Kasunduan (Cinebro, 2018) is a drama of the interpenetration of an ostensibly legitimate society - underground sports and the violent reign of organized crime. The central plotline is August Montemayor’s (Ejay Falcon) vaunted independence. The little world to which he belongs and the larger one to which he connects is a man’s world. Yet Kasunduan doesn’t psychologize his behavior. The logic is clear and consistent and the action doesn’t come off as willful symbolism. Rather, August's character isn’t diagnosed or traced to specific personal experiences or explained by aspects of backstory. The peculiarity of the film and its enduring inspiration is August's transformation into an opaque and external unit, a negative mirror that makes him a perfect and closed embodiment of the milieu to which he belongs. What consumes him in the wider world is equalled by the self-shredding fury of his suffering which also gets its supreme expression in fighting. Lawrence Fajardo films the underground fighting sequence in kinetic closeups that render the cruelty and the pleasure in inflicting pain, the destructive frenzy, the passion, and the virtual serenity of agony and grace in suffering. When August is ferociously beaten, showing him in a terrifyingly patient exaltation of anticipation of pain is a moment of conscience in torment that glows and flares only briefly, but with an intensity to burn a hole in the screen. The compact, compressed solidity with which August’s unilluminated, impersonal character is composed makes him not a cipher or a void but a distillation of the worst of the particular world he lives in and a paradoxical hero whose ability to win is itself an indictment of the world at large. From the metaphor of fighting to succeed, August actually fights with carnal possessiveness. From discarding traditional morality comes cavalier indifference.
Fajardo doesn’t dramatize the process but, rather, unites the action and the character with the milieu which is why so much of the best of Kasunduan is less a matter of action than of inaction, of potential energy, of the storm that’s brewing rather than the one that’s unleashed. The movie’s palette stylizes the drama and abstracts the action, detaching it from immediate experience and emphasizing stark lines and forms at the expense of detail, ideas in lieu of specifics. Kasunduan is distinguished from Fajardo’s later films by its stillness and abstraction. This matter of style is another thing that Kasunduan shares with A Hard Day (2021) and Fajardo conjures his ideas with similar dramatic strategy. It’s a film of gazes and pauses, of the power of the unexpressed and the undisplayed, of a mental life that expands beyond one character’s thoughts that echo outward as the common state of things. Long takes, featuring talk in near-stillness, in off-balance compositions that emphasize empty spaces before or behind characters are shot and edited to emphasize suspended moments which are terrifyingly tense with the violence that feeds them. There’s a widespread and mistaken notion that humanism in Filipino cinema is inseparable from the meticulous detailing of personal motives and histories. This has led to the commonplace of describing commercial films as plot-driven and artistically ambitious ones as character-driven and to presume that the latter belongs to the realm of finer feelings and broader conscience. Fajardo’s best films rely on character and psychology as springboards for action that nonetheless surpasses its personal specifics to develop through aesthetic ideas, a philosophical vision.
Sound Supervision: Immanuel T. Verona, Aian Louie D. Caro
Music By: Peter Legaste, Rephael Catap
Edited By: Law Fajardo
Cinematography By: Albert Banzon
Screenplay By: Enrico N. Santos, Anton Santa Maria, Rennes Soriano, John Bedia
Directed By: Lawrence Fajardo
