Pagpasok sa lupalop ng limot at binahang komunidad
ni Romulo P. Baquiran, Jr.
Ang paglikaw-sipat ng kamera sa nilikha/aktuwal na lugar ng Paraiso/Navotas ay pagsipat din sa buhay ng mga tauhang inilalantad ng naratibo. Pugad ng kahirapan ang tabing-dagat na komunidad na lalo pang pinalubha ng pagsakop ng tubig sa kinasanayang teritoryong tinatapakan ng tao. Nagsisikap mabuhay sa lubog na lugar ang mga tauhan, pangunahin ang tatlong mag-ina at ang mga lalaking naugnay sa kanila.
Tila siruhanong inilalantad ng sinematograpiya ang realidad ng kanilang kondisyon; walang kurap na tinitistis nito ang gangrenosong mga ugat at laman ng kanilang personal at panlipunang ugnayan. Malinaw ang alusyon sa naunang Insiang, hindi lamang sa balangkas ng kuwento kundi pati sa sityo ng pagdurusang panlipunan. Dito sa Paraiso, tumindi pa ang kalagayan ng kadahupan dahil sa paglukob ng likidong malapot at maitim sa batayang pamumuhay ng lahat. Lumulutang at lumulubog sila sa tubig na walang maaasahang malinaw na rabaw at malinis na kailaliman. Ang pagsisikap ng mga protagonistang makaahon o maglublob sa literal at abstraktong likidong impiyerno ay dramatikong naitanghal sa mala-sosyorealistang estilo.
Sa pelikula, ang produksiyon ng espasyo ay sabay na naglalarawan ng milieu at sikolohikong kondisyon. At transgresibo ang proyektong ito sa loob ng namamayaning pagbalorisa ng pangkorporasyong layunin ng industriya ng pelikunang Filipino sa mga romansang burges na sadyang nagsasalaylayan sa mga malawakang panlipunang realidad. Makikita agad ito sa mismong pagtuon ng Paraiso sa natatanging representasyon ng isang limot na komunidad.
At literal na “lumubog” ang sinematograpiya sa materyal na nais maitanghal ng pelikula. Hinuhuli ng mata ng kamera ang ritmo ng buhay-buhay sa looban. May mga eksenang nagpapakita ng herarkikal at nahahati-sa-uring kondisyon ng lipunan hindi sa lantad at didaktikong paraan kundi sa tila-simpleng presentasyong biswal lamang. Halimbawa ang kuha ng pagkukuwentuhan ng barkada sa isang gilid ng maruming ilog. Nasa unang antas ng kuwadro ang mga mukha at katawan ng mga kalalakihang taga-looban; nasa ikalawang antas naman ang kaligiran ng malawak pero basurahang ilog; sumunod ang tulay, at sa kabila ng tulay ang maunlad na siyudad. Ang neutral na kalikasan ay nagkakaroon ng dimensiyong pangkultura at pampolitika sa gitna ng kaayusang likha ng tao na nagsusulong ng paggamit ng kapangyarihan para sa opresyon ng kapuwa. Ang dating malinis na ilog na minarkahan ng dumi ng kaunlaran ang hidwang pang-espasyo sa literal at simbolikong antas na kailangang tawirin ng mga nasa laylayan ng lipunan upang marating ang siyudad ng tao. Kahit mayroong tulay na magagamit, hindi ito nagsisilbing pandugtong na panlipunan kundi isa pang uri ng demarkasyon ng may kapangyarihan at ng nagbibili lamang ng kanilang lakas-paggawa. Malayo at halos wala sa kuwadro ng realidad ng huli ang siyudad na katatagpuan ng modernong kaluwagan sa buhay.
Kasama ang anggulo ng kamera sa pagbubunyag ng ontolohiya ng lugar. Madalas na ang puwesto nito ay halos nasa ibabaw lamang ng tubig, at tinatanaw ang primal na tagpuan ng aksiyon—ang tahanan ng mag-iina na isa lamang sa mahabang hilera ng mga bahay ng naghihikahos. Madalas ring tulad ito ng ibong lumilipad para malapitang tingnan ang mga lihim sa kabila ng mga dingding at silid. Ang hidwaan ng mag-iina sanhi ng paninirahan ng bagong asawa ng ina ay naitanghal ng kamerang sumisilip sa kisame.
Ang pagsasaayos ng espasyo-panahon sa takbo ng naratibo ay mainam na naisasagawa lalo na sa maiigting na eksena. Nabanggit na ng kasamang Lauzon ang magkaagapay na tagpo ng pakikipagtalik ng tauhang ginagampanan ni Renee Summer sa pulis (Roldan Aquino) para makaganti at ng pagsalvage sa lalaki (John Regala) na dahilan ng pagdurusa nilang mag-iina.
Marungis ang disenyong biswal sa pelikula dulot na rin ng kahingian ng materyal. Malikhaing natimpla ito ng produksiyon at nalikha ang Paraiso na bagama’t may malaking kahinaan sa pagbuo ng makatwirang delineasyon ng katauhan ng babae, ay nakapaglatag pa rin ng obrang sumasalungat sa higit na palsong pananaw-sa-daigdig ng burges na pelikulang namamayagpag sa mga mall ng ating panahon.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Exercises of Commencement (Let the Love Begin)
Exercises of Commencement
by Patrick D. Flores
While the restoration of conflicted love to its harmonious ideal is de rigueur in the genre of romance in popular cinema, all is not lost in terms of the potential of an alternative mode of restoring it. For it is not solely the restoration that must inform the critique of film, but the restorative gesture; and that romance is not necessarily the fulcrum on which the freight of affection strives for poise: the romantic possibility in the face of lovelessness, indeed the initiation into love amid the despair nurtured by social inequity, might be the proper axis. We appreciate Let the Love Begin to the degree that it resists the temptation merely to repeat the script of restoration, so that it could work through (but not inevitably work out) the romantic process. It is in the latter that we begin to grasp the necessity of the love that is almost already reduced to a commodity or fetish in the alienating habits of the media. It is the production of this love, with the impediments of both station and sensibility, that renders everything heartfelt and moves us to sigh because it relieves.
The plot is from a distance barren. But inasmuch as the screenplay is attentive to the details of emergence, the landscape flourishes in the course of the viewing experience. The problem revolves around a poor young man who works as a janitor in a school where he studies at night. The predicament is not poverty in its abstract sense, but the material conditions bred by this dispossession, a vital aspect of which is the intimate longing to love, to release those dams of feeling, that is held at bay. In other words, this earnest character cannot afford to culture what is made to appear a natural disposition because the said conditions militate against it, or at least restrain its indulgence. That said, the film plods on still because it is interested in the exercise of commencement: of how the hero could let the love begin. This pursuit is consequently deferred; it is, in fact, such deferral that frustrates certain expectations for the romantic resolution to return to normalcy (and normativity) and thus transforms facile enamoration into an exasperation of sorts: the film shifts its gears unhurriedly, no rush to completion here, as if love is painfully protracted, defended against the delusion of unconditional devotion. It is deferral that fulfills the promise of cinema as both annunciation and anticipation.
Implicated in this suspension are the people around the protagonist: the beloved, a wealthy scion whose father wants her to be in business and to forsake all aspirations to be an artist; confidantes who work in a fast-food chain and the pedicab circuit; a grandmother who serves as singular parent who solicits prayers from the forlorn faithful of the church to keep body and soul together; and a rival suitor who masquerades as the damsel’s savior. Integral to the narrative’s humanist inclination is the ethic of the young man, who is pictured as a diligent, persevering, talented, compassionate, generous, and sensitive male who achieves success through sheer determination. But this success is verisimilarly delayed, in step with his patient, sentimental romance: he continues to sweep floors after college while his peers have become cloying careerists. In the end, the working class knight receives a scholarship from a well-known university in the United States, courtesy of a global firm, a dream that, in the vein of pervading extensions, is likewise put off again – interestingly, in the era of late capitalism and in the full efflorescence of belated desire.
All told, in spite and because of the routines of genre, the screenplay of Let the Love Begin merits discussion. It carves out a different space for class contradictions to reveal much-vaunted strife and at the same time to glimpse the prospects of internal critique. For it is not outside love that these antagonisms fester, but within its sanctum. There is a scene in the film that captures this intricate perturbation, and thus captivates. Seated inside a car, the hero is confronted by the origin of his adoration, who preens before the window that reflects in mirror-effect her image, oblivious to his presence. He is unsettled because he fears of being seen by someone who is actually at the end of his gaze. This is an uncanny moment in which misrecognition finds its screen: the agents of romance become at once object and subject that are inhibited from consummating their encounter, estranged partly by the vanities of their sight and the illusions of a deceptive glass. One sees herself on a surface that conceals the man who surveils and espies her beholding herself while staring at him. The other gains bliss by coming face to face with his intractable fantasy but is concomitantly agitated by his disingenuous technique of supervision and the peril of being found out. This only reminds us that love is a plane that can never be transparent, mediated as it is by the asymmetries of life and the compromises that a project like Let the Love Begin can conjure only in dilatory disguise.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
by Patrick D. Flores
While the restoration of conflicted love to its harmonious ideal is de rigueur in the genre of romance in popular cinema, all is not lost in terms of the potential of an alternative mode of restoring it. For it is not solely the restoration that must inform the critique of film, but the restorative gesture; and that romance is not necessarily the fulcrum on which the freight of affection strives for poise: the romantic possibility in the face of lovelessness, indeed the initiation into love amid the despair nurtured by social inequity, might be the proper axis. We appreciate Let the Love Begin to the degree that it resists the temptation merely to repeat the script of restoration, so that it could work through (but not inevitably work out) the romantic process. It is in the latter that we begin to grasp the necessity of the love that is almost already reduced to a commodity or fetish in the alienating habits of the media. It is the production of this love, with the impediments of both station and sensibility, that renders everything heartfelt and moves us to sigh because it relieves.
The plot is from a distance barren. But inasmuch as the screenplay is attentive to the details of emergence, the landscape flourishes in the course of the viewing experience. The problem revolves around a poor young man who works as a janitor in a school where he studies at night. The predicament is not poverty in its abstract sense, but the material conditions bred by this dispossession, a vital aspect of which is the intimate longing to love, to release those dams of feeling, that is held at bay. In other words, this earnest character cannot afford to culture what is made to appear a natural disposition because the said conditions militate against it, or at least restrain its indulgence. That said, the film plods on still because it is interested in the exercise of commencement: of how the hero could let the love begin. This pursuit is consequently deferred; it is, in fact, such deferral that frustrates certain expectations for the romantic resolution to return to normalcy (and normativity) and thus transforms facile enamoration into an exasperation of sorts: the film shifts its gears unhurriedly, no rush to completion here, as if love is painfully protracted, defended against the delusion of unconditional devotion. It is deferral that fulfills the promise of cinema as both annunciation and anticipation.
Implicated in this suspension are the people around the protagonist: the beloved, a wealthy scion whose father wants her to be in business and to forsake all aspirations to be an artist; confidantes who work in a fast-food chain and the pedicab circuit; a grandmother who serves as singular parent who solicits prayers from the forlorn faithful of the church to keep body and soul together; and a rival suitor who masquerades as the damsel’s savior. Integral to the narrative’s humanist inclination is the ethic of the young man, who is pictured as a diligent, persevering, talented, compassionate, generous, and sensitive male who achieves success through sheer determination. But this success is verisimilarly delayed, in step with his patient, sentimental romance: he continues to sweep floors after college while his peers have become cloying careerists. In the end, the working class knight receives a scholarship from a well-known university in the United States, courtesy of a global firm, a dream that, in the vein of pervading extensions, is likewise put off again – interestingly, in the era of late capitalism and in the full efflorescence of belated desire.
All told, in spite and because of the routines of genre, the screenplay of Let the Love Begin merits discussion. It carves out a different space for class contradictions to reveal much-vaunted strife and at the same time to glimpse the prospects of internal critique. For it is not outside love that these antagonisms fester, but within its sanctum. There is a scene in the film that captures this intricate perturbation, and thus captivates. Seated inside a car, the hero is confronted by the origin of his adoration, who preens before the window that reflects in mirror-effect her image, oblivious to his presence. He is unsettled because he fears of being seen by someone who is actually at the end of his gaze. This is an uncanny moment in which misrecognition finds its screen: the agents of romance become at once object and subject that are inhibited from consummating their encounter, estranged partly by the vanities of their sight and the illusions of a deceptive glass. One sees herself on a surface that conceals the man who surveils and espies her beholding herself while staring at him. The other gains bliss by coming face to face with his intractable fantasy but is concomitantly agitated by his disingenuous technique of supervision and the peril of being found out. This only reminds us that love is a plane that can never be transparent, mediated as it is by the asymmetries of life and the compromises that a project like Let the Love Begin can conjure only in dilatory disguise.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
Desertion (Dubai)
Desertion
Jason P. Jacobo
How dry can a film shot in a desert city be?
Take away the setting, and Dubai’s story is staple love triangle: two brothers (Aga Muhlach and John Lloyd Cruz), the woman who comes in between (Claudine Baretto), and the sacrifices each must offer to love and live!
Director Rory Quintos should have learned from the blunders of her colleague Olivia Lamasan, whose concept of doing a Filipino production in Milan was making her characters speak, eat, wear things Italian! What we are saying here is the film fails to play out its setting as the ground of conflict. And we only know it’s Dubai we’re seeing on screen because of the obligatory sequence where John Lloyd tours himself around the First World cityscape. Had the producers thought well of their project, they would have had better use of their capital by shooting in Ilocos. Anyway, what they wanted was just desert.
Our audiences have yet to see a competent love-in-the-time-of-diaspora film. Sana Maulit Muli (an Olivia Lamasan work) could have just been the piece, save for the last scene where Lea Salonga, after going through all the works of the American cosmopolis, becomes Dalagang Filipina all over again. But unlike Lamasan, Quintos (es)chews politics. Remember that nationalist discourse amid dayami in the Bicolanesquery that was Kailangan Kita? Well, she does it again in Dubai, with a little help from Ricky Lee’s laborious labor rhetoric. And this time, in a wedding banquet hosted by the Aga Muhlach, the mouthpiece of overseas Filipino work.
But in an attempt to give the film its due credit, we still ask “Why Dubai, of all places in the ‘Middle East?’” Why not depict Filipinos struggling to pick up the pieces of their lives in post-Saddam Baghdad? What’s so particular about Dubai? Is it the prospect of striking gold in that wealthy state that gilds a character’s dreams with so much hope as well as regret? Or is it the co-existence of “tradition and modernity,” as city publicist Michael de Mesa would claim? If so, can we really see the cohabitation in the menage-a-trois? How strange can the bedfellows be? Just because they are family?
While the sensitive viewer may see the possibilities of the said themes in the film, the apparent drabness in the style cannot lead her to a clear understanding of the director’s vision, if she is indeed capable of it. In a Quintos production, never hope to see an object transformed into a symbol nor an image. Let’s just take her word for it—a desert is a desert is a desert.
Nonetheless Dubai is not all sand in John Lloyd Cruz. Like any other Lee character, John Lloyd’s is traumatized, because of a series of losses which causes an unrealized sense of self/personhood: the mother leaves him for Canada, dies there; then his elder brother tries his luck in the Middle East. In Dubai, Cruz is made to confront the neurosis of infantilism in a triangulation of desire, where he fails, but nevertheless emerges as a survivor, with his heart still in the right place. What is astounding here is how Cruz sheds light on the Oedipal conflict with so much daring in spite of an innocence that insists on its glare on the one hand and a self-knowledge that casts its shadow on the other. The maturity Cruz displays in this role may not be as quiet as Trillo’s or as determined as Rosales’s, but this Dubai performance secures his position as an actor of his time, an arrival long awaited yet still sighted—like that of a true oasis.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
Jason P. Jacobo
How dry can a film shot in a desert city be?
Take away the setting, and Dubai’s story is staple love triangle: two brothers (Aga Muhlach and John Lloyd Cruz), the woman who comes in between (Claudine Baretto), and the sacrifices each must offer to love and live!
Director Rory Quintos should have learned from the blunders of her colleague Olivia Lamasan, whose concept of doing a Filipino production in Milan was making her characters speak, eat, wear things Italian! What we are saying here is the film fails to play out its setting as the ground of conflict. And we only know it’s Dubai we’re seeing on screen because of the obligatory sequence where John Lloyd tours himself around the First World cityscape. Had the producers thought well of their project, they would have had better use of their capital by shooting in Ilocos. Anyway, what they wanted was just desert.
Our audiences have yet to see a competent love-in-the-time-of-diaspora film. Sana Maulit Muli (an Olivia Lamasan work) could have just been the piece, save for the last scene where Lea Salonga, after going through all the works of the American cosmopolis, becomes Dalagang Filipina all over again. But unlike Lamasan, Quintos (es)chews politics. Remember that nationalist discourse amid dayami in the Bicolanesquery that was Kailangan Kita? Well, she does it again in Dubai, with a little help from Ricky Lee’s laborious labor rhetoric. And this time, in a wedding banquet hosted by the Aga Muhlach, the mouthpiece of overseas Filipino work.
But in an attempt to give the film its due credit, we still ask “Why Dubai, of all places in the ‘Middle East?’” Why not depict Filipinos struggling to pick up the pieces of their lives in post-Saddam Baghdad? What’s so particular about Dubai? Is it the prospect of striking gold in that wealthy state that gilds a character’s dreams with so much hope as well as regret? Or is it the co-existence of “tradition and modernity,” as city publicist Michael de Mesa would claim? If so, can we really see the cohabitation in the menage-a-trois? How strange can the bedfellows be? Just because they are family?
While the sensitive viewer may see the possibilities of the said themes in the film, the apparent drabness in the style cannot lead her to a clear understanding of the director’s vision, if she is indeed capable of it. In a Quintos production, never hope to see an object transformed into a symbol nor an image. Let’s just take her word for it—a desert is a desert is a desert.
Nonetheless Dubai is not all sand in John Lloyd Cruz. Like any other Lee character, John Lloyd’s is traumatized, because of a series of losses which causes an unrealized sense of self/personhood: the mother leaves him for Canada, dies there; then his elder brother tries his luck in the Middle East. In Dubai, Cruz is made to confront the neurosis of infantilism in a triangulation of desire, where he fails, but nevertheless emerges as a survivor, with his heart still in the right place. What is astounding here is how Cruz sheds light on the Oedipal conflict with so much daring in spite of an innocence that insists on its glare on the one hand and a self-knowledge that casts its shadow on the other. The maturity Cruz displays in this role may not be as quiet as Trillo’s or as determined as Rosales’s, but this Dubai performance secures his position as an actor of his time, an arrival long awaited yet still sighted—like that of a true oasis.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
Tactile/Tactical : Masahista
Tactile/Tactical
Jason P. Jacobo
Surveying the settings of local cinema’s sex films, we can say our audiences have quite traversed many a zone: street corners, public parks, fishing villages, and all that lush vegetation. But since no meat could ever matter in the sole depiction of current perversions, exhibiting the said areas only furthered myths about the sin city, as well as the sad tropics. Before we can say that a filmic locale is legitimate, the space must fully flesh out a context, one that marks out the passage of identities, they who are unsettled, or are simply stranded—lost and struggling for another, if not a better, place. And even if a film’s aim is to simply uncover a site of struggle by showing bodies stripped of their human dignity, the divestments must not only lay bare the devices that coerce subjects to accept the wearing down of their whole and parts and discard the possibility of redress by holding on to their pedestrian habits. The cinema of such variety that strives to be truly interventive must avoid the mere spectacle of a striptease by envisioning a spectrum of embodiment beyond the nude and the naked. After displays of the burlesque, a film is also hoped to reveal new designs of refashioning disfigured, because disproportionate, social anatomies.
Thankfully, Brillante Mendoza’s Masahista has its context, one that maps out what we can call a “tropical traffic.” Shuttling between the metropolises of Angeles and Manila, the film locates the transactions of the flesh not just on the level of anonymous bodies but on the plane of familiar subjects—familiar, as the encounters plot out the prosaic itineraries of corporeal selves negotiating affects which are by turns sensible, sensational, and of course, sensory. Familiarity is a condition the film aspires for so that what can only come to the fore is a vision of the “concrete,” revealing the various “social thicknesses” deep down a seemingly dichotomic (country-city) surface. Once a city that catered its “women of excess” to American military officers, Angeles in the film now provides the “surplus” of male sex work to a capital region whose homosexual herd seems to need tending from an ever-willing pack of virile virgins.
The American moment in Angeles is a significant incident in understanding the contemporary history of sexuality that the city has come to represent. Anecdotes tell us that as a “contact zone,” Angeles has allowed a “cultural coitus” that only allegorizes this country’s miscegenational tendencies (or are they techniques?) with foreign sojourners, the colonial paramour most especially. The fruit of the said dalliance is most evident in the birth of an Amerasian generation, the “G.I. babies” of yesterday’s lonesome songs. But the fair fathers of these love children had no choice but to abandon them and their mothers, local economy’s “service women,” turning them into cashless casualties of a war they once wished would last beyond their years. Against their will but with the movies in their mind still reeling, these women coaxed their swearing sons to carry on the “heritage.” After all, these men, demigods boasting of hybrid physiognomies, could only be ripenesses ready for the picking. We are not saying that the masseur (Coco Martin) in the film is of the said lineage, nor we are suggesting that the mother (Jaclyn Jose) is a retiree from civilization’s oldest trade. Such readings would only defeat our efforts to contextualize the filmic locale. What we are trying to point out here is that the choice of the milieu makes the film tread a path paved with the stuff that constructs history. Nevertheless, Jaclyn Jose as the masseur’s mother is a point to consider. In her youth, Jose archetypicalized the prostitute in films like Macho Dancer and Olongapo: The Great American Dream. The irony of this detail only thickens the texture of Masahista’s historicizing.
Manila completes the erotopolitics of a post-American Angeles by providing the new “base” from which the “trafficking”of flesh is negotiated. Instructive in this discursive field is the notion of “excess,” as it names the diasporic movement of male sex work from the country to the city in legionary terms, ascribing to the flight a force best expressed in the idiom of “swarm,” “horde,” and yes, “stampede.” In the metropole, the excess of male bodies need not threaten the “balance of trade.” If we consider the clientele, who in desiring only produces a surplus of longings, the omnipresence of male sex work will no longer astound us, for we finally come to understand why there is a “mass production” of male sex work in the city—because the “service men” perceive the setting as one overflowing with the capital that would free them from a condition of economic scarcity.
Masahista particularizes the male sex worker that services the metropolitan context by singling out an expert—the masseur. The choice to identify the said type answers our question of why the film dwells in the familiar: to make more palpable (but not necessarily palatable) our reckoning with urban estrangement, social immobility, and albeit elaborately, spiritual retreat.
How does the alienation take place? With the massage as both the medium and the message of the “service,” maleness becomes an indefinite undertaking for our expert; if his performance falls short of the expected display of prowess, then musculature need not be a primary criterion in purchasing the goods of masculinity. If the pleasure of the visual matches that of the performative, only then can man preserve his mythic wholeness. But how can one reconcile a view with a gesture? How does a quiver (or its absence) fail a gaze? Such a struggle “the boys” must contend with even after they have been chosen as “finalists.” In the bedroom, there is the real pageant. Nonetheless, probing the grotesque male body does not necessarily valorize the bearer of the gaze. The rather typical depiction is necessary to critique, not the gay, but the consumptive machinations of a libidinal economy in which the gay participates.
Brillante Mendoza’s critique departs however from the imaginings of Lino Brocka (in Tubog sa Ginto and Macho Dancer) and Mel Chionglo (in Sibak and Burlesk King), who have worked through the question of male sex work under the social realist paradigm. A film leaning towards the latter will have to dramatize a range of social forces which restrain and finally disable the individual to rise out of the condition of (what else but) poverty. With or without the dream of the “good life,” Macho and Sibak portray the male sex worker as someone left without any choice but to sell his body. The pathos that this premise conjures is obtuse, for it rests on a false humanism: the bourgeois lamenting the perils of the lumpen throng, as if the former has not contributed to the latter’s dispossession. Such philanthropic guises are not found in Masahista, whose society works out its poignant tragedies in the humble energies of the everyday, and not through the grand forces of messianic history. The film’s settings are open milieus whose unruly arrangements tangentially capture political terrains, and not cordoned locations whose insularity exaggerates, by way of allegory, the (un)likelihood of politicized and politicizing landscapes. Residing in these locales are locals inhibited by the imbalance in the social ecology and not just non-initiates stripped of their virtues in a morality play. Portrayed is human interaction; conflict only arises because of the clash of desires and interests, and not just because of individual mores and manners sticking out of the social fabric.
In other words, Masahista is significant because it evinces the ethnographic, a mode that most aptly configures a context, breaking down familiar experience into the perceptive and the perceptible—those details, patterns, and motions of “local knowledge.” The critique that such a framework yields goes beyond the defiles of exposé (as in tabloidal television) and the shame of exposure (as in circulated private telephonic video), but remains within the bounds of the cinematic exposition, or the visual essay.
But the film chooses to emphasize certain disruptions in its ethnography by juxtaposing the trades of the flesh with the rituals of bereavement, a feat achieved through a tour de force parallel editing. This technique infuses the masseur with a certain sentience, enabling him to confront the limits to prowess, the insistence of finitude, and the redemption in filiality. But how does the film build up these thematic possibilities? This is where criticism functions as a rhetoricization of the filmic anthropology.
As the hotbed of desires in the cold Third World night, the massage parlor allows one to weather the heart—well, for a dear price. But while the quasi-panoptic cinematography explores the scenario to its minutiae, granting the audience almost total access to the dark skin and its darker schemes, the production design dares to evoke synaesthesia, making the visual and the tactile copulate. Masahista lets our eyes come into contact with the various senses of touch, from the habits of the busy flesh to the rites rendered to one’s wretched remains. This is where art moves us, in spite of a genre’s bare necessities. And this is also where Mendoza tries to remind us that while labor is alienated (forced by the customer into sodomy, the masseur doesn’t get his expected fees), the reification is not total, for the masseur’s work is, despite his sex, affective.
We are told that in a massage, one lets another’s hands touch one’s body, and allows the forager full entry to that landscape. But with the transaction involved, the erotic remains the customer’s fantasy. The tactile one, we are told, is a master of tactics. He may be numb to the nakedness before him, but with each stroke, he knows he can close the deal and get more out of it. So Iliac, the masseur, touches the customer’s core by weaving a pathetic life story, which varies from one night to another, depending on the moment’s need. But the film tells us that the masseur’s narrative, even with altered references, is a self-allegory, a confession even. Well, almost, for the sinner leaves out the gravest offense. On the night of his service, Iliac finds out that his estranged father has already passed away, but the former only ignores the news, letting his romance novelist customer (Allan Paule) finish his parable. However, at the height of abandon, Iliac is haunted by his own abandonment. Before a phantom of death, that is where the fictive, however tangible, renders itself futile. The film owes these levels of abstraction to a screenplay whose ambiguity is made brusque by an attentive sound recording, allowing Puigesque chatter to commingle with Pinterian silences.
Hence, the spectator is no longer a voyeur but a fellow sufferer. Brillante Mendoza sees to it that the sensual detail will not lead to an alienation from the image, but a filiation to it. So when Iliac is made to dress his father’s corpse up, the latter’s touch is already charged with irony. Here is a character left without any choice but to confront what the event, absurd as it may seem, can intimate about mortality. What does the masseur do with the cadaver that he detests but needs to reclaim by means of a dignified apparel, while remembering how he surrenders his own manhood, or what is left of it, each time he undresses for the survival of his kin? What touch can he offer when the warmth of his hands has already been taken by a stranger’s body?
The vulnerability presented by the masseur’s encounter with death is made more palpable by a motif of ruin (or the neglect that causes it) running through the film’s lyrical images: a bicycle’s mishap with a karitela in a street of broken earthen pottery; demolished buildings which surround the hospital where the dead father is lain; the widow’s rough face; and a customer whose skin sags with every breath he catches just to enjoy the night’s lease.
So why resolve the metaphysical dilemma in terms of the melodramatic? At one glance, the scene where Iliac discovers the shoe sizes that his father kept is not in keeping with film’s rhythm. The said revelation simply disrupts the contemplative pace the film has maintained because of the director’s keen handling of the tropes of tactility. At that point, the narrative evaporates, condensing emotion only through Iliac’s tears. But the flatness of the rendition salvages the rest of the film from sheer campiness on the hand and ultra-poeticism on the other. It is in this tempo bereft of any affected cadence that one finally feels through it all; and melancholia descends, sinks in, stays. Then we realize that isn’t just a plot that can unravel, but also viscerae.
Speaking of the visceral, one performer almost vomits her gut out to claim it. Katherine Luna, whose concept of body acting is limited to a grimace, coupled with the most irritating shriek, can only arouse pity. We understand that her character is supposed to state an oxymoron: a sex-starved prostitute who happens to be the gilfriend of an overperforming masseur. But what the hell happened with the contradiction? Where has all the control in Babae sa Breakwater gone? Out to sea?
If there was any advantage Paule had as an actor in the film, it would have been hindsight. Unfortunately, Paule could not recall the 80’s, when he immortalized the role of the male sex worker. Instead of drawing from his Macho Dancer experience, Paule turned to his Sa Paraiso ni Efren role and repeated the Maryo J. de los Reyes motivation—sissiness as homosexuality! Had he looked farther, he would have understood why Mendoza chose him for the role—to complete the path he has traversed as an actor in the genre by playing the part of the client and providing an ironic twist to its typicality. Paule should stop accepting gay roles from this day on. His reading of the customer is just customary.
Jaclyn Jose carries a body that tacitly wishes to disappear. In the film, she is the untouchable, and she knows it.
Coco Martin, who switches from innocence to cunning to regret with conspicuous effort but with notable charm nonetheless, plays the eponymous character with utter vitality. Well, Martin is rather limited by his face, whose gentle features resist corruption, or a prospect of it. Stunted puberty also thwarts the erotics of his body, but the psychological restlessness Martin invests into the role glows, enabling him to release a persistent sexuality. At some point, we are convinced Martin is rather unsexed, and therefore, miscast as the masseur, but the hunger is there—an authentic one that makes him a “savage aesthete.” This understanding of emptiness must be the reason why Martin knows where to touch and when to go before he is singed by his own advances. In the end, tactility must be coupled with a movement, after the moorage. Martin’s seduction is by turns sly and timid, one that draws very near only to escape.
In the 16 years of the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle, Masahista makes history by being the only film ever to be awarded in all categories. A total achievement most clear in the vivid urgencies of editing, sound, cinematography, and production design; in the calm eloquence of the screenplay; and in the thoughtful performances of Jaclyn Jose and Coco Martin. But above all these competencies is director Brillante Mendoza, who might just be the auteur Philippine Cinema has been looking for all these years. In this debut film, he is not just an assured visionary, but also a scrupulous worker, with hands so “full of grace,” that in the end, we say that a “sexual healing” can happen in and through film; and when it does, it seeks what lies beneath duct and pore, cutting through muscle and bone, to find what could be a harrowed soul, and salve it with love’s touch, caress, embrace.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
Jason P. Jacobo
Surveying the settings of local cinema’s sex films, we can say our audiences have quite traversed many a zone: street corners, public parks, fishing villages, and all that lush vegetation. But since no meat could ever matter in the sole depiction of current perversions, exhibiting the said areas only furthered myths about the sin city, as well as the sad tropics. Before we can say that a filmic locale is legitimate, the space must fully flesh out a context, one that marks out the passage of identities, they who are unsettled, or are simply stranded—lost and struggling for another, if not a better, place. And even if a film’s aim is to simply uncover a site of struggle by showing bodies stripped of their human dignity, the divestments must not only lay bare the devices that coerce subjects to accept the wearing down of their whole and parts and discard the possibility of redress by holding on to their pedestrian habits. The cinema of such variety that strives to be truly interventive must avoid the mere spectacle of a striptease by envisioning a spectrum of embodiment beyond the nude and the naked. After displays of the burlesque, a film is also hoped to reveal new designs of refashioning disfigured, because disproportionate, social anatomies.
Thankfully, Brillante Mendoza’s Masahista has its context, one that maps out what we can call a “tropical traffic.” Shuttling between the metropolises of Angeles and Manila, the film locates the transactions of the flesh not just on the level of anonymous bodies but on the plane of familiar subjects—familiar, as the encounters plot out the prosaic itineraries of corporeal selves negotiating affects which are by turns sensible, sensational, and of course, sensory. Familiarity is a condition the film aspires for so that what can only come to the fore is a vision of the “concrete,” revealing the various “social thicknesses” deep down a seemingly dichotomic (country-city) surface. Once a city that catered its “women of excess” to American military officers, Angeles in the film now provides the “surplus” of male sex work to a capital region whose homosexual herd seems to need tending from an ever-willing pack of virile virgins.
The American moment in Angeles is a significant incident in understanding the contemporary history of sexuality that the city has come to represent. Anecdotes tell us that as a “contact zone,” Angeles has allowed a “cultural coitus” that only allegorizes this country’s miscegenational tendencies (or are they techniques?) with foreign sojourners, the colonial paramour most especially. The fruit of the said dalliance is most evident in the birth of an Amerasian generation, the “G.I. babies” of yesterday’s lonesome songs. But the fair fathers of these love children had no choice but to abandon them and their mothers, local economy’s “service women,” turning them into cashless casualties of a war they once wished would last beyond their years. Against their will but with the movies in their mind still reeling, these women coaxed their swearing sons to carry on the “heritage.” After all, these men, demigods boasting of hybrid physiognomies, could only be ripenesses ready for the picking. We are not saying that the masseur (Coco Martin) in the film is of the said lineage, nor we are suggesting that the mother (Jaclyn Jose) is a retiree from civilization’s oldest trade. Such readings would only defeat our efforts to contextualize the filmic locale. What we are trying to point out here is that the choice of the milieu makes the film tread a path paved with the stuff that constructs history. Nevertheless, Jaclyn Jose as the masseur’s mother is a point to consider. In her youth, Jose archetypicalized the prostitute in films like Macho Dancer and Olongapo: The Great American Dream. The irony of this detail only thickens the texture of Masahista’s historicizing.
Manila completes the erotopolitics of a post-American Angeles by providing the new “base” from which the “trafficking”of flesh is negotiated. Instructive in this discursive field is the notion of “excess,” as it names the diasporic movement of male sex work from the country to the city in legionary terms, ascribing to the flight a force best expressed in the idiom of “swarm,” “horde,” and yes, “stampede.” In the metropole, the excess of male bodies need not threaten the “balance of trade.” If we consider the clientele, who in desiring only produces a surplus of longings, the omnipresence of male sex work will no longer astound us, for we finally come to understand why there is a “mass production” of male sex work in the city—because the “service men” perceive the setting as one overflowing with the capital that would free them from a condition of economic scarcity.
Masahista particularizes the male sex worker that services the metropolitan context by singling out an expert—the masseur. The choice to identify the said type answers our question of why the film dwells in the familiar: to make more palpable (but not necessarily palatable) our reckoning with urban estrangement, social immobility, and albeit elaborately, spiritual retreat.
How does the alienation take place? With the massage as both the medium and the message of the “service,” maleness becomes an indefinite undertaking for our expert; if his performance falls short of the expected display of prowess, then musculature need not be a primary criterion in purchasing the goods of masculinity. If the pleasure of the visual matches that of the performative, only then can man preserve his mythic wholeness. But how can one reconcile a view with a gesture? How does a quiver (or its absence) fail a gaze? Such a struggle “the boys” must contend with even after they have been chosen as “finalists.” In the bedroom, there is the real pageant. Nonetheless, probing the grotesque male body does not necessarily valorize the bearer of the gaze. The rather typical depiction is necessary to critique, not the gay, but the consumptive machinations of a libidinal economy in which the gay participates.
Brillante Mendoza’s critique departs however from the imaginings of Lino Brocka (in Tubog sa Ginto and Macho Dancer) and Mel Chionglo (in Sibak and Burlesk King), who have worked through the question of male sex work under the social realist paradigm. A film leaning towards the latter will have to dramatize a range of social forces which restrain and finally disable the individual to rise out of the condition of (what else but) poverty. With or without the dream of the “good life,” Macho and Sibak portray the male sex worker as someone left without any choice but to sell his body. The pathos that this premise conjures is obtuse, for it rests on a false humanism: the bourgeois lamenting the perils of the lumpen throng, as if the former has not contributed to the latter’s dispossession. Such philanthropic guises are not found in Masahista, whose society works out its poignant tragedies in the humble energies of the everyday, and not through the grand forces of messianic history. The film’s settings are open milieus whose unruly arrangements tangentially capture political terrains, and not cordoned locations whose insularity exaggerates, by way of allegory, the (un)likelihood of politicized and politicizing landscapes. Residing in these locales are locals inhibited by the imbalance in the social ecology and not just non-initiates stripped of their virtues in a morality play. Portrayed is human interaction; conflict only arises because of the clash of desires and interests, and not just because of individual mores and manners sticking out of the social fabric.
In other words, Masahista is significant because it evinces the ethnographic, a mode that most aptly configures a context, breaking down familiar experience into the perceptive and the perceptible—those details, patterns, and motions of “local knowledge.” The critique that such a framework yields goes beyond the defiles of exposé (as in tabloidal television) and the shame of exposure (as in circulated private telephonic video), but remains within the bounds of the cinematic exposition, or the visual essay.
But the film chooses to emphasize certain disruptions in its ethnography by juxtaposing the trades of the flesh with the rituals of bereavement, a feat achieved through a tour de force parallel editing. This technique infuses the masseur with a certain sentience, enabling him to confront the limits to prowess, the insistence of finitude, and the redemption in filiality. But how does the film build up these thematic possibilities? This is where criticism functions as a rhetoricization of the filmic anthropology.
As the hotbed of desires in the cold Third World night, the massage parlor allows one to weather the heart—well, for a dear price. But while the quasi-panoptic cinematography explores the scenario to its minutiae, granting the audience almost total access to the dark skin and its darker schemes, the production design dares to evoke synaesthesia, making the visual and the tactile copulate. Masahista lets our eyes come into contact with the various senses of touch, from the habits of the busy flesh to the rites rendered to one’s wretched remains. This is where art moves us, in spite of a genre’s bare necessities. And this is also where Mendoza tries to remind us that while labor is alienated (forced by the customer into sodomy, the masseur doesn’t get his expected fees), the reification is not total, for the masseur’s work is, despite his sex, affective.
We are told that in a massage, one lets another’s hands touch one’s body, and allows the forager full entry to that landscape. But with the transaction involved, the erotic remains the customer’s fantasy. The tactile one, we are told, is a master of tactics. He may be numb to the nakedness before him, but with each stroke, he knows he can close the deal and get more out of it. So Iliac, the masseur, touches the customer’s core by weaving a pathetic life story, which varies from one night to another, depending on the moment’s need. But the film tells us that the masseur’s narrative, even with altered references, is a self-allegory, a confession even. Well, almost, for the sinner leaves out the gravest offense. On the night of his service, Iliac finds out that his estranged father has already passed away, but the former only ignores the news, letting his romance novelist customer (Allan Paule) finish his parable. However, at the height of abandon, Iliac is haunted by his own abandonment. Before a phantom of death, that is where the fictive, however tangible, renders itself futile. The film owes these levels of abstraction to a screenplay whose ambiguity is made brusque by an attentive sound recording, allowing Puigesque chatter to commingle with Pinterian silences.
Hence, the spectator is no longer a voyeur but a fellow sufferer. Brillante Mendoza sees to it that the sensual detail will not lead to an alienation from the image, but a filiation to it. So when Iliac is made to dress his father’s corpse up, the latter’s touch is already charged with irony. Here is a character left without any choice but to confront what the event, absurd as it may seem, can intimate about mortality. What does the masseur do with the cadaver that he detests but needs to reclaim by means of a dignified apparel, while remembering how he surrenders his own manhood, or what is left of it, each time he undresses for the survival of his kin? What touch can he offer when the warmth of his hands has already been taken by a stranger’s body?
The vulnerability presented by the masseur’s encounter with death is made more palpable by a motif of ruin (or the neglect that causes it) running through the film’s lyrical images: a bicycle’s mishap with a karitela in a street of broken earthen pottery; demolished buildings which surround the hospital where the dead father is lain; the widow’s rough face; and a customer whose skin sags with every breath he catches just to enjoy the night’s lease.
So why resolve the metaphysical dilemma in terms of the melodramatic? At one glance, the scene where Iliac discovers the shoe sizes that his father kept is not in keeping with film’s rhythm. The said revelation simply disrupts the contemplative pace the film has maintained because of the director’s keen handling of the tropes of tactility. At that point, the narrative evaporates, condensing emotion only through Iliac’s tears. But the flatness of the rendition salvages the rest of the film from sheer campiness on the hand and ultra-poeticism on the other. It is in this tempo bereft of any affected cadence that one finally feels through it all; and melancholia descends, sinks in, stays. Then we realize that isn’t just a plot that can unravel, but also viscerae.
Speaking of the visceral, one performer almost vomits her gut out to claim it. Katherine Luna, whose concept of body acting is limited to a grimace, coupled with the most irritating shriek, can only arouse pity. We understand that her character is supposed to state an oxymoron: a sex-starved prostitute who happens to be the gilfriend of an overperforming masseur. But what the hell happened with the contradiction? Where has all the control in Babae sa Breakwater gone? Out to sea?
If there was any advantage Paule had as an actor in the film, it would have been hindsight. Unfortunately, Paule could not recall the 80’s, when he immortalized the role of the male sex worker. Instead of drawing from his Macho Dancer experience, Paule turned to his Sa Paraiso ni Efren role and repeated the Maryo J. de los Reyes motivation—sissiness as homosexuality! Had he looked farther, he would have understood why Mendoza chose him for the role—to complete the path he has traversed as an actor in the genre by playing the part of the client and providing an ironic twist to its typicality. Paule should stop accepting gay roles from this day on. His reading of the customer is just customary.
Jaclyn Jose carries a body that tacitly wishes to disappear. In the film, she is the untouchable, and she knows it.
Coco Martin, who switches from innocence to cunning to regret with conspicuous effort but with notable charm nonetheless, plays the eponymous character with utter vitality. Well, Martin is rather limited by his face, whose gentle features resist corruption, or a prospect of it. Stunted puberty also thwarts the erotics of his body, but the psychological restlessness Martin invests into the role glows, enabling him to release a persistent sexuality. At some point, we are convinced Martin is rather unsexed, and therefore, miscast as the masseur, but the hunger is there—an authentic one that makes him a “savage aesthete.” This understanding of emptiness must be the reason why Martin knows where to touch and when to go before he is singed by his own advances. In the end, tactility must be coupled with a movement, after the moorage. Martin’s seduction is by turns sly and timid, one that draws very near only to escape.
In the 16 years of the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle, Masahista makes history by being the only film ever to be awarded in all categories. A total achievement most clear in the vivid urgencies of editing, sound, cinematography, and production design; in the calm eloquence of the screenplay; and in the thoughtful performances of Jaclyn Jose and Coco Martin. But above all these competencies is director Brillante Mendoza, who might just be the auteur Philippine Cinema has been looking for all these years. In this debut film, he is not just an assured visionary, but also a scrupulous worker, with hands so “full of grace,” that in the end, we say that a “sexual healing” can happen in and through film; and when it does, it seeks what lies beneath duct and pore, cutting through muscle and bone, to find what could be a harrowed soul, and salve it with love’s touch, caress, embrace.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
The Hero in Let The Love Begin
The Hero in Let The Love Begin
Eloisa May P. Hernandez
On the surface, Let the Love Begin appears as a run of the mill romance movie. A pretty actress and a handsome actor comprise the love team in a typical rich girl-poor boy story. There are the staple accoutrements of the genre: comic sidekicks for friends, a scheming and not so charming prince pretender, a popular song for the movie’s title, and the perfunctory celebratory scene in the end complete with raindrops falling on the protagonists’ heads. However, despite this rather stereotypical mix of plot, characters, and events, the film succeeds in that it provides a rather refreshing take on what it means to be a “hero” or “savior” in this day and age.
Our hero in the story has a mission – to win the heart of the girl he loves. He tries to do this by helping her out with schoolwork, specifically by leaving finished homework under a school chair they share, she by day and he by night. The girl is enamored with her “savior,” yet his true identity remains obfuscated from her. He is hesitant to reveal himself and his intentions, so he takes his time until events overcome him: she leaves for the United States after graduation. A few years transpire and they meet again; she is now a corporate executive, while he as a janitor in her office. A friendship develops between them, yet she remains ignorant of the fact that the janitor used to be her “savior.” In a moment of desperation, she prays for her “savior” to save her again. And once again, our hero comes to save the day. Finally, our hero decides to divulge his identity and intentions to his beloved, but a prince charming pretender steals the glory. As our hero’s beloved finally recognizes that the pretender is not heroic, she realizes that she loves the janitor. She sees in the janitor the heart of a true hero, ultimately realizing that the janitor is her “savior.” With this realization, our hero’s identity and intentions are finally revealed.
Working within the confines of the romance genre, the film triumphs in the characterization of our young hero. He is a typical teen-ager with teen-age concerns and angst, coupled with the fact that he is poor and orphaned. Yet, he is intelligent enough not to allow his poverty to deprive him of a good education. What he lacks in material things, he makes up for in kindness in that he is always willing to help, albeit anonymously, his beloved. His heroism shines in his willingness to sacrifice his chance to study in a top university abroad for his grandmother. He is a diligent, hardworking young man who, at the same time, is a conscientious and intelligent student. His heroism is in his every day life—in his capacity to overcome the temptations and vagaries of youth, in his efforts to educate himself out of poverty. No, he may not be our typical knight in shining armor on a white steed; but his intelligence and kind heart shine through, making him a knight in an armor all his own.
He is not faster than a speeding bullet, nor is he more powerful than a locomotive and he cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound – he is as human as he can get but is an everyday hero, a savior, who fulfills his mission set at the beginning of the film. Let the Love Begin ends with what most of us yearn for in life – a happy ever after.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
Eloisa May P. Hernandez
On the surface, Let the Love Begin appears as a run of the mill romance movie. A pretty actress and a handsome actor comprise the love team in a typical rich girl-poor boy story. There are the staple accoutrements of the genre: comic sidekicks for friends, a scheming and not so charming prince pretender, a popular song for the movie’s title, and the perfunctory celebratory scene in the end complete with raindrops falling on the protagonists’ heads. However, despite this rather stereotypical mix of plot, characters, and events, the film succeeds in that it provides a rather refreshing take on what it means to be a “hero” or “savior” in this day and age.
Our hero in the story has a mission – to win the heart of the girl he loves. He tries to do this by helping her out with schoolwork, specifically by leaving finished homework under a school chair they share, she by day and he by night. The girl is enamored with her “savior,” yet his true identity remains obfuscated from her. He is hesitant to reveal himself and his intentions, so he takes his time until events overcome him: she leaves for the United States after graduation. A few years transpire and they meet again; she is now a corporate executive, while he as a janitor in her office. A friendship develops between them, yet she remains ignorant of the fact that the janitor used to be her “savior.” In a moment of desperation, she prays for her “savior” to save her again. And once again, our hero comes to save the day. Finally, our hero decides to divulge his identity and intentions to his beloved, but a prince charming pretender steals the glory. As our hero’s beloved finally recognizes that the pretender is not heroic, she realizes that she loves the janitor. She sees in the janitor the heart of a true hero, ultimately realizing that the janitor is her “savior.” With this realization, our hero’s identity and intentions are finally revealed.
Working within the confines of the romance genre, the film triumphs in the characterization of our young hero. He is a typical teen-ager with teen-age concerns and angst, coupled with the fact that he is poor and orphaned. Yet, he is intelligent enough not to allow his poverty to deprive him of a good education. What he lacks in material things, he makes up for in kindness in that he is always willing to help, albeit anonymously, his beloved. His heroism shines in his willingness to sacrifice his chance to study in a top university abroad for his grandmother. He is a diligent, hardworking young man who, at the same time, is a conscientious and intelligent student. His heroism is in his every day life—in his capacity to overcome the temptations and vagaries of youth, in his efforts to educate himself out of poverty. No, he may not be our typical knight in shining armor on a white steed; but his intelligence and kind heart shine through, making him a knight in an armor all his own.
He is not faster than a speeding bullet, nor is he more powerful than a locomotive and he cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound – he is as human as he can get but is an everyday hero, a savior, who fulfills his mission set at the beginning of the film. Let the Love Begin ends with what most of us yearn for in life – a happy ever after.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
Illicit
Illicit
by Patrick D. Flores
The taboo of incest bedevils the family in Nasaan Ka Man. This is one peculiar family whose filial ties are veiled and intimated with disquieting vagueness at the film’s inception. Once these are disclosed, the entire venture slides into decline, then decay, and never recovers. But what amazingly holds it is the tension that the ensemble of performers sustains with unnerving intensity. No cast in recent years has been able to redeem a failed scheme like the one we witness in this film. As the strands of the frayed fabric unravel with no respite, as secret after secret is disentangled and illicit liaisons are unknotted in tatters, the nucleus of actors and actresses keeps at it, its energy not exhausted, its valence retaining its integrity.
Confined to a damned abode on a slope in a cold mountain, these hapless souls challenge the specters that threaten the basis of their contaminated kinship. Siblings of elusive origins fall in love; spinsters who become surrogate parents are repressed and raped; the covetous eldest films his trysts with a blind servant and violates the virtue of his own sister; the less favored son comes back as spirit to haunt his beloved; and the patriarch hovers to unfurl a lurid tale.
There is a substantial degree of adulteration here in which volatile elements of perversion and deliverance corrupt what we conceive as custom. And the chemistry of the drama is nearly organic; from Kisapmata to Paradise Inn, in-breeding causes ruin, the fall of the gothic house in the corner or on the hill.
It is a modest tribute to directorial guidance and acting mettle that Hilda Koronel, Gloria Diaz, Jericho Rosales, Claudine Barretto, Diether Ocampo, Irma Adlawan, Katherine Luna, and Dante Rivero rise to the surface of all this coagulation. It is the essential fluid of their performances and passions, specifically the bristling raillery between Koronel and Diaz and the reassuring competence of Rosales who infects the temperaments of the banal Ocampo and the antipathetic Barretto, that distills. It infuses this weary body of film with the blood that overcomes debilitating anemia. In the relentless struggle between what an anthropologist describes as the realm of “purity and danger,” these performers know no fatigue.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
by Patrick D. Flores
The taboo of incest bedevils the family in Nasaan Ka Man. This is one peculiar family whose filial ties are veiled and intimated with disquieting vagueness at the film’s inception. Once these are disclosed, the entire venture slides into decline, then decay, and never recovers. But what amazingly holds it is the tension that the ensemble of performers sustains with unnerving intensity. No cast in recent years has been able to redeem a failed scheme like the one we witness in this film. As the strands of the frayed fabric unravel with no respite, as secret after secret is disentangled and illicit liaisons are unknotted in tatters, the nucleus of actors and actresses keeps at it, its energy not exhausted, its valence retaining its integrity.
Confined to a damned abode on a slope in a cold mountain, these hapless souls challenge the specters that threaten the basis of their contaminated kinship. Siblings of elusive origins fall in love; spinsters who become surrogate parents are repressed and raped; the covetous eldest films his trysts with a blind servant and violates the virtue of his own sister; the less favored son comes back as spirit to haunt his beloved; and the patriarch hovers to unfurl a lurid tale.
There is a substantial degree of adulteration here in which volatile elements of perversion and deliverance corrupt what we conceive as custom. And the chemistry of the drama is nearly organic; from Kisapmata to Paradise Inn, in-breeding causes ruin, the fall of the gothic house in the corner or on the hill.
It is a modest tribute to directorial guidance and acting mettle that Hilda Koronel, Gloria Diaz, Jericho Rosales, Claudine Barretto, Diether Ocampo, Irma Adlawan, Katherine Luna, and Dante Rivero rise to the surface of all this coagulation. It is the essential fluid of their performances and passions, specifically the bristling raillery between Koronel and Diaz and the reassuring competence of Rosales who infects the temperaments of the banal Ocampo and the antipathetic Barretto, that distills. It infuses this weary body of film with the blood that overcomes debilitating anemia. In the relentless struggle between what an anthropologist describes as the realm of “purity and danger,” these performers know no fatigue.
(Appeared in Young Critics Circle Film Desk’s Sine-Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images-Stars, Awards and Criticism for 2005, March 2006)
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