Lawrence Fajardo emphasizes the gleaming, soulless surfaces in Walker (VMX, 2025), a film accurate and attentive enough to convey the appalling emptiness of streetwalker Alex's (Robb Guinto) world. Walker is attractive to look at, shot in a fluid, semi-poetic style. The story is told in fragments out of chronological sequence. The spectator is obliged to work at piecing them together. As criticism, however, if criticism this be, Walker is ultimately timid and evasive. It relies far too much on its self-consciously oblique approach, which tends to take center stage and far too little on genuine insight into the world it represents. This is a self-conscious film from a gifted director who has often been prepared to go where the mainstream doesn't flow. Successful in both, Fajardo has balanced his ability to make commercial hits with his desire to do more personal and innovative films. This one offers an interesting idea but falters in the casting. Once the novelty of the casting wears off, the performance offers nothing to hold onto, no meaningful insight into either the character, Alex or Guinto herself. There are layers upon layers here, Guinto taking on a serious acting role in which she plays a woman whose job is to make herself an object of male fantasy. Alex (and one can’t help but imagine, Guinto) are indistinguishable: blank, dull, prone to choosing her words carefully and choosing the most banal ones imaginable. On the rare occasions when the conversation shifts to alternative topics, it is seldom enhanced.
In what is either a commendably honest internal critique or more likely, an attempt to head off inevitable complaints about the performance, the film practically assures us, she’s playing someone who’s completely affectless. Either way, we’re left with little more than the pretty surfaces, which those inclined could presumably see at greater expanse in Guinto’s work. It would have been possible, I suppose, for Fajardo to work his way around the collapsed star at the center of his film if the characters in her orbit brought something to the encounters, if she were a mirror held up to their desires and disappointments. But the rest of the cast spends most of their time, like us, marveling at how closed off she is. The movie is short on information about the actual business of being a walker. The filmmakers seems to be supposing that the awfulness of most of these people means there is no high drama to be extracted from their lives. Does Mara's (Stephanie Raz) murder, for example or the fate of the innocent and not-so-innocent individuals, offer no material for tragedy? Is there something fundamentally different about the whoring that Guinto’s character does versus the whoring that everybody else in the film does? Bringing bits and pieces of this unpleasant, narcissistic life in Walker, for example, is not a satisfying substitute for explaining why such a social existence came into being and why it fell apart. No perspective at all, in this instance, means ignoring certain larger realities. Walker proves that a visually striking film can be made on the fly. But grab-and-run is a more fruitful strategy for images than scripts.
Sound Design: Nicole Rosacay
Musical Scorer: Mbella SineScore
Production Design: Ian Traifalgar, Endi "Hai" Balbuena
Editor: Ysabelle Denoga
Cinematographer: Albert Banzon
Screenplay: Jim Flores
Directed By: Lawrence Fajardo
