2003 was another poor year for Philippine cinema. Political
instability, continued depreciation of the peso against the
dollar, more censorship, and high taxation of the industry
(at almost 30% of the gross, one of the heaviest in the
world) continued to take their toll. As a result, cheap sex
flicks, unsubtle comedies, and heavy-handed melodramas
were pretty much all that was produced. The industry’s
prospects aren’t likely to improve, either. Members of the
Director’s Guild of the Philippines (DGPI) believe film production
will not exceed forty films next year. In the late
Nineties, production ranged from 100 to 200 films a year,
the industry’s output sometimes outstripping Hong Kong.
But in spite of the grim news, a few gems turned-up here
and there, many of them produced independently. Maryo J.
de los Reyes’ Magnifico is a wholesome family picture that,
for once, is actually quite good. The movie lacks complicated
sub-plots, heavy melodrama, sadistic villains, and
masochistic heroes - everything that is wrong with recent
Filipino movies, in fact. It’s about a boy with the odd name
of Magnifico (Jiro Mano), who goes about trying to help
family and neighbors. Magnifico himself isn’t anything special.
All he has in his favour is the innocence to attempt the
impossible, the imagination to think up ways of attempting
it, and the heart to persevere. It’s a modest film with modest
virtues. It shows realism without being dull, has funny
moments that remain true to character and situation, and
has enough heart to just about touch the audience. All in
all, it’s a modest miracle.
Gil Portes’ Munting Tinig (Small Voices), which premiered
last year but was given a commercial release this year, is
about a young woman (Alessandra de Rossi) who arrives
at a small town as a substitute teacher. She’s not much
older than the students themselves, who are all from poor
families. The teacher aspires to uplift her students, and
concocts a plan where she trains the class into a crack
choral group and has them enter a singing contest. You
can almost smell the various movies thrown into this mix:
Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less, Majid Majidi’s Children of
Heaven, and an ending straight out of Sister Act. But borrowing,
which can be fine in movies, is not the problem. It’s
simply that the film is so erratically made and poorly paced
that the only fun comes from recognising the borrowings.
Characterisation plays a crucial role in films with small production
budgets, but here, it’s mostly a hit-or-miss affair (in
fact, more a miss-than-hit affair). De Rossi plays the standard-
issue noble educator, eyes huge with indignation at
the tremendous inadequacies of the Philippine educational
system - doesn’t she watch the evening news?. She’s so
relentlessly good, she ends up a dull cipher. It’s a small film
with a small voice. Unfortunately, that voice is off-key.
Wenn V. Deramas’ Tanging Ina is a surprisingly supple comedy
that depends on the generous, if unglamorous, comic
and acting talents of Ai-Ai de las Alas. Ai-Ai is, to put it kindly,
odd to look at: bountiful bosom and supermodel legs are
attached to a face with a horse’s jaw. Men find her attractive
enough to marry, and God finds her amusing enough
to play the butt to some of his crueler jokes. The first twenty
minutes are the film’s high point. Deramas uses the
standard tropes of Filipino comedy - speeded-up slapstick,
absurdist imagery, semaphoring silent acting - in the service
of creating a fairly original comic character. The mother
is hapless creature of fate, doing her best to keep her
sizeable chin above water as she marries one husband
after another.
Along the way Deramas (with a script from Mel Mendoza
del Rosario, one of the better comedy writers working
today, and Keiko Aquino) scores a few satiric points. The
tendency of Filipinos to produce horrifyingly large families
(Ai-Ai eventually ends up with a dozen kids), the mad
scramble for decent jobs in an increasingly indecent economy,
and the value put on material wealth and respectability
are all lampooned. Perhaps the picture’s best joke is its
title. It more or less means “true Mother”, but it’s also a
pun on “‘tang ina”. “Puta ang ina” is an obscenity that
means “whore mother”. Thirdly, it spoofs the critical and
commercial hit Tanging Yaman (Only Treasure), which was
shown in the Far East Film Festival 2001. The film doesn’t
sustain its comic momentum. Two-thirds of the way through, it sags from all the tiresome tearjerking drama
piled on to underline Ai-Ai’s plight. Still, this is a film with
serious targets that it manages to skilfully skewer at least
half the time. Most local satires nowadays miss their targets
entirely, so that’s good going.
Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Noon at Ngayon (Then and Now) is
sequel to her classic Moral, about four women who are
good friends. Noon is set nineteen years later, but because
filmmakers didn’t use the original cast, you have trouble
recognising who is who. Diaz-Abaya, as usual, feels the
need to touch on current middle-class issues (closet gay
politicians, childless marriages), although the characters
have been so successful they’re more upper class now.
Star Cinema gave the picture its standard glossy-production-
values treatment - fashionable clothes, and glitzy
houses - in contrast to the original’s realism. But when you
start recognising the characters from the previous movie,
and when Ricky Lee (who wrote the script for both) introduces
a great hook, it becomes surprisingly engaging, and
indeed, even touching.
You might say Joel Lamangan’s Huling Birhen sa Lupa (The
Last Virgin on Earth) is the polar opposite of Diaz-Abaya’s.
The latter is set in Metro Manila, among the upper middleclass,
the former is set in a fishing community struggling to
stay above the poverty line. The latter starts weak and
ends strong, the former starts fascinating then spectacularly
self-destructs. Script, by Raquel Villavicencio (one of
the better women writers in Philippine cinema), has a priest
(Jay Manalo) washed up along the shores of an island
whose villagers have lost their faith in God. The priest is
actually a con man dressed in priestly robes who has an
affair with the village whore (Ara Mina). Together they cook
up a series of fake miracles which attract nation-wide
attention, and produce a small cottage industry exploiting
the sudden flood of tourists. Suddenly the miracles
become real. It’s an intriguing premise, almost the flip side
of Ishmael Bernal’s anti-religion classic Himala. In that,
here a holy miracle collapsed in disillusion and death, and
here an elaborate con turns into a search for genuine faith.
It’s good until the armed goons come out, the raping and
beatings begin, and everything takes on a markedly hysterical
tone.
Quark Henares’ Keka, about a woman serial killer (Katya
Santos), borrows heavily from Truffaut’s The Bride Wore
Black and Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Nothing wrong with borrowing,
but you still have to know how to make a film, and
Quark shows he can do that. He knows how to cut and
frame his images, and he knows how to put together his
shots and make them flow. In fact, he does it so well, he’s
a bit of an auteur. There are plot loopholes, but they don’t
totally destroy the enjoyment of the film. The psychology
isn’t deep, and it isn’t much of a character study of a
young girl turned vengeful psychotic. But Quark knows how
to inject just enough style to make the film watchable and
tell a plausible enough story so that we don’t feel we’re
being insulted. He knows how to keep his balance, in other
words.
Mario O’Hara’s Babae sa Breakwater (Woman of the
Breakwater) is about the communities along the Manila Bay
breakwater, perhaps the most marginalized people in the
city. They cling to the edge of Manila, literally. They put
together makeshift shelters from driftwood and floating
garbage and make a living off the sea by fishing, selling
what they find on shore, begging, and whoring. To this
wretched place arrive Basilio (a new actor with the softcore
porn name of “Kristofer King”) and his brother, hoping
for a better life in Manila. Basilio falls in love with
Paquita (Katherine Luna, yet another newcomer) a girl who
started whoring so early on that at her relatively young age
she’s riddled with sexually transmitted diseases and cov-ered with open sores. Threatening the two is “Bosing”
David (Gardo Verzosa), a former cop and cripple who holds
the breakwater area in his cruel grip.
Anyone familiar with the films of Lino Brocka will find the
story familiar. This provincial innocent who comes to the
big city to be corrupted and destroyed is a reprise of Julio
Madiaga’s character in Brocka’s classic Maynila sa Mga
Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon). Arguably,
you can’t improve on Maynila. The best you can do is make
a radically different variation of the original. Which O’Hara
accomplishes here.
Unlike Maynila, Breakwater doesn’t focus solely on the protagonist.
It’s eye wanders about, taking in other people,
like a wandering woman who likes to grab the crotches of
surrounding men. The most memorable of the lot is the
Visayan troubadour with his guitar (Yoyoy Villame, in a wonderful
supporting role). This troubadour is one of the best
examples of O’Hara taking off from Brocka’s social realism.
Villame’s songs act as musical transition between
scenes and as commentary on what’s going on. The songs
also work in a way Dennis Potter or many a Bollywood filmmaker
would recognize. They take bits of melody we’re all
familiar with and, inserting them at the right time and in the
right manner, provoking powerful feelings of nostalgia and
regret. Perhaps the loveliest, most moving passages in the
film have no dialogue, no significant narrative going on, but
simply show random bits of life: children splashing in the
sea, elderly lovers dancing in discarded wedding clothes,
couples strolling down Manila Bay in the moonlight, with
Villame singing a sad Visayan ballad in the background.
Then there’s O’Hara’s spirituality. Basilio tells Paquita that
his father, who is a fisherman, taught him to pray not to
God, but to the sea. Every day he would dip his head under
the water (it didn’t matter whether the water was filthy or
not) and emerge with something in hand. Peace, sometimes,
inner strength, sometimes, or occasionally one or
two pieces of gold jewellery. You might wonder at this ability
to pick up drowned gold at will (we call it “magic realism”
nowadays, but that’s really just a newfangled, imprecise
term for “fantasy”). Basilio’s odd little power may be
O’Hara’s way of demonstrating that old biblical saying
“sufficient unto the day”. God will always provide enough
for us to live on, if not much more. Basilio emerges with
maybe one or at most two gold pieces, not handfuls. It’s
more than just a magic trick, it’s a sign of Basilio’s innocence
and faith, a sign of nature’s divinity, and a sign that
this world is more than mere logic or realism.
Finally, there’s the film’s tone. Brocka’s Maynila felt thoroughly
grim. There was only Madiaga’s love scene to break
the mood. Breakwater, despite all the horror, violence, and
cruelty, allows for humour and unexpected moments of joy.
These people may suffer and scrounge, but in moments of
crisis they do try look out for each other the best they can.
Once in a while they even manage to enjoy life, putting on
party clothes found in suitcases floated in from the sea,
and then dancing to a sweet Visayan song. They may have
lost their innocence, their happiness, even the shirts off
their backs, but they have kept their humanity.
O’Hara sustains this delicate balancing act, this seesawing
between frail fantasy and brute reality, for the length of the
film. He shows in unstinting detail people suffering from
abject poverty, yet shows them transcending that suffering.
It’s easily the best local film of the past two years.
Noel Vera