laurice Guillen’s Maskara (Mask) where Ina Feleo, playing Anna, the illegitimate daughter of accomplished actor Bobby (Tirso Cruz III) who recently passed away, suddenly weeps. Guillen does not opt for an extreme close-up of her daughter’s face. Instead, Feleo is seen from a comfortable distance, allowing her to overwhelm the frame with just There’s something strangely haunting about Feleo’s performance. It is more than good within the scope of the film’s narrative. It is actually very moving on its own, encompassing emotions as varied as sorrow and anger, regret and acceptance.

Feleo’s father and Guillen’s husband, the great actor Johnny Delgado, died in 2009. While Feleo and fictional Anna were born under different circumstances, they share common emotions, of longing and of overflowing love for a missed father. In short, Feleo’s memorable performance has truth as its foundation. That the truth is conveyed through the art of acting makes it immeasurably more beautiful.

Maskara, written also by Feleo, is based on the truth. Huge portions of the film are covered by unscripted anecdotes told by Delgado’s friends and comrades. The interview of Bobby by Anna is adapted from an actual interview done by Delgado. The film, although fictional, becomes a loving tribute to Delgado, not only by Guillen and Feleo, but by the actors, from someone as established in the industry as Ricky Davao, who dedicates a very raw but convincing rendition of O Sole Mio, to someone as young as Miles Ocampo, whose tearful reminiscence of Delgado is poignant, who shared their stories to both humanize the actor and to move the film’s story.

Truth, as it is, is a powerful thing. Truth, moderated and enunciated through arts and craftsmanship, becomes infinitely more powerful. There are fragments of very personal truths to Guillen’s family in Maskara’s story of a wife (Shamaine Buencamino) who discovers of her husband’s illegitimate daughter through letters that the daughter wrote to her father that he kept. These personal truths, masked by the fiction of Guillen’s cinema, is modulated, turning what could possibly be personal only to Delgado’s family and to those who personally knew him into something that is personal to everyone who ever loved and even questioned love.

The story ends with a question left unanswered. Why did Bobby hide Anna from her family? The concealment could taint love. It can also mystify it, deepen it, and instruct that it has more facets than what we may know in a single lifetime.

Acting is an art where the concealment of the truth is required. Film too, since it is based on the illusion of movement. The paradox here is that the quality of these art forms is often gauged as to how much truth is revealed from the concealment. The more real the acting, the closer to truth the film is, the better. Maskara conceals as much as it reveals. The film, more than an impassioned tribute to a loving and beloved husband for Guillen, father for Ina and executive producer Ana Feleo, and esteemed artist and friend for the other actors who appeared in the film, is a document on the power of art, to communicate and to heal.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

Sa'yo Lamang (2010)

Jumat, 03 September 2010

Sa'yo Lamang (2010)

Sa'yo Lamang (Laurice Guillen, 2010)

The story of Laurice Guillen’s Sa’yo Lamang (Only for You) is hardly new. An imperfect but seemingly stable family disintegrates into chaos as one by one, the family members figure serious conflicts and secrets, whether from the past or the present, conveniently unravel, threatening the sheen of normalcy that has sustained the family through the years. From Jeffrey Jeturian’s low-budgeted but elegantly staged Sana Pag-ibig Na (Enter Love, 1998), to Wenn Deramas’ lowbrow yet unpretentiously comical Ang Tanging Ina (The Only Mother, 2003), to Joel Lamangan’s middling and intolerably weepy Filipinas (2003), to Brillante Mendoza’s highbrow and provocatively stirring Serbis (Service, 2008), the Filipino family has been exposed, crumbling in the midst of dire needs or expanding generation gaps or the simple passage of time.

The family, considered as an invaluable social element, is a persisting Filipino need. In the absence of it, a typical Filipino, in his desire to find personal comfort by means of being part of a social circle, would always seek a replacement. Thus, the idea of the concept of family dissipating to irrelevance because of very-real-to-the-point-of-being-cliché eventualities like infidelity, jealousy or something as natural as death is a gold mine for cinema. The threat to the family is a fear that is always relatable, no matter how fantastically conceived. Translated to cinema, where there is always the protection of the knowledge that whatever tragedy happens onscreen dissipates as soon as the credits roll and the lights are turned on, the viewer is allowed to be emphatic to aches of the cinematic family despite the differences between his familial history to the fictional one depicted onscreen simply because he can relate.

Sa’yo Lamang, like Guillen’s Tanging Yaman (A Change of Heart, 2000), an earnestly-made soap that explores long-repressed aches among siblings as they claim their respective shares in the estate of their still-alive mother who is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s Disease, borrows its title from religious songs whose words, if taken away from the backdrop of Catholicism, can also play like a secular song about love. Sa’yo Lamang, as opposed to Tanging Yaman which is explicit in its religiosity in a way that God actually becomes an actual participant in the narrative, wears its religiosity within the context of a household of sinners. It’s a tricky premise that Guillen interprets deftly and without having to place judgments by sudden changes in moral perspectives and personality. In the film, faith, a concept that is as human as the moral dilemmas and sins that continue to turmoil the film’s various characters, instead of the saving power of the Catholic God, is the thematic center. Because of this utility of something as universally appreciable as faith instead of belief systems that are endemic to the Catholicism, the film’s often brushes with prayers and rituals are never obtrusive. Instead, they become rousing centerpieces of the effectively contoured ensemble drama.

Guillen intelligently frames her actors during the film’s most sublime moments to emphasize their commendable performances. When Coby (Coco Martin), frustrated that his pregnant ex-girlfriend (Shaina Magdayao) has been allowed to stay in the family home, rapes her and in the middle of the rape changes his hateful stares to looks of pity, mercy, and perhaps, love, Guillen communicates the surprising change of heart via an extremely tight close-up, allowing her actors, Martin with his invaluably expressive eyes and Magdayao with her exquisite turn as a woman who has suffered enough to accept anything as simple turns of fate, to take part in the storytelling. In another scene, Dianne (Bea Alonzo), after being sobered by her mother’s wishes that she reconcile with her father (Christopher de Leon), quietly yet achingly explains to her father why it is so difficult to do so. The room is dimly lit, and Guillen smartly makes use of the limited light and the persisting shadows to dictate the mood. From a close-up of Alonzo’s stoic face while uttering words that can only devastate her father, the camera zooms out to reveal De Leon’s profile, humbled by the revelations relayed by his daughter. All one can do is to succumb to heartaches for both the resilient daughter and the apologetic father.

Lorna Tolentino, who gives life to the character of Amanda, the mother who single-handedly raised her children for ten years, consistently delivers a tremendously moving performance. Starting out as a seemingly weak character as she is left in the background by Dianne who dominates the household, she shapeshifts, and little by little, exposing cracks to her character, some of which are reprehensible. By film’s end, without transforming inexplicably, she becomes the most human of all the characters. Inasmuch as Guillen has poured her mastery of the filmmaking craft and her personal convictions as a Catholic mother who has suffered and survived familial hardships through faith to the making of the film, she generously allows her film to also belong her actors who portray their roles with a proficiency and sensitivity that is pleasantly surprising even from the cast-members who’ve already established reputations as great actors.

Midway through the film, Guillen makes use of a flashback, awkward because of the sudden marked difference in aesthetic but awesome in the sense that it is not only a flashback for the character, but also to the film’s viewers. Illuminated differently with the faces of Tolentino and De Leon giving off a cool bluish aura instead of the warm golds and yellows, scripted in a way that every shouted word contains a powerful emotional charge, blocked in a way that recalls the most typical of melodramas, the flashback allows a glimpse of an era where dramas, despite their lack of affinity with how the real world works, always had something to say, or if it didn’t, were at least beautiful pictures that earned every tear, every sob, and every peso they asked from their viewers. The flashback felt like it was scene from Guillen’s earlier films, films where female characters were liberated from the bounds of a male-dominated society and took control of their lives resulting to shouting and crying expeditions, films that can be very good despite the commercial preconditions of their bankrolling studios.

Sa’yo Lamang gives me confidence that Star Cinema and these other mainstream studios will start respecting the genres they mine for cash. It allows me to believe that capitalist and artistic aspirations, although theoretically always at war, can also co-exist as long as integrity, instead of profit motives are the primary consideration. Star Cinema, there is hope for you yet.

(Cross-published in Twitch.)

I Love You, Goodbye (2009)

Kamis, 31 Desember 2009

I Love You, Goodbye (2009)

I Love You, Goodbye (Laurice Guillen, 2009)

In a film festival that showcases Philippine cinema in its most obnoxiously self-important, with festival films ranging from spectacle-filled pseudo-epics to overacted tearjerkers to undercooked slapsticks, I Love You, Goodbye, despite its own melodramatic excesses, is joyfully quiet, lyrical and close to being authentically moving. It grabs you immediately from the start, when Lizelle (Angelica Panganiban), the poor girlfriend of wealthy doctor Adrian (Gabby Concepcion), enters the house of her boyfriend's family, gets rudely ignored by her boyfriend's mother (Liza Lorena), insulted by her boyfriend's daughter Ysa (Kim Chiu), and overshadowed by her husband's ex-wife (Angel Aquino) who charmss everyone with her seeming perfection compared to Lizelle's enumeration of imperfection. Despite the onslaught of unfortunate eventualities of that night, she still ends up passionately making love with her boyfriend.

The introduction, swiftly and without need of narrative embellishments, summarizes the mess that Lizelle is trapped in. She thrives within a relationship that is solely grounded on a flimsy concept called love. The initial lovemaking scene, shot by Lee Meily in disarming close-up, exposing the uncovered bronzed skin of the lovers in intense embracing and kissing, scored by Von de Guzman who makes use of the saxophone to enhance the steamy mood, and directed with an unabashed sensuality by Guillen, is sinful to look at, not because of the abundance of flesh exposed but because it is simply an act of desperation, an act by lovers struggling amidst a reality that is against their union, a fantasy, although masked by the intoxicating feeling of romance. The plot thickens. Gary (Derek Ramsay), Lizelle's ex-boyfriend, returns, and woos Ysa so that she can get chance to win back Lizelle. Ysa eventually falls in love with Gary who can't reciprocate such adoration because he is still desperately in love with Lizelle.

Lizelle becomes the center of an intricate web of disjointed desires, misplaced adoration, and unavoidable compromise. Panganiban, whose angelic face betrays the seductive curves of her body, is quite a talented actress, gifted with an innate ability to efficiently convert emotions like restrained passion, repressed sadness, and emotional despair into heartfelt gestures, tears, and facial expressions. In one scene, where Lizelle and Gary are left alone in the beach, and allowed for the very first time since their separation to be honest with each other, Guillen aptly does away with music, allowing Panganiban to solely control the scene, puncturing the stillness of everything with a masterful display of whirlwinding emotions, of reminiscence of a lovely past and hope for an unattained future, of an unbearable loneliness and the comfort of a long-awaited release, of the utter confusion of being trapped in the middle of two equally strong loves and the happiness of being essentially exposed to one. It's a beautifully crafted scene, completely unadorned yet brimming with such delicate sadness.

I Love You, Goodbye should have been a good film and it pains me to note that it is not for the simple reason that it flaked in its ending. After meticulously mapping the exposure of a dreamy relationship for the veritable sham that it really is, it quickly abandons such directive and surrenders to the inevitable call of inane conventionalism. I Love You, Goodbye could have been the decade's anti-romance, the momentary cure (at least for the two hours that the audiences would invest on the film) to the Filipino's inherent infatuation for escape through the plasticine happiness of matinee idols and leading ladies entangled in choreographed kisses and embraces. It could have echoed the glossy melancholy of the ending of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), where two lovers who are deeply in love, after being separated by war, unexpectedly meet-up, armed only with the painful memories of that love they used to share with each other that can never be regained. It could have had the same puncturing bittersweet resolution of James Gray's Two Lovers (2008), where a dreamer of a man wakes up and realizes his dreams of a perfect romance is unattainable, and settles.

But of course, I Love You, Goodbye is a different movie altogether and to expect something else out of it is admittedly an unfair proposition. Yet, the knowledge that the happy ending is merely a product of corporate concession and not of creative impulse, complicated by the fact that the originally intended ending, an ending that is more grounded in reality and logic, has already been shot but eventually shunned by the film's producers for being ambiguously sad, alarms because it pinpoints a national commercial cinema that is obviously taken hostage by formula and what seems to be misguided appreciation of what an audience can and cannot take.

As it turns out, reality, even in something as impertinent as the romantic relationship of fictional characters, is too much of a risk for movie producers with primary capitalist sensibilities. The more lucrative option is to perpetuate the grand cinematic lie; that everything ends happily and all problems and conflicts, no matter how undeniable unresolvable they are, can be magically resolved, and all characters can achieve a state of ecstatic satisfaction and completely forgetful of all the hatred and ill will that have been exchanged between and among them before. Perhaps it is my innate cynicism that drives me to abhor the ending that was imposed upon the film by its cowardly producers. Perhaps perfect endings are actual possibilities or even if they are not, we are in such need of them that we delight in being bombarded by them no matter how misplaced, dangerously false, and illogical they are. However, when a film has a perfect ending just for the sake of having one, betraying all notions of storytelling logic and emotional consistency, it is simply bad filmmaking that is not to be faulted to the director or her cast and crew, who in my opinion have crafted a fine film save for the insulting resolution, but to the profit-oriented movie studio that is being run by a team of unimaginative businesspeople who deplorably treat art not with passion or adoration but with outright bullyism and unfair compromise.