Wanted: Border (2009, Ray Defante Gibraltar)

Is it a masterpiece or not? I’ve seen Wanted: Border a couple of times but I’m still torn about my feelings for this unforgettable film. There are times when I deem it not worthy enough to be rated as one of the best films of 2009. But, there are those days when I consider it a masterpiece.

The films of Ray Gibraltar are mainly characterized by jumbled editing. This one-of-a-kind film straddles the thin lines between sanity and craziness, between the seven last words and the seven deadly sins, between excellent acting and bad performance, between the sacred and the profane, between a likable good film and a disturbing great film. The non-linear editing by Tara Illenberger is perfectly suited to the ‘border’ concept of the film. It gives viewers a glimpse of the unstable and volatile state of mind of the characters.

A plethora of disturbing characters pepper this film. An envious and greedy politician connives with a resident to spread vile rumors against a mother and her daughter Salvacion. The fatal lynching of her mother leaves the girl to fend for herself alone until she reaches adulthood. The young lady hooks up with a soldier assigned to torture and kill communists. This affair triggers her lust for blood.

As decades pass, Salvacion ‘Saleng’ Castro (Rosanna Roces) becomes an owner of an apartment/eatery. She is a religious fanatic who had a few conversations with God. Her apartment/eatery becomes some sort of haven to problematic people such as the gluttonous obese woman, slothful/lustful filmmaker, and the wrathful student.

Acidic black humor abounds in this film. The scenes with the imprisoned artist are a hoot. There is also the wicked scene involving a dildo and a lecherous stepfather. The campy acting of Roces serves as some relief from the dark and disturbing nature of the movie.

Roces is perfectly cast as Saleng. Her performance borders on greatness and campiness. There are some scenes in which she seems on the verge of laughter. Roces said that her ‘bad’ acting was ordered by director Gibraltar. She made her director proud. It is her best performance so far. It was a surprise to learn that Gibraltar initially thought of offering the lead to Ronnie Lazaro. The latter is a great actor but I think he would be too serious to give the film the desired ‘campiness.’ The proposed film with Lazaro will just end up being too dark and wicked.

Wanted: Border is a must-see film. It is remarkable for its vicious ability to have viewers identify with the sinful behavior of a character/s. It is up to the viewer to exorcise those personal demons or let them out in the open. As it is, Wanted: Border is a perfect movie to watch this Lent.

Cinema One Originals 2009: The films of Raymond Red

The Cinema One Originals Digital Movie Festival 2009 was a veritable feast for movie lovers. A retrospective of works by maverick filmmakers, Brillante Mendoza and Danny Zialcita, was on hand. A welcome surprise is the screening of Raymond Red's award-winning short films.

A Study for the Skies (1988) is a silent meditation on a young man's futile attempts at flying. He tries out several wing contraptions that are similar to those inventions of Leonardo da Vinci. After several failed attempts, the defiant man does a Vitruvian man. An audacious piece of filmmaking, the film won a Best Short award from the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino.

Anino (2000) is the Cannes-winning short film of Red. It is a wonderful tribute of sorts to Lino Brocka's Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag. A harried and hungry photographer seeks solace at Malate Church. He had not eaten in a day. Upon his exit from the church, a mysterious man in black taunts him. ‘Prayers are useless.’ ‘You’re a thief.’ The words of the enigmatic stranger cling to him like a shadow. The next time they meet, the hapless lens man had all been eaten up by the darkness and filth oozing from all corners of Manila.

Director Raymond Red will once more explore the themes from the short films (ie. flying as a metaphor for escape, and Manila as hell for impoverished people) in his latest film, Himpapawid (2009, Manila Skies). The story deals with Raul Lakan, a downtrodden man who cannot take the ills of the city anymore. He joins a heist that goes badly. Armed with a grenade, he hijacks an airplane. He then parachutes out of the plane with a bagful of loot.

Is Himpapawid the much-awaited masterpiece of Red? No. The acting of Raul Arellano is too loud for my taste. Directing actors seems to be Red’s Waterloo. I’ve read critics' complaints about poor acting in Red’s earlier feature films Bayani and Sakay. I’ve seen both films way back in the 1990s and the only good thing I can remember now is the sound engineering of Bayani.

The short films of Red still linger in my mind. These are prime examples of great filmmaking. Other excellent short films shown at the festival were Anomi, Bulong, and a trio of Cinemalaya winners (Andong, Bonsai, and Rolyo). These short films were sometimes better than the main feature films that they accompanied. The short films of Red and other non-competing films (eg. Tirador and Altar) soften the disappointments I’ve had with the competing entries.

Cinema One Originals 2009: The Year of the Misbegotten

The movers and shakers of this year's Cinemalaya must be congratulating themselves as the year comes to a close. A fruitful year, 2009, they must be musing as they pop champagne and toast themselves in jubilation. True enough, many of this year’s films have exceeded modest expectations and have done not just the filmmakers, but the country proud. Even as this is being written, many of these films are now making the rounds of the festival circuit abroad and initial news indicates they are coming home far from empty-handed. Pepe Diokno's Engkwentro won the Venice Horizons Award and the Luigi de Laurentiis Award at the recent Venice Film Festival and Alvin Yapan's Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe bagged the Gold Prize at the 33^rd Cairo International Film Festival. At this year’s Cinemanila Film Festival, local audiences had the privilege to see the promising feature debuts of directors Christopher Gozum (Anacbanua) and Armando Lao (Biyaheng Lupa) and it wouldn’t be far-fetched to see them invited overseas as well. Nor would it be surprising to see them grabbing some prizes along the way.

When all is said and done, the same might not be said of the entries to this year’s Cinema One Originals. Featuring veteran directors at the helm, this year saw a forgettable procession of mediocre and uninspired filmmaking. One came away from watching the Originals with a sensation of malaise: the films were not bad, but not good, either. The films were either too safe (read: too commercial, too formulaic) or just too headlong (read: too enterprising but not too well thought-out). But the coup de grace that doomed these films remains the failure of the scriptwriting. Film critics have often harped on the short shrift afforded to Filipino film scripts, and this year's films validate this cutting observation and testify to the need for improved screenwriting.

If nothing else, the Cinema One Originals this year seemed to dwell on the shallow end of navel-gazing. Self-flagellation has never been so symptomatic as now. And yet, like most of Lenten flagellants, these films open little more than skin-deep wounds, seemingly content and complacent at their exhibitionism. As humans, as a society, as a nation, we get little insight through these films into our essential maladies. The interrogation of our common plight dissolves ultimately into flippancy. These films don’t problematize our condition as much as take cheap potshots at it; hence many in this lineup of films are either comedic or fantastic.

Lahat tayo may abnormality, declares a supposedly insightful character in Maximus & Minimus, the opening film at the festival, a comic film that proceeds to do nothing with its rehashed insight into the human condition, but concludes with a cynical ending. The eponymous characters must contend with distorted self-perceptions amidst a modern world obsessed with rigorous conceptions of beauty. Their shallow plight is telegraphed by their names: Maximus is an overweight beauty who has few problems – not even with her healthy sex life – except that a new lover has given her a reason to doubt her comfort in her own skin. Papu, on the other hand, derives his nickname, Minimus, from his lack of penile endowment, so lacking that he cannot possibly pleasure the fleshy and fleshly Maximus. He is consigned in this movie to find ways to remedy his physical shortcoming, illustrated by trope after trope depicting his failures. Lest we think that abnormalities depicted in this film are shallow, Maximus’ new lover will give Freudians a reason not to outrightly dismiss it. On second thought, forget it.

Paano Ko Sasabihin is a romantic comedy that turns Maximus & Minimus' motif of dysmorphia into the motif of disability. This is strictly for the birds: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and well, you get the drill. Not many films delve into the sensitive issue of disability; but those that do often squander the chance at giving this subject a fresh, insightful spin. Practically trivializing its delicate subject and turning it into a substanceless subplot, Paano Ko Sasabihin, sadly, belongs to this majority. A cutesy tale about two people who know sign language (the boy works at a school for deaf-mute; the girl has a mute brother) and mistake each other for deaf-mute, it is little more than a vehicle for its stars, who are reprising their romance in an ongoing television serial.

Wanted: Border is the film that comes closest to a serious distillation of some of our national maladies. But it’s not so much a social analysis as it is a stylish and richly embellished imagining of a story in the tabloids. Like much tabloid fodder, we get a gallery of grotesque characters -- yet identifying who corrupts whom is no easy task in a culture of violence that implicates everyone. At the center of its black, macabre comedy is Saleng, a woman who must run an eatery while military men turn her house into a halfway house for suspected communist rebels. Before long, the tortures Saleng and her mentally-challenged son witness turn them into butchers. With increasingly ghoulish faces, leprous sores, black circles under their eyes (remember Elem Klimov’s Come and See?), they butcher and cook their victims and feed them to the unsuspecting – not the least of which are their teachers in torture. As the first woman to be crucified during Lent, Saleng embodies the conflicts and traumas of a nation's tortured history. Whether her acts of butchery are the symptom of profound sociopathy or just the outcome of Pavlovian conditioning, whether her crucifixion is sincere penitence is left to the audience to decide. It is best left that way: Wanted Border neither trivializes nor judges.

Bala Bala: Maniwala Ka is a fantasy that foregrounds our common irrationality, as if to acknowledge it would mean our redemption. At the heart of its story is a boy named Amiel, a mute child whose secrets are manifold. He has elemental origins and elemental powers, but he is also a child suffering from the abuse of his adoptive parents. He begins to use his supernatural gifts for good when he meets an agriculturist who has come to the boy’s beleaguered town on orders to investigate the source of a plague. The plague – not unlike a biblical one – has started to claim children and domesticated animals. The agriculturist, an arrogant cynic from the city, becomes the child’s instrument to heal sick children. The agriculturist also crosses paths with a curious witch doctor whose prophecies seem to be coming true. In the end, we are given to speculate (read: the film withholds too much) that the town is little but a playground for elementals who apparently harbor resentment for the mistreatment of their kind. Bala Bala: Maniwala Ka ultimately depicts the chastening of science, and revels in privileging what cannot be verified by it. With the logic of magic realism, with its espousal of the anachronistic, this fantasy further reinforces why we have remained in the dark ages for so long, why we have remained stubbornly polarized against a logical positivistic world.

Paano Ko Sasabihin? (2009, Richard Legaspi)

A kiss is just a kiss but if it is done by the scrumptious pair of Enchong Dee and Erich Gonzales, it ends up being an earth shuddering moment.

I've been watching movies at theaters for a long time, but the Cinema One Originals screening of Paano Ko Sasabihin? is one of a few times I've heard the audience loudly swooned in unison. Moviegoers strongly reacted to the initial kissing scene between Mike (Enchong Dee) and Erhyl (Erich Gonzales). I knew that both young stars are popular but I never expected that kind of intense reaction from fans.

Television writer Erhyl is a regular commuter of the Light Railway Transit. Just like Betsy Rallos of Now That I Have You, Erhyl is always on the lookout for her crush. She have been eyeing him long enough to know that he is deaf-mute. The ice was broken when she thanked him. How? It turns out that Erhyl knows a bit of sign language. Her brother is also deaf-mute.

The main problem of Erhyl becomes how to tell to her new friend, Mike, that she is not deaf-mute. The pretty lass feels dirty for deceiving him. The young man though has a secret of his own.

The fifth edition of the Cinema One Originals film festival is not as breathtaking as the torrid kiss of Mike and Erhyl. As expected, Wanted: Border romped off with most of the major prizes. It is a sign of the festival's relatively weak slate that no film got the first runner-up award or the so-called jury prize.

However, Paano Ko Sasabihin? nabbed a special mention from the film festival jurors led by film critic Rolando Tolentino. The average romance film was also selected as winner of the Audience Choice award. If you ignore the idiotic root of the film's main conflict, then this film will be a pleasant ride with a delectable screen presence of Gonzales. It is no wonder then that Dee gave his growling best in their memorable kissing scene.