As of this writing, Filipino auteur Lav Diaz has won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival for his eight-hour opus, Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis). He adds this trophy to last year’s Locarno winner From What Is Before (Mula Sa Kung Ano Ang Noon), and to several dozen best film citations for Norte, The End of History (Norte, Hangganan Ng Kasaysayan) the year before that. Lav Diaz is probably the most famous Filipino filmmaker in the world at present, but in his own country he is less recognisable to the general audience than a disqualified contestant in a reality show.
The career of Lav Diaz, lionised abroad and largely obscure at home, sums up the gulf between independent arthouse cinema and commercial entertainment in the Philippines, a former American colony whose history is intertwined with film. (Sometimes it even seems that the movies are the reality and history the fiction.) Filipino cinephiles and academics are expected to flock to the screenings of Lullaby, but even with box-office stars John Lloyd Cruz and Piolo Pascual in the cast, the movie is not likely to pull in the general audience.
The average moviegoer will prefer a raucous comedy like Beauty and the Bestie starring the reigning box-office queen Vice Ganda, or the romantic drama A Second Chance starring Bea Alonzo and John Lloyd Cruz, or My Bebe Love #KiligPaMore featuring the massively popular “loveteam” of Alden Richards and Maine Mendoza, aka AlDub. This is by no means a recent development: there has always been a chasm between ambitious, challenging cinema and mass market fare, in the Philippines and elsewhere.
Beauty and the Bestie was the year’s box-office champion with unofficial grosses (there are no official figures from the Metro Manila Film Festival in December) of Php526,000,000.
Even with the contested box-office results from that festival, Vice Ganda now has the distinction of having starred in five of the 10 top-grossing Filipino films of all time. Vice Ganda can no longer be dismissed as a novelty: she is the film industry. The sudden death in February of filmmaker Wenn Deramas, who directed all of Vice Ganda’s blockbusters, will test her hold over the audience.
My Bebe Love #KiligPaMore starred veteran comedians Vic Sotto and Ai Ai de las Alas, but public attention was focused on Richards and Mendoza, whose segment on a long-running noontime variety show set a global record for the number of tweets within 24 hours (41 million). According to unofficial reports, the movie grossed Php385,000,000 during its theatrical run.
There were times in the last year when it seemed that change had finally arrived in the film industry. The independently-produced romantic comedy English Only, Please made a strong showing in the previous year’s Metro Manila film festival and continued to draw crowds in January. Though it stayed close to the tested romcom formula, it steered clear of the tiresome cliches that weigh down the typical studio product. Director Dan Villagas and writer Antoinette Jadaone found ways to freshen up the material. The movie made a star of Jennylyn Mercado at last, and highlighted a different side of screen beefcake Derek Ramsay.
In February, Antoinette Jadaone’s feature That Thing Called Tadhana (Destiny), a two-character romantic road movie in the style of Before Sunrise became a blockbuster. Carried by its charming leads Angelica Panganiban and J.M. De Guzman, it seemed to embody the millennial audience’s idea of romance. Tadhana grossed Php134,000,000, an unheard-of sum for a low-budget indie made with a Php2,000,000 grant from the Cinema One Originals Festival.
At this point the reigning studio powers took note of the indie breakouts and did what they do best: take the winning elements of these little movies and make bigger, glitzier versions. Star Cinema’s Jadaone-helmed You’re My Boss starring Toni Gonzaga and Coco Martin opened in April to the tune of Php210,000,000. In July, Star Cinema’s The Break-Up Playlist, written by Jadaone and directed by Villegas, was headlined by two of the biggest stars in the country, Sarah Geronimo and Piolo Pascual.
The result, though a commercial success earning Php148,000,000, was somehow less than the sum of its parts. Geronimo and Pascual play indie rock musicians, a casting coup that is the definition of “cognitive dissonance”. To close the year, Jadaone wrote and directed the star-studded All You Need Is Pag-Ibig (Love), which really should’ve been called Pag-Ibig, Actually. By then the formula was showing signs of exhaustion.
Other blockbusters included Crazy Beautiful You, directed by Mae Czarina Cruz-Alviar and starring another young love team, Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla (Box office: Php322,000,000), and the adultery drama The Love Affair, directed by Nuel Naval and starring Richard Gomez, Dawn Zulueta and Bea Alonzo (Php300,000,000). Felix Manalo, the official biopic of the founder of Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) or Church of Christ, set three Guinness World Records with its premiere: the largest audience in a film premiere, the largest audience in a film screening, and the largest paying audience for a film premiere. Written by the INC’s evangelism head Bienvenido Santiago, and directed by Joel Lamangan, Felix Manalo starred Dennis Trillo and virtually every actor in the local film industry, plus 8,000 extras. The movie earned Php225,000,000.
If any movie in 2015 could claim to be a game-changer it was Heneral Luna, a biopic of the revolutionary Antonio Luna, produced by Artikulo Uno (Eduardo Rocha and Fernando Ortigas) and directed by Jerrold Tarog. With no big-name stars or media-spanning marketing campaign, Heneral Luna struggled initially at the box-office. Just when it seemed that the film would be pulled out of theatres, something wonderful happened: the moviegoers themselves saved it. They championed the film, taking to Facebook and Twitter to urge people to watch it.
The flamboyant, obstreperous hero Antonio Luna (John Arcilla), who stood against the political opportunists who would sell out to Spain and then the US, struck a chord with viewers hungry to know about their own history. Enthusiastic word of mouth not only saved Heneral Luna, it made this feisty indie one of the biggest hits of the year (Php256,000,000). Along the way, it exposed gaping holes in the teaching of Philippine history, and questioned the version of history that has been propagated by the ruling class. It also demonstrated the sheer power of social media, which other films have tried to harness with varying results.
The mainstream was understandably rattled by this development. Towards the end of the year, Star Cinema brought out what looked to be a hurried sequel to one of its best-loved hits, Cathy Garcia Molina’s One More Chance. Bea Alonzo and John Lloyd Cruz returned as the audience’s favorite couple, this time married but once again on the verge of separation. The viewers did not care if the movie was rushed. It was what they wanted.
With the Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival taking a break, other indie competitions like Cinema One and QCinema (Quezon City Film Festival) did more than fill the gap. The winner at QCinema was Apocalypse Child by Monster Jimenez and Mario Cornejo, the compelling story of a man facing the myths surrounding his life, beginning with the one about Francis Ford Coppola being his father. At Cinema One it was Carl Joseph Papa’s innovative Manang Biring and Ara Chawdhury’s crazy comedy Miss Bulalacao.
Along with the questionable quality of films in the official selection, controversy is a staple of the Metro Manila Film Festival, during which only local films are screened in theatres. This year there were two big controversies: the alleged ticket-switching to fix the box-office results, and the disqualification of the movie Honour Thy Father from best picture consideration. As always, hackles rose, tempers flared, statements about the bleak future of Philippine cinema were made, and a congressional inquiry was convened. Whether anything comes of this inquiry remains to be seen. Every year the continued existence of the Metro Manila Film Festival is called into question, and every year it returns like a zombie that can’t be killed.
2016 being an election year, the real question is: can the movies compete with politics, and can we tell them apart?
Note: 1 php equals about 2 US cents
Jessica Zafra