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.

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.