Prosti

Erik Matti has since the late 1990s made his career in Filipino cinema with a suite of stylish, gritty dramas usually set in a working class urban milieu. His directorial career began with a sequel to Scorpio Nights, Peque Gallaga’s 1984 classic of voyeurism, sex and irony (and humorous riposte to Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses). The themes of schoolgirl tease and middle age male lust in Matti’s sequel are recast more seriously in Prosti, one of his finest films to date. The young and uninitiated Dita goes to work as a prostitute in Madam Xedes’ discreet but busy brothel. Xedes quickly instructs Dita in the rules of the business, servicing customers and most important, no sex with her handler and pimp, the tough Nonoy who ferries her around in a tricycle. As Dita settles into her new profession, we glimpse vignettes of brothel life and the little dreams and aspirations of the women who work there. But Dita has another life - a student by day, she is pursued by a classmate, the virgin Alex. As Dita develops an emotional hardness in her profession, she paradoxically awakens Nonoy’s long repressed personal desires. Their passion transgresses Madam Xedes’ iron rule and leads to a dramatic climax. Largely devised from workshop improvisations, and constructed as an ensemble film, Matti aimed to depart from the clichés of Filipino films about prostitution. Setting the brothel in an aging mansion in a corner of old Manila, and shot in a glowing suffused light, Matti indirectly suggests another time and another place, creating a separate and almost self-contained world, a family with its own rules, problems and dramas. The customers - including the “respectable” elite of politicians, cops, academics - bring the corruption of the outside world into this “other” society that seems almost pure by comparison. With these formalistic flourishes and an especially convincing performance by Jay Manalo, Matti creates a drama of two doomed lovers who escape one system only to be trapped in the larger prison of life itself where in Matti’s view “everyone is a prostitute, one way or the other.”