For filmmaker Lawrence Fajardo, social interaction with the audience is far more important than sexual interaction on the screen. Some of the men solicit attention, others determined to avoid it. But all are in search of human connection however short or sordid. Cinema Parausan, one of Erotica Manila’s (Vivamax, 2023) four episodes functions best in its voyeuristic, sociological mode, offering fragmentary glimpses of complicated lives and the complicated social rituals that shape them. Lorna (Azi Acosta) and Gab (Alex Medina) are acting out an elaborate choreography of desire and denial. There is no need for secondhand moralizing in the presence of such rich and varied human material. Girl 11 is predicated on the power of loneliness and longing, an inarticulate desire to connect to life and this desire delivers the dramatic thrust. Each emotional misfire provides a new layer of meaning. Girl 11 is governed by a narrator, in this case Manila Daily journalist Steven (Joseph Elizalde) whose world folds into and out of itself. Fajardo demonstrates with the execution of the last line of dialogue, one of devastating, succinct finality and all that leads up to it, a mastery of dialogue as sound and sound as delivered through the cinema-specific device of voiceover narration. The MILF and the OJT, mixes an existential study in anomie with comedy in the person of haughty actress Beatrice (Mercedes Cabral). Her attitude gives a predatory (even proto-cougar) quality. Less interested in the fluidic facts that dominate teen sex comedies, The MILF and the OJT examines varieties of discomfort. Fajardo specializes in extruding just enough of the vulnerability underlying Beatrice’s facade, never better than in the scene where she lays out her expectations.
Fajardo takes a character whose actions and vacillations veer to the contrived and makes us believe her charm as well as her capricious whims. Jico (Vince Rillon) is ethical that we are forced to act pretty much as he does, even in his most extreme moments. His acute honesty is accurately drawn that we hardly know whether to laugh or look inside ourselves. Sex is a disruptive force in Death by O that it succeeded in reducing screen sex to a fashion accessory. Its purpose is to embellish a story with enough discrete fillips of titillation and soft core fantasy to quicken the pulse without causing palpitations. It crashes through the mold by acknowledging that sex can have catastrophic consequences. Brix (Felix Roco) and his wife Elya (Alona Navarro) are so besotted that when the urge overtakes them, they have sex and their frantic rutting, instead of satiety leaves them raw and aching for more. Death by O has a taut script that digs into the characters' domestic life without wasting a word. It helps ground the film whose visual imagination hovers somewhere between soap opera and pop surrealism. Fajardo knows exactly the type of effect he wants to achieve and gets it. He builds a complex relationship between his characters and the viewer. Fajardo wants us to see sex as a cocoon, so he genuinely tries to show what attracts his characters to each other. His earnest objectification of actors’ bodies is often compelling. We look at bodies in motion and see them as body parts first and then people trying to get lost in each other, giving each other pleasure and to remain lost in sensations that will always remain mysterious to anyone who isn’t experiencing them first-hand.
Sound Designer: Dale Martin
Music By: Emerzon Texon
Editors: Lawrence Fajardo, Jobin Ballesteros
Production Designer: Jed Sicangco
Director of Photography: Nor Domingo, LPS
Screenplay: Jim Flores, Miguel Legaspi
Directed By: Lawrence Fajardo
