Mondomanila (Khavn dela Cruz, 2010)

These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands…

Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility.

-- Julia Kristeva, An Essay on Abjection

This is not another masterpiece by Khavn dela Cruz. This is not guerilla digital filmmaking at its finest. This is not the stuff of cinema: Certainly not about the high-jinks of the juvenile and the poor; the foisting upon audiences of the taboo and the abject; no, there is no subversive import lying just beneath the surface. No, this is not a film by Khavn dela Cruz. This is not his 28th film. This is not Mondomanila Filmfest Motherfuckers.

Frivolity aside, Mondomanila represents one of Khavn’s best films to date. Here is a flower of evil plucked from the fertile dung of the margins, blooming among the dregs of society; here is a work of uncompromising and unwavering vision, a film that was almost stillborn, but now here in our midst, jumping out at us like a jack-in-the-box, thumbing its nose at us who cower behind blinders. In a word, be prepared for a frightful but rollicking ride through a no-man’s land that we, the coddled, hold our breaths against and turn away from.

At the rotten core of Mondomanila are teenage layabout Tony and his juvenile posse, Paranoid X, pleasure-seeking delinquents without a future but never to be taken for pushovers. Here in their neighborhood of slums and garbage dumps, they are kings, and the cameras observe them in very close proximity, rendering them through hallucinatory filters, washed-out colors, split screens and strange lighting. These Bunuelian olvidados exhibit few inhibitions: young, brash and compliant, they mouth their syntax of obscenities and perform outrageous acts that straddle the lines of morality. They sing and rap, some of them break-dance, some hold small jobs, some don’t, but what makes them gravitate together, what defines them, are common misery and drug-induced fantasies.

Much of their adolescent fantasies, predictably, revolve around sex. Among them is a compulsive masturbator, who uncontrollably does his thing even in the group’s presence. Another literally engages in bestiality: easing himself on a live, squawking goose, just before he chops off its head. Lumped together, their sexual obsession is even worse: they peep on fornicating midgets and lesbian twins. Meanwhile, menace lurks in the background: Whiteboy, a Caucasian pedophile, makes no bones about his perverse ideology and submits the young kids of the neighborhood to “sexual slavery.” Soon his deviancy hits very close to home.

Figuratively, and all but literally, one gets buried neck-deep in Mondomanila’s proverbial bodily fluids. The immoral. The criminal. Few taboos remain unscathed here. Combining the abrasive aspects of his recent films namely Squatterpangk and The Family that Eats Soil, Khavn transvaluates Julia Kristeva’s notions of the abject and turns it from a source of horror to something darkly humorous. Instead of horrifying us and making our skin crawl, Khavn numbs and etherizes our sensibilities into a catharsis: blood, piss, excrement, bestiality, sodomy, and mutilation are here in plentiful doses that erode our guards. At some point we start to laugh; we wallow and luxuriate in it. Numbed and etherized in the abject, Khavn paves the way for his film’s subversive end.

Cunning murder, hypocritical revenge, to borrow Kristeva’s words, this is what the film deems its logical coda. Guile, cunning, hypocrisy are exactly the words that befit the crime, subsequently a composite of several crimes. The fact that the crime is compounded raises the acts to the level of the abject, many times over. We laugh nervously and must do a double-take, as the so-called heroes dance and sing for joy after the fact: We realize our rank complicity, our blurring concepts of right and wrong. We argue curiously: But doesn't the crime -- done as it is at the expense of someone draped with neo-colonial trappings -- translate to a symbolic act of patriotism? And how to explicate the aggravating actions after the crime? Reparations? Somehow it is so morally wrong; somehow it is so viscerally right.

Chassis (Adolfo Alix Jr., 2010)

A truck. A homicidal, ten-ton truck. To see Adolf Alix’s Chassis is to step figuratively into the path of such an oncoming, runaway vehicle. For good measure, the same truck will back up on your convulsing body just to make sure it does the job. Alix’s latest film is just that, unforgiving. Unforgiving; it spares nobody. Not the film’s diegetic characters who must endure the grinding forces of poverty and harsh circumstance. Not the viewing audience, no matter how prepared it believes it is for a film like Chassis.

But don’t get me wrong. The same uncompromising virtues are what makes Chassis an ultimately commendable film. And I’m beginning to like it for the same reasons that may ultimately discourage a wider patronage. As with any genuine art, after all, common sensibilities are meant to be shocked and scandalized. It’s often ahead of its time. This is not to say, though, that Chassis is a work of such ground-breaking originality. One will recoil from this realization: that it’s a pauperized version of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman.

I say “pauperized” for several reasons. One, Chassis is a literal pauperization, the story is transplanted to an impoverished scenario. Unlike the domesticated Jeanne Dielman, the heroine of Chassis is a woman without a home. Nora inhabits no living space of her own, but a parking lot in a harbor compound, where the underside of her chosen cargo truck serves as her roof. Like a hermit cab without a shell, she must look constantly for a home to live under. She must lug her few belongings – a cardboard mat, a few clothes, a few cooking utensils – from one chassis to another, at the mercy of the trucks’ brisk schedules. Two, what Akerman takes a monumental 201 minutes to dramatize and make a statement, Alix accomplishes in a dense and intense 73 minutes, a veritable slice of life.

Chassis, like Akerman’s film, however, is about self-sacrifice, an entrapment in helpless circumstance, and what happens when one’s reason for it ceases to exist. In Chassis, Nora is a woman trapped in a cycle of poverty and prostitution. She resigns herself to selling herself very cheaply in order to support a hand-to-mouth existence for herself, her lover and her young, uncomprehending daughter.

Her daughter represents the last consolation, a final lifeline, for whom she can sustain her state of indignity. She will put her through school on any pain. She will promise her what she can only grant through acts that degrade her in the eyes of everybody. Her smile is reserved just for her child. Never for anyone else, not for her lover, not for the truck drivers who use her like so much latrine, not her demi-monde kind in this compound, not for the Mormon missionary who tries to evangelize her.

Everything about Chassis is grim and dreary. Depicted in ominous tones of black-and-white, it seems forever set in a twilight hour. One never knows whether it’s lightening or darkening. All one senses is its sepulchral nature. The gargantuan specters of cargo ships and maritime industry, meanwhile, tower in the distance, as though never to stop for the negligible fates of humanity. But what stays with us, more crucially, is the film’s chiaroscuro portrait of a woman with nowhere to go: Nora, with her funereal mask of a face, her sleep-walking steps, her lifeless stance – the shorthand of wretched resignation.

While the last drastic gesture of Jeanne Dielman is born out of a long, cumulative process of prostitution and thankless domesticity, we can pinpoint the last straw that produces Nora’s act of rebellion. With Nora’s raison d’etre intact, however, it is foreseeable that she could go on and on indefinitely as a martyrized woman. Whether, like Jeanne Dielman, Chassis will become a feminist favorite, however, remains to be seen. Viewers have been reportedly put off by its unrelieved bleakness and hopelessness, remarking how utterly different Alix has turned out to be since the days of Donsol and Kadin. But that’s beside the point. To repress the reality depicted in Chassis just to humor our squeamish bourgeois sensibilities is just wrong; wronger when we do nothing from the comfort of our armchairs.