When Timawa Meets Delgado (2007, Ray Gibraltar)

This is one of the films championed by the late film critic Alexis Tioseco. In response to Tioseco’s wish for more people to see the movie, film critic Francis ‘Oggs’ Cruz chose this film as his Critic’s Pick selection during the Cinemanila International Film Festival 2009. The movie is a good choice because it is a pretty decent film and is rarely exhibited.

Sure, the picks of film critics Bien Lumbera and Roland Tolentino are better films (Serbis and Engkwentro) but those films have been well-exhibited. How I wished the two Urian members chose little-seen gems such as the Urian Best Picture nominee Hunghong Sa Yuta or Hospital Boat. The latter films, both of which I failed to see, had one-time only screenings at Cinemalaya festivals.

When Timawa Meets Delgado is still funny and wacky after all these years. My second viewing of the Gibraltar film highlights major assets and reveals a few defects as well. The rousing soundtrack, with songs by Mista Blaze, Tinug ni Nanay, and Color It Red, keeps things perky when segments fail such as the conversation between filmmaker Jun Delgado and his lover.

The segment I disliked most is the ambush interview with two young girls. Ray Defante Gibraltar coaxes the girls to give answers that fit in with the film’s subjects, which are nursing and the lure of working abroad. The segment falls flat because of awkwardness. It contrasts differently from the well-edited interviews of nursing students.

The editing of the film is a mixed bag. The segment featuring the video projects of Delgado takes up a lot of time. It became dragging after a while. There seems to be funny things embedded in the video sampler but are just too deep or personal for ordinary moviegoers to decipher. I had more of a blast with the sampling of the works of award-winning gay poet Ruben Timawa. The gayspeak translation of Timawa’s poem ‘The Pig’ continues to bring out the guffaws. That alone is already worth the price of a ticket.

I love the humor, silliness, and inventiveness of the film. It is a unique and crazy hodgepodge of serious documentary footages, exhilarating music videos, penetrating interviews, and hilarious poem reading.

Special thanks to Oggs for using his clout to get this one-of-a-kind movie exhibited on a big screen.

Ebolusyon Ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (2004, Lav Diaz)

October 24, 2009. Several malls observed United Nations' Day by holding events. Some of you may have celebrated their birthdays or anniversaries on that day. For a dozen or so moviegoers at Fully Booked's U-View, they spent half of that special day watching Lav Diaz's majestic story, Evolution of a Filipino Family.

It was a mini-celebration of United Nations' Day at U-View. An award-winning Filipino filmmaker, a Filipino-Chinese film critic, a Filipino-Japanese female scriptwriter, a middle-aged Caucasian male, and a smattering of local cinephiles patiently sat through the 11-hour epic film.

11-hour film!?! Who would have thought of doing that?

Evolution of a Filipino Family is epic storytelling at its best. Only a genius like Lav Diaz can consistently create films that are more than 5 hours in length, and win acclaim and awards in the process. This film is Diaz’s response to Lino Brocka’s dictum of creating films for fellow Filipinos. It is a film in which local moviegoers will identify themselves with the aspirations and travails of the Filipino family.

The story initially focuses on a rural family. Three female siblings take on farm jobs because their father was incarcerated for theft. As the film progresses, we get to know of two more families. There is the family of treasure hunters in Benguet. A father and his adopted sons try their luck looking for gold. The third family is a fictional and dysfunctional one. The radio-based family is made up of a lecherous stepfather, his wife, and his stepdaughter. Just as the family of treasure hunters keeps track of a favorite radio program, the audience also anticipates the continuing drama and adventures of the three sisters and the gold prospectors. The storytelling is so intense and gripping, you will not notice the minutes quickly passing by.

Lav Diaz utilized various tricks to keep the audience wide awake. He inserted footages of voice talents doing work for a melodramatic radio program. The loud, booming voices and emotional faces keep the audience enthralled. There are also footages of grave political mistakes captured on video. Watching this film is probably your only chance to see unexpurgated video versions of the Ninoy Aquino assassination and the Mendiola massacre of farmers in 1987. These powerful footages were stunning.

But, ultimately, the harrowing tales of the families are the ones that will keep the viewers glued to the screen until the end. There is a killing here and a massacre there. There are incarcerations. And, then, there are those family reunions. There will be a happy ending for one family and a sad ending for another family.

As the end credits roll on, the cinephiles lingered. When the lights came back, a spontaneous, overwhelming applause erupted in the small room. The audience obviously loved the film. Almost half of the attendees that night came back the next day to watch another Lav Diaz film, Agonistes. That is the effect of a Lav Diaz film. Once you've seen an epic film by Diaz, you'll be begging for more.

Evolution of a Filipino Family is a highly recommended film. It may have a problem with synchronized dialogues but it is a film worth celebrating and worth allotting 12 hours or so of your precious time.

The Cinemanila group must be commended for exhibiting three Lav Diaz films during the festival in October 2009. Now, the question on local cinephiles’ minds is ‘when is the much-awaited screening of Batang West Side?’

Walang Alaala Ang Mga Paru-Paro (2009, Lav Diaz)

Tasked to create a short film for an omnibus project of the Jeonju International Film Festival (JIFF), Lav Diaz came up with the 59-minute film, Butterflies Have No Memories. He is always pushing his films to the limit. A minute more and it would no longer have been considered a short film. However, the JIFF organizers trimmed it down to 40 minutes in order to make it fit in with two other short films. The longer version is available in the DVD box set released by JIFF.

In the extremely loaded film Butterflies Have No Memories, a bearded man named Ferdinand ‘Pedring’ Belleza is yearning for the return of mining in his town. He worked as chief security officer of a multinational mining company for decades. When it closed down, he lost a well-paying job, as well as his family.

The long-legged beauty Martha is a scion of the mining owners. The family closed the mining company after toxins heavily polluted the river. Their hasty departure turned the former prosperous place into a ghost town.

The return of fair-skinned Martha fuels irritations among local residents. She is likened to the so-called snow from Canada (mine tailings) that triggers skin rashes among the residents. Her former playmates, Carol and Willy, no longer have time to accommodate the young Canadian lady. They are so busy doing household chores or eking out a living. It is ironic that Martha, named after the Biblical character known for her hospitality, is treated badly during her visit.

There is a tinge of envy for the rich, single, and carefree visitor. Some people are more hostile. Pedring hatches a plan to kidnap Martha. His love for money reigns supreme over memories of good times with the family of Martha.

The short film alludes to the destructive effects of mining in Marinduque. Mine tailings caused the biological death of Boac River in 1996. The mining company left the place after decades of operations. Subsequent proposals to re-open the mining site are repelled by the Church and environmentalists.

The hellish effects of mining/treasure hunting were earlier tackled by Diaz in his majestic epic story Ebolusyon Ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino. A female character from the film admonishes her husband to give up mining. 'It is hell,' said the sight-impaired woman. Indeed, the mining area became a burial ground for gold prospectors and treasure hunters. Diaz will return once more to the issue of treasure hunting in a film project titled Agonistes.

Butterflies Have No Memories contains elements one would expect from a Lav Diaz film. Shot in bleak monochrome, the abbreviated film includes a couple of long takes. The lush ambient sound is also here along with scenes featuring animals/insects. I always look forward to the last two elements, ambient sound and inclusion of animals. They play a big part in making Diaz’s films so natural and realistic.

What I didn’t expect is the peculiar, dream-like ending. It features three adult men donning Moriones masks. Their epiphanic encounter with a swarm of butterflies triggers a change of heart for one of them. The sublime last shot is that of a prostrated young man in the middle of the forest while a pair of Roman soldiers looks on.

Lav Diaz is truly a great filmmaker and storyteller, equally adept with short features and epic stories. Butterflies Have No Memories is his best short film so far and one of his most symbol-laden films. It is a wonderful amalgam of mundane and insane images.

Biyaheng Lupa (Armando Lao, 2009)

There is a little-known Serbian comic film titled Who’s Singing Over There? (Slobodan Sijan, 1980) that has a similar premise: a passenger bus, a long journey, a cast of disharmonious travelers who must keep their sufferance. There, too, is the star-crossed destination. The similarities are striking, but they remain on paper. Armando Lao’s Biyaheng Lupa outstrips its antecedent: it's not a simple account of claustrophobic travel, but a poetic, disembodied journey of voices.

Biyaheng Lupa is not so much a road movie, a journey to appointed places, as it is a trip into inner landscapes. Mouths barely open. Like telepaths, we hear the passengers think and feel inwardly, all their psychic activity audible on the soundtrack – making us privy to dramatic irony. Regrets, suspicions, disdains, fears, hopes, paranoias, desires, prejudices, the whote gamut: all feelings and senses oscillate in a steady stream-of-consciousness on this eventful bus ride. Travel has never been a more introspective activity. We don't get the impression of noise: the disembodied voices are devoid of ambient noise.

Lao’s characters strike close to Filipino homes and yet sound not too rehashed. Lao’s light satire sees them as caricatures caught in their funny and comical foibles. There is the man with the body odor who is unaware of it. This is complemented by a shadiness – pragmatic or opportunistic? – as he secretly wolfs down a wrapped espasol he finds under his seat. There is the multi-level marketer who dreams grand dreams of profits but is discomfited at every turn and finds no takers among a busload of streetwise passengers. His anti-cancer merchandise even gets him into trouble with the military.

There is the discreet, daydreaming cougar who is on her way to a tryst with her younger lover. Her thoughts of romance are broken as the town gossip has just come on board the bus. Her wariness turns to slight panic when she realizes that a picture of her lover and herself is missing. The gossip is an odd creature: a beautiful lady who is indeed profiled as a curiosity seeker. Yet her caviling instincts are balanced by her romantic thoughts for the ticket man on the bus.

They also come in parallels and polarities. The young text-mates, one of them a conflicted and secretive mute, who provide the aspect of puppy love. A homosexual and a good-looking teenager are cats and dogs. And this apparently involves thwarted sexual advances in the comfort room. A look into the hearts of a pair of old characters reveal checkered pasts, tinged with regrets and slight despair.

There are checkpoints, there are stopovers, there are drop-offs, along the way. But there are moments when the static nature of the mise-en-scene – mostly static framing of characters with just the dynamism of aural information – stagnates the flow of the film. Lao shifts gears with a song number, a chorus of the passengers with their teary-eyed plea for love or tenderness. Or understanding. I forget. Touching enough.

Biyaheng Lupa may not break new ground in film art, but there are few films that precede it in its use of the stream-of-consciousness as a narrative device. Fewer have even succeeded. Off-hand there are Resnais’s seminal Last Year at Marienbad and Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone, but Lao’s film can be said to be more ambitious. In his directorial debut, he attempts a subconscious portrait of an ensemble cast of characters. It takes some flair and some balls to even attempt it. And Lao has some success.

Biyaheng Lupa, in the end, however, is watered-down sociology, the sanitized fabric of the Filipino subconscious. The resulting portrait is not as raw, illogical and impressionistic as the Filipino psyche would have been. Still, this is one auspicious debut with moments of sheer cinematic beauty. Look for the butterfly floating through the bus, a lyrical moment that signals the uncertainty of this bus ride we call life.

Agonistes (Lav Diaz, work-in-progress)

The ancient Greeks invented and defined the term apropos of our everyday fate. Agony. Ours is one born out of a myriad of cataclysms – both natural and auto-inflicted. Lav Diaz’s Agonistes, an admitted work-in-progress but already fully formed, meditates on the Filipino’s most pressing worldly struggle, his struggle to break out of material poverty and the non-material consequences of poverty. Hints, however, point to a more eschatological theme – the centrality or the simultaneity of the spiritual struggle.

Directing from his own script, Diaz transposes the ancient term agonistes to latter-day Philippines. He singles out the classic strugglers of contemporary times, the working-class men and the peasants, to shoulder grinding poverty. In truth, it can be said that the agonist has been a favorite fixture of Diaz’s other films: Heremias is both agonized and anguished, so is Hamin in Death in the Land of Encantos, tortured and demented at once. Epic but individual in scope, mythological and biblical in character, Diaz’s stories are veritable stories of struggles, sagas of agony.

Agonistes opens with a grandiose sequence of robust buildings under construction in Manila. This is the magnificence that, on a sudden, contrasts with the slumped figure of one construction worker, a young man named Juan. As he narrates what he has witnessed to Manoling, an older, brotherly fellow worker, he has been traumatized by the sight of one of his co-workers being buried alive in wet concrete at the construction site. But the occupational dangers are not the end of it – the rainy season soon floods the metropolis and makes it impossible for them to reach their workplace.

These two become so desperate that, over a drinking session, they latch on to a kind of Pascalian wager. Manoling has revealed a secret of treasure supposed to be buried in his family’s land somewhere in Bikol. If they find it, they are set for life. If not, it’s just a matter of a few days’ work and a matter of looking a little silly, perhaps. They aren’t even thinking of that: Manoling is just “tired” of the daily grind.

Quitting their jobs, they emerge in Bikol one day, purchase digging equipment and get to work. They meet Manoling’s brother who farms the land but whose wife Loleng is terminally ill with a lung disease. As the trenches deepen, Juan and Manoling only manage to turn up rusty metals and an old military boot. Manoling’s brother seems content to live a farmer’s life and jokes in the background about a share of the spoils. At dusk, all of them often – including the bed-ridden Loleng -- gather to watch the magnificent – otherworldly? – sunset.

Agonistes is a miserabilist ode to materialism – or an oblique one to spiritual “reorienting.” Or perhaps, their unresolved dialectic. As the almost Syssiphian diggings go on, the crash and crunch of shovels against sand and gravel alternate with the sound of Loleng’s deathly and fatal coughing. As Juan and Manoling pursue their treasurely dreams, they seem oblivious to the specter of death, the possibility of afterlife. Like a colossal god, Mayon Volcano towers in the background to shame their pointless efforts. The Pascalian wager of the search for treasure can thus be read as an allegory on misplaced faith itself, the pursuit of false gods.

Even in this rough cut, Agonistes holds up as an excellent film. The layers of meaning are already robust. The simplistic notion, for instance, of the materialistic agonist (represented by Juan and Manoling) is elevated by the presence of other kinds of agonists: Loleng, the terminally ill agonist whose struggle is physical illness and presumably coming to terms with her faith; and Manoling’s brother, outwardly content, but something else deep down.

It’s a world of lingering shadows, and Diaz complements his classic themes with black and white cinematography. It serves him well again – appropriately eerie and reminiscent, among others, of the work of Bela Tarr. Diaz’s compositions are painterly -- he must have studied classic portraiture in preparation for this -- which reinforces the timelessness and universality of his themes, whether it is a reckoning of the ills of the contemporary Filipino or not. Diaz’s work will transcend the borders of time and space and nationality, our agony aunt for all time.

Anacbanua (Christopher Gozum, 2009)

Somewhere deep in the night in distant Middle East, the present year, a Filipino writer, burning the midnight oil, is suddenly seized by a creative paralysis, a profound crisis of identity. He is a poet of a dying breed, if being a poet is not an ephemeral fate in itself, as he labors to write in his mother tongue, Pangasinense. We get a sense of his literary interiors by the books at his elbow: The Age of Reprieve by Sartre, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, The Stranger by Camus. There seems to be the streak of the existential loner in him – a foreign legacy that doesn’t sit well with his antipodal upbringing.

At a crucial climacteric of his creative life, the poet decides drastically: abandon his overseas job and return to his faraway roots, literally and figuratively, in order to retrieve his generative bearings. Accompanied by no one but his sullen Muse, the poet surfaces in Pangasinan, brooding about his spiritual estrangement, thinking he is the last Filipino poet writing in the vernacular amid a welter of borrowed languages. Starting on this fairly worn premise -- the artist in creative limbo -- Christopher Gozum’ feature debut proceeds to a literally poetic and lyrical odyssey in the life of an embattled poet, as he tries to retrieve himself through an exploration of his native Pangasinan, its culture, its artisanal and creative industries.

Will the poet recover the heartland that underpins his creative spirit? What illuminations and epiphanies are in store for him? The poet journeys from town to town, Bayambang, San Carlos, Lingayen, among others, his destinations dictated by the salient features and textures of Pangansinan: the Agno River, its plentiful rice paddies, San Roque Dam, the baroque edifice of the provincial capitol, the brick makers, clay pot factories, the bagoong industries, the metalworks specializing in cleavers.

Anacbanua complements what the camera sees with fighting words and poetry. The first Filipino film to be shot entirely in Pangasinense, the soundtrack is a groundswell of sonnets and villanelles (the fiery an-long of Pangasinense poet Santiago Villafania) as though to document the creative and spiritual struggle and resurgence of the poet and the tempering sway of the Muse. Pangasinense has never sounded so fierce and fascinating, sacred and earthy.

There is a mystical and metaphysical edge to how the journey influences the poet. His Christian background, for instance, seems to make him confess to his sense of sin, his affinity with the fallen angel. His Muse in the meantime is impelled to make ritual offerings at the Sacred Agno River. Epiphany comes at the mere vision of paddy fields, and sets him into running like a child in boisterous, euphoric circles. Is he any nearer to the "Caboloan of old," that "parnassus of Pangasinan"?

Director Gozum's experimentalism, thankfully, eclipses the didactic and overly hortatory summation of Villafania's poetry at the end. The director's eye for the poetic seems attuned to the work of visual stylists like Sergei Paradjanov (tableaux vivant compositions) and Bela Tarr (the textural qualities, the tactility of the images, and the monochromatic photography). The film's imagery forms a disparate diversity that ultimately finds cohesion in their theme of renewal, regeneration and creation.

Tonight, at the 2009 Cinemanila International Film Festival Awards, Christopher Gozum marked his feature debut with an auspicious bang: Anacbanua won the Lino Grand Prize, the grand prize for the Digital Lokal category, besting five other entries including Armando Lao’s Biyaheng Lupa. The director, who conceived, shot and performed practically all aspects of post-production, made it a sweet double by bagging the best director award. It’s a pity he is not here but in faraway Saudi Arabia to receive his much-deserved prizes. Distance must indeed give this director perspective, in addition to what we presume are pangs of homesickness contained in Anacbanua. The great artist must indeed suffer for his art.

Cinemanila Digital Lokal 2009

Anacbanua (Christopher Gozum, 2009)

Not a narrative film at all, and fortunately so. This is one fierce piece of memorable filmmaking -- a successful experiment in film form that has kinship with the work of film poets like Sergei Paradjanov. Anacbanua concerns a young Filipino poet, based in distant Middle East, experiencing a creative and spiritual crisis. As we see the books at his elbow ( Sartre, Dostoevsky, Camus) there is the streak of the existential loner within him. To reclaim his lost bearings, he returns to his heartland, his home province of Pangasinan. Here he embarks on a pilgrim’s odyssey, touching base with the culture, nature and the creative and artisanal industries of his native place. What makes Anacabanua resonate is the exclusive use of the Pangasinense language on the soundtrack. Reciting sonnets and villanelles in Pangasinense, the poet slowly maps out his lost “parnassus,” taking stock of his own human dimensions, his personal ethos, on his way to rebirth and regeneration. On his journeys his Muse accompanies him and tempers him with illuminations and epiphanies. There is a streak of didacticism in some of the poems, and moments of formlessness and imagistic repetitiveness, but all in all, its searing, tactile, monochromatic imagery recalls Bela Tarr, Raya Martin and Sergei Paradjanov.

Must-see.

Dolores (Lito Casaje, 2009)

Dolores is a pubescent girl on the verge of womanhood. She is beginning to attract the libidinal eyes of men, no wronger than the men in her family. Dolores. Dolours. Sadnesses? Or perhaps Dolores Haze. Lolita. That Humbert Humbert nymphet. Unfortunately the similarity with the Nabokov classic ends right there. Everything goes downhill from here to the abyss of bathos. Alas, if only the filmmakers had the mind to follow the time-honored tradition of adapting literature. No such luck. Director Casaje terms his picture as a “coming-of-age” film, an ironic misnomer as the title character doesn’t even live to grow up from loss of innocence and the end of childhood. What we get instead is unintended comedy, about beady-eyed old men and a shell-shocked young girl. Before the jig is up, there is a long trail of dead, and we can’t help treating it with laughter.

Avoid at all costs.

Iliw (Bona Fajardo, 2009)

Set in Japanese-occupied Vigan, parts in Baguio, it’s the picturesque period story that has been done before, about a young Ilocano lass named Fidela who falls in love with the enemy, a young Japanese captain named Takahashi. This premise is getting shopworn, it’s a variation from Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos and Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer. In the end it serves its original purpose: it lives up to its tag as “film tourism,” as how the Ilocos governor who was at the premiere introduced it. True enough, the Vigan sights are harnessed and thrown into good relief: fancy-lit ancestral Spanish-era homes, cobble-stone streets and horse-drawn calesas ply the thoroughfares with an eye for idealization.

Passable, commercially viable fare.

Ang Beerhouse (Jon Red, 2009)

For the last few decades in Philippine commercial cinema, the beerhouse has become a common fixture in action films. An action film is not complete, it seems, without a shootout or a brawl at a beerhouse. There is always a fight by alcohol-addled men for the attentions of the establishment’s women. In Jon Red’s Ang Beerhouse, the violence may have been tempered but the dive is no less cleaned up: unscrupulous operators lurk in the background. The titular beerhouse is where men spend their hard-earned money and this is where love blossoms between one of its dancers and the poor man who sells street food across the street. But Ang Beerhouse is a sprawling mess, self-indulgent, too drawn out, offers nothing new, and the conflicts are artificial. But stay tuned, hot-blooded males: you will be rewarded at the end with the ample offerings of Gwen Garci. This is a beerhouse after all.

Worth a few laughs and titillating moments, but neglible.