SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     Kung Kasalanan Man (Viva Films, 1989) is a movie where morality is grey and whether a character is likable is beside the point. But almost immediately, the film makes it clear whom we’re supposed to be a little more sympathetic. Should our loyalties be with Irma (Dina Bonnevie) or should they be with Jo, the impostor (also played by Bonnevie)? Soap operas tend to feel a bit off the rails — like they’re continuously improvising crazy developments in the plot to maintain our interest regardless of quality. Kung Kasalanan Man, in contrast, has twists that feel satisfactorily purposeful when they materialize, it’s like they’re falling into place. There is something good about Jo (Timmy Cruz) that is ultimately not so good. She can’t seem to be satisfied. She wants, she lacks. There’s an underlying resentment of what her best friend possesses. But in not recognizing, acknowledging what she has, Jo throws away all that’s worth having. A little bit into the movie, Jo is mistaken by Aling Miding (Vangie Labalan), one of Irma’s housemaids — an innocuous blunder that becomes an inciting incident. It plants a wicked idea in Jo’s head. Through reconstructive plastic surgery she became Irma and thus rid herself of all her woes. This scheme is so overwrought that, from a distance, it sounds like a dark joke — a satirization of how far a soap opera might go to get its audience agog. The plot sticks close to her and doesn’t stray to extraneous characters. We see her machinations of deceit up close and personal, but Bonnevie plays Jo’s desperation with enough pain to take her seriously: her emotional yearning for a life better than her own, though not resulting in excusable action, resonates. We’re not alienated because we can fundamentally understand her mode of thinking; for the less empathetic viewer, Kung Kasalanan Man at least establishes enough interest so that we can’t help but want to compulsively watch to find out how long Jo can keep up the charade. 

     After deciding that the one thing in her life she cares about — her boyfriend, Dan (Tonton Gutierrez) — still isn’t enough to reconsider the potential pitfalls of this outré scheme, Jo succeeds. She isn’t able to exult in the material joys of being Irma for very long. In the guise of her best friend she discovers just how much Dan loved her and this confirmation of a passion she’d taken for granted eats at her. Then we discover that she was jilted and beaten to a pulp by her lover, the sleazy Alvaro (Julio Diaz). Many melodramas find their principal characters saddled with hardship despite not necessarily doing anything wrong, which only makes them more sympathetic. Jo, by comparison, is like a spider who has gotten trapped in her own web. She would have been fine had she not spun anything in the first place. Bonnevie is sensational in both roles; when the camera rests on her face in close-up during a particularly emotive moment, there’s a floridness to her performance, but that’s part of what makes the movie so magnetic — Bonnevie knows how to complement the excesses of the plot. She’s adept at achieving emotional believability that also looks beautiful when played for the camera. As Irma she is bland, wistful, introverted—the sort of character she usually plays when put upon. As Jo, she swaggers, talks boldly and generally behaves toward herself—or she toward others. The direct juxtaposition of Bonnevie's two familiar types of roles, with herself—expertly photographed, incidentally—playing both of them, inclines to disconcert. The trick is too patent to be illusory, the situation too theatrically contrived. Gutierrez is agreeable as the object of both women's love and selfishness, though he is never any more than just an object, while Diaz registers masculine adulation. Eddie Garcia directing stylishly, shrewdly uses mirrors to remind Jo of all the deceit she has wrought. They’re like tangible manifestations of her inner consciousness and what she has done after a successful duplicity has put an arrogance in her step. There’s an otherworldly eeriness to the film’s menace, with its flouted ideas of an evil other around to seize one’s life, this feels ingeniously addressed by Jaime Fabregas' musical score. Garcia is bold enough to enlist the viewer on Jo’s side. Not, perhaps, in overt complicity, but rather in a deep-rooted emotional identification with her longing for a better life. Kung Kasalanan Man takes a darker and more jaded view of morality. Melodrama is a critical instrument of a society that has created it to show its desires, limitations and longings. 

Production Design: Manny B. Morfe

Cinematography: Joe Batac, Jr., F.S.C.

Sound Supervision: Rolly Ruta

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.

Musical Director: Jaime Fabregas

Screenplay: Amado Lacuesta, Jr., Raquel Villavicencio

Directed By: Eddie Garcia

     Elwood Perez finds the right tone in Diborsyada (Regal Films, Inc., 1979). And it’s not always very easy to find because he wants to make his film both true and funny, not sacrificing laughs for the truth. Diborsyada resembles Divorce Pilipino Style (1976) not only in its insight and precise observation of behavior, but also with the emotional satisfaction it provides — Perez isn’t afraid to pull out all the romantic stops at the right moment. He wants to record the exact textures and ways of speech, the emotional complexities of his characters and point out the empty and hiding places in their lives. But Perez is not a slice-of-life artist. He starts from real and sooner or later arrives at a release and the movie depends on how well he controls the release. In Dibrosyada, he has prepared his ground so carefully that we not only care but even believe when (Gina) Gina Alajar falls in love with sexy businessman, Jim (Jimi Melendez). He was the perfect casting here and the Alajar character has been so wonderfully realized that we’d even buy it if she met and fell in love with Melendez as himself. There are scenes in Diborsyada so well written and acted that our laughter is unsettling, the laughter of exact recognition. The first scene of Gina with girlfriends Wendy (Deborah Sun) and Shirley (Bibeth Orteza) is presented with precise accuracy, all the words and attitudes ring true. The interplay between Gina, her mother, Seferina (Perla Bautista) and mother-in-law Jane (Marissa Delgado) is also wonderfully well understood. Great thought, care and love must have gone into the writing of Diborsyada, but great courage went into the acting too. Alajar takes chances here and never seems concerned about protecting herself and reveals as much in a character as anyone has. The luminosity in her performance was all the more joyful. It’s a lesson for critics on the dangers of assessing performance in a movie, a medium in which the actors may be more at the mercy of the other craftsmen than we can easily see. Perez decided to go with his intuition and he was spectacularly right. We have to understand how completely Gina was a married woman, it's a journey that Perez makes into one of the funniest, truest, sometimes most heartbreaking movies I've ever seen. 

     The going is sometimes pretty rough, especially when Gina's trying to make sense out of things after Mike (Michael de Mesa) leaves her. What does the movie really say, about women in our society? It's not a message picture — it’s supposed to make us feel what the woman in this situation (and therefore many women in the same situation) might go through when a marriage ends. Diborsyada is wise to spend enough time at the top establishing the marriage as an apparently happy one, the sex between Gina and Mike, as her husband is as easy and familiar as it is occasionally erotic. The scenes with Melendez are perhaps the trickiest in the film. There’s the temptation to accuse Perez of an improbably happy ending. Having given herself to one man, unwisely as it turned out, Gina will now keep permanent possession of herself. She has to take two chances: the chance of falling in love and the chance that Jim won’t settle for less than all of her.  He is a man who is perfectly right and perfectly wrong for her. Gina takes chances, keeping her independence while shouldering the burden of his dependence on her (and the shots are the visualization of her choice). Alajar's out on an emotional limb, letting us see and experience things that many actresses simply couldn't reveal. Perez takes chances, too. He wants Diborsyada to be true. We have to believe at every moment that life itself is being considered here, but the movie has to be funny, too. He won't settle for less than the truth and the humor and wonder of Diborsyada is that he gets it. Perez's achievement is distinctively choreographic, For all the trenchant conversation, he sets the characters into mad motion, alone and together — jogging, dancing, fighting, strolling and embracing. When the unmoored Gina finds a new lover — her struggle for independence, after a life of comfortable subordination, resumes and it’s as much a matter of her physical space as her emotional one. And Perez does it in a movie so firmly in control of its language, body movement, personal interplays and its most fleeting facial expressions that we’re touched by real human sensibilities. In Diborsyada, Elwood Perez and Gina Alajar discover beautiful and worthy things about women.

Sound Supervision: Rolly Ruta, Vic Macamay

Production Design: Ulay Tantoco

Director of Cinematography: Johnny Araojo

Screenplay: Toto Belano

Music: Lutgardo Labad

Film Editor: Rogelio Salvador

Direction: Elwood Perez

     Lawrence Fajardo is a subtle filmmaker reveling in the depiction of everyday life acted out amongst traditional activities meant to reflect the changing cultural landscape that often place its inhabitants at uncomfortable odds. Prinsesa (Cinema One Originals, Self-Service Productions, Solito Arts,  Pixel Art Media Production Co., 2007) starts out with the Philippines in political and economic turmoil, a difficult time of recovery and transition. The simple but effective approach and stylistic rigor with which Fajardo controlled his framings are very much evident here. Early in his career, he sought to find and develop a way of seeing and showing the world that felt right to him as it happened, the use of long shots, taken with a mostly stationary camera from an unusual angle in relation to the characters in frame; simple cuts rather than fades, wipes or dissolves, montage sequences of landscapes not only to begin films but also to provide punctuation and linkages between narrative scenes, a preference for ultra-naturalistic, everyday dialogue, often of the most seemingly trivial kind and a related preference for low­-key, almost de-dramatized stories evocative of the ordinary lives who make up the major part both of the population and presumably, of Fajardo’s audience. The relationship between a parent and a child is wired for heartbreak. In fact it translates human emotion and experience in ways few movies have. Go beyond the apparent simplicity and you will discover immense sophistication at play in their construction and meaning. Take, for example, the subtle treatment of the interrelated themes of loneliness, nostalgia and familial responsibility. But Prinsesa isn’t a child-in-peril melodrama or a punitive fable of parental irresponsibility. Its structure emerges through a pattern of perceptions and moods. Sometimes Princess (Katrina "Hopia" Legaspi) and her father, Mar (Romnick Sarmenta) fail to connect. Sometimes they’re silly and sometimes they relax into an easy, almost wordless intimacy. Capturing the thick, complex reality of their bond — registering its quick, microscopic fluctuations and tracking its slow tectonic shifts — is Fajardo’s great achievement. And Sarmenta and Legaspi’s as well. They are so natural, so light and grave and particular, that they don’t seem to be acting at all. It’s hard to find a critical language to account for Prinsesa’s delicacy and intimacy. This is partly because Fajardo is reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling. 

     Though the film’s real focus is on what will happen between Princess and her father and even that aspect is quite complex enough in itself, given that both have a habit of concealing their real feelings, the relationship is endlessly reflected in and refracted through the experiences of the other characters in the film: not just his sister Marie (Shamaine Buencamino), but friends Enrico (Archi Adamos) and Cisco (Andre Solano). These characters’experiences and words of advice serve a number of functions: they flesh out and enrich the story, they provide the hesitant Mar with an array of options to consider; they show that his problems are common and far from extraordinary and they ensure that we don’t identify or sympathize too simplistically with either Mar or his daughter. Fajardo makes us feel deeply about his characters and does so by being honest rather than by manipulating the viewer. If we are enormously moved at the end of his film, it is not because anyone pushed the right buttons but because we have seen something that strikes us as truthful. There are, I’d suggest, various reasons for this impression of veracity. First, is the subtle way in which Fajardo contextualizes his story and characters within the wider world. Second, there is his abiding penchant for restraint and understatement, most evident in the performances. What Sarmenta does in this role goes beyond good acting. It's a risky move. He bares his soul as Mar, displaying a vulnerability that is certainly not easy to unearth from one's self. The way he acts is often loving and caring. He holds back his feelings to try and make a good life for his daughter, but ultimately it's the fact that this life is causing him such pain. Sarmenta is channeling something from within, beyond just acting. He and Legaspi both leave parts of themselves embedded into the film itself. Buencamino has always impressed, offering an assessment that is extremely true. Though the narrative content might be suggestive of a weepie, for the most part, Prinsesa is anything but. What’s resonant is that we are made to realize that words are both self-indulgent and true at one and the same time. There’s no sentimentality, only profound compassion.

Director: Lawrence Fajardo

Director of Photography: Jun Aves, Lawrence Fajardo

Screenplay: Jade Snow Calderon, Lawrence Fajardo, Dado Lumibao, Jim Flores

Production Designer: Lexter Tarriela

Editors: Lawrence Fajardo, John Wong, Conrado M. Zaguirre Jr.

Sound Design: Jobin Ballesteros

Musical Score: Jimmy Bondoc, DJ Myk Salomon, Jobin Ballesteros

     Lino Brocka's Pasan Ko ang Daigdig (Viva Films, 1987) is a remake of an already-terrific film, the 1956 Sampaguita picture Gilda with Lolita Rodriguez and Eddie Arenas, is one of the finest melodramas of its day so it's no little thing that Pasan Ko ang Daigdig improves upon the original in almost every way, the sophistication of its writing and the metanarrative complexity of its drama. In a role that tests every single skill Sharon Cuneta ever displayed as a performer, her apologetic nervousness, her ability to swiftly inhabit wounded melancholy with a speed that suggests it was always secretly hiding there (aided by how haunted and solemn her face is), her gift for frustrated reaction shots timed perfectly for pathos and of course, her one-of-a-kind stage presence. Her first number (the film has no book numbers, which makes it even clearer that these are showcases for Cuneta) pouring her soul and Lupe's into belting Araw-Araw Gabi-Gabi, as the camera steadily tracks her, until she strikes a final tableaux using her body to channel the energies flowing through her. There's no exhausting how immediately it proves Lupe's talent. As the driving engine for the whole movie, Pasan Ko ang Daigdig does trade pretty heavily on Cuneta's star power, but it's never just red meat for the fans. She's making very clear decisions about how she'd play the numbers, how Lupe would play the numbers and proceeds to sock us in the face with nonstop singing.   

     Beyond competition, she is well matched by Marilen Martinez's Ruffy, who makes her plunge with panache, leaving a blazing trail of sound professional acting behind. Casting aside familiar trappings, they emerge as players of the subtlest quality registering the finest shades of emotion. Brocka's skill with actors is still apparent. Loretta Marquez's Metring evokes an intense feeling of sympathy and helplessness over being unable to save herself from her all too human weakness. Mario Montenegro has a couple of terrific scenes as Lupe's record producer, Don Ignacio. Princess Punzalan is quietly wonderful as Luming. The filmmaking generally isn't show, outside of the numbers, but Brocka and his crew do exactly the right amount of work to frame the character drama for greatest effect. It's an account of the romance of a singer headed for stardom and her admirer Carding (Tonton Gutierrez), a long-time friend and neighbor waiting tables at the night club where she performs, would have very little force or freshness in this worldly wise day and age if it weren't played within the surroundings of significant performance. So it is this build-up that gives background to the film's poignance. What's fascinating is that Pasan Ko ang Daigdig gains a large measure of its sadness from the way necessity has dictated their presentation.

Production Designer: Edgar Martin Littaua

Sound Supervision: Vic Macamay

Director of Photography: Rody Lacap

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.

Musical Director: Willy Cruz

Screenplay: Rene O. Villanueva, Orlando Nadres

Directed By: Lino Brocka

     Once upon a time long, long ago, fairytales were more than just imaginative flights of fancy. They weren't cute or cuddly, aligned with strategic marketing to create excellent cross promotion and/or marketing advantages. No, back when they were first formed, fairytales had more in common with urban legends than they did with wish fulfillment, ego integrity and lessons about sharing. If they were anything, a fairytale was a parable, a clear cautionary example of avoiding certain situations and individuals wrapped up in prosaic pomp and circumstance. They also stood as a manner of social redistribution, a chance for the commoner to laugh at the crown or sneer at the wealthy and privileged. Today, all that’s gone. In its place are politically correct platitudes and non-violent positivity. From the moment Tala (Felicity Kyle Napuli) discovers the Fairy's (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) lair, we witness the kind of vital visual splendor that has been missing from most productions. Thanks to Kenneth Dagatan’s wonderful combination of the sinister with the sublime, the whimsical elements become deep and rather disconcerting. Like the Brothers Grimm before him, here is a filmmaker who wants to give fairytales back their teeth. The journey at the center of the story is meant to symbolize the internal struggles that any young person must face when confronted by the grown-up world. Indeed, Dagatan argues that what Tala and her brother Bayani (James Mavie Estrella) faces is the temptation of choice and the confidence to decide direction for oneself. Courage is a key element in the narrative themes. We are supposed to see self-sacrifice and bravery parallel and surpass the brutal tactics resulting in a realization of what truly matters in a time of war. Take the relationship between Ligaya (Beauty Gonzalez) and her husband. In order to survive, she must trust her husband, Romualdo (Arnold Reyes) and it’s a price she’s willing to pay with her own expiring existence.