INTRACTABLE ATTRACTION

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     McArthur C. Alejandre's Silip sa Apoy (Viva Films, 2022) knows how much we enjoy seeing a character work boldly outside the rules. We keep waiting for the movie to lose its nerve and it never does. Working with Viva Films, which also produced My Husband, My Lover the year before, Alejandre cast Angeli Khang, who scuttled around various projects most notably as Alexa in Lawrence Fajardo’s Mahjong Nights. In a marvelous opening punctuated by Khang's face, Emma is an obstinate seductress of classic noir displaced in an erotic thriller. She's adept at thinking on her feet, weaponizing sexuality and manipulating simple-minded men. However, throughout the story, the motive for this woman's life-changing evasion is traced back to her husband Ben's (Sid Lucero) violence. He hits her, she acts shocked and hurt, but the surprise quickly melts into performative quiet. Khang keeps us at a distance, letting us guess how much the domestic altercation's indignancy shook the character. In any case, her following actions are swift and oriented around a straightforward impulse. It's difficult to parse out what actions are organic and what behaviors are calculated measures. 

     Emma makes love for Ben's horny amusement. She's in a moment of intimate pause that's only for us, the camera and the audience. There's no similar instant for contemplation in the ensuing narrative, seeing as Emma is constantly on the alert, seducing and setting the pieces on her mental chessboard that will result in a most astonishing checkmate. For her part, Khang is brilliant at this kind of opaque character construction. That's what attracts men in the film to her Emma. She feels impenetrable, a challenging impossibility that harkens back to how audiences regarded bigger-than-life movie stars. She's out of this world, but instead of alienation, this personal quality produces intractable attraction. Consider the seduction of her lover, Alfred (Paolo Gumabao). Cocksure and touched by a hint of self-aggrandizing intoxication, he never quite catches on to the full depth of Emma's deception. The way she does it is effortless, she tosses off her commands, aloof but never completely uninvested. The femme fatale never hides her contempt for the lesser creatures at her feet, becoming all the more eager to get a sign of unachievable approval. All that, and there's the way she moves. Khang embodies a physical demeanor characterized by great confidence that it's difficult to regard her as a sexual object. Alejandre deserves plenty of plaudits too. Ricky Lee’s screenplay is taut and gripping revealing devastating surprises along the way.


Sound Engineer: Immanuel Veroba

Musical Director: Von de Guzman

Production Designer: Ericson Navarro

Editor: Benjo Ferrer

Director of Photography: Daniel "Toto" Uy

Screenplay: Ricky Lee

Directed By: MacArthur C. Alejandre

FRONT AND CENTER

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     Loneliness and independence aren't opposites but twins, gemini states of being that can give even the shyest among us, courage to stride forth. Yet Maryo J. delos Reyes and Nora Aunor, paired as director and lead actor for Naglalayag (Angora Films International, 2004), capture this not-really-a paradox in a cerebral pas de deux, as if each has found an unspoken understanding in each other. Their seemingly disparate sensibilities - Delos Reyes's attention to craft and sense of decorum, Aunor's fortright crispiness, which serves as a fortress for her eggshell fragility - merge in this odd-couple picture. Naglalayag is about how fear of living is more paralyzing than fear of death. Its ending should seem sad, yet it's piercingly jubilant, like a celebratory cocktail with a complex, bittersweet finish. Delos Reyes heightens the film's tragedy by actively empathizing with all of his subjects, especially Dorinda, whose mild restlessness is treated with profound sensitivity. Aunor beautifully imbues Dorinda with a recognizable sense of discontent (she's not unhappy, per se, but she's quietly weary of middle-aged life doldrums), and Delos Reyes supports her performance with warm compositions and delicate close-ups, placing her perspective front and center. Aunor's eyes always seem to be giving her feelings away, and so every time she widens, lowers or shifts them there is a great deal of suspense.

     Naglalayag is a romance between Dorinda and Noah (Yul Servo), two people in search of an unnameable connection, and we warm to the way they find solace in each other. But the fleeting nature of this affair is its most golden element; it is romantic precisely because it can't last. In the end, Naglalayag is really a romance of the self, a celebration of the person you can become when someone else touches you deeply. We're all souvenirs of our own experiences, and what we take away from love affairs is sometimes of more value than what we gain when we try to wrest them into some ill-fitting frame of permanence. A kept memento is a sad thing, but a memory remains alive and supple forever. It's the flower you don't catch, the one you never crush by pressing it into a book. Dorinda's triumph in Naglalayag isn't a conquering of loneliness - some form of that will always be with her. Dorinda's victory is that she has said yes - not just to a younger man but to herself. Loneliness can't be cured, but it can change shape. What appealed to me in the idea of Naglalayag? Loneliness - a more common emotion than love, but we speak less about it. We are ashamed of it. We think perhaps that it shows a deficiency in ourselves. That if we were more attractive, more entertaining, and less ordinary, we would not be lonely.


Sound Engineers: Nestor Arvin Mutia, Angie Reyes

Editor: Jesus Navarro

Music: Gardy Labad

Production Designer: Randy Gamier

Director of Photography: Odyssey 'Odie' Flores

Screenplay: Irma Dimaranan

Directed By: Maryo J. delos Reyes

SLICK AND SILVERY

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     A hit-and-run lands a detective in more trouble than he could have ever imagined in A Hard Day (Viva Films, Inc., 2021), a thriller that finds director Law Fajardo handling a taut yet elaborately plotted narrative with control and near-faultless technical execution. Edmund Villon's (Dingdog Dantes) resourcefulness and resistance to intimidation makes us root for him, despite his professional conduct, and lack of moral fiber. In a morbid example of necessity being the mother of invention, Villon  hits upon a novel way of disposing the body in an extraordinary stunt sequence. With increased freneticism, Fajardo moves Villon relentlessly forward in the face of an obstacle course filled with pop-up hurdles and an occasional kick in the gut. Dantes’s disciplined performance ties all of A Hard Day’s inventions together, investing the film with visceral panic. He plays Villon as a henpecked nice guy, this delusion serving as a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

     Just about the time it seems Fajardo should soon be running on empty, he introduces a new threat, Lieutenant Ace Franco. Played by a spectacular John Arcilla adding a bespoke dash to the villainous picture, he slides into the story and soon engulfs it. Arcilla has a face that can freeze into a stone-cold slab of pure malice. Fajardo keeps the chaos moving at a breathless tempo. He's a remarkably fluid orchestrator of action kinetics, always springing his surprises a beat faster than one expects only to occasionally slow things down to prevent the viewer from acclimating to his quicksilver timing. An explosion is timed with nightmarish precision perhaps because Fajardo caps a phenomenal, self-consciously Hitchcockian set piece with an unexpected commonplace payoff. Throughout, the images are sleek and silvery informing the debauchery with an aura of impersonality. A Hard Day is ultimately a parody of self-entitlement, though the carnage dramatically registers. The filmmakers walks as many tightropes as Villon does, and one gratefully submits to their dexterity.


Directed By: Law Fajardo

Screenplay: Arlene Tamayo

Production Designer: Mark Sabas

Director of Photography: Rodolfo Aves Jr.

Edited By: Law Fajardo

Musical Score: Peter Legaste, Rephael Catap

Sound Engineers: Alex J. Tomboc, Pietro Marco S. Javier




UNION OF ART AND SENSATION

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit  (Regal Films, Inc., 1989) has a lush yet aching beauty that seems to saturate as you watch it. I’m not just talking about visual beauty. I’m speaking of dramatic beauty, the exquisite moment-to-moment tension of characters who reveal themselves layer by layer, flowing from thought to feeling and back again, until thought and feeling become drama. Director Elwood Perez made a rare movie that evokes not just the essence of a great Filipino melodrama, but the experience of it. We are also enveloped, at every turn, in the hidden pulse of his characters’ motivating passions. The union of art and sensation, intellect and feeling, mass appeal and aesthetic refinement is something the movies are uniquely able to promise and occasionally, when a filmmaker possesses the right mixture of calculation and compassion, able to deliver. Perez is fiercely devoted to his actors. From the moment you see her here, Nora Aunor exudes a new, womanly radiance. 

     As Magnolia de la Cruz, Aunor does full justice to a heroine who loves deeply and helplessly. Tirso Cruz III delivers a beautiful nuanced performance. He seems a tad opaque in the opening scenes, but peels back the layers of his character as the film progresses. In Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit, Ricardo Jacinto, in a glorious demonstration of all that cinematography can be, floods the screen with color. Lutgardo Labad's score punctuates key moments with expert precision, complimenting the tone of the characters’ voices and the traumas written on their faces. By observing and even, to some extent, exaggerating, Perez gives the film an emotional impact that could not have been achieved by conventionally realistic means. And this, in effect, is what Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit accomplishes for its characters. It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. Elwood Perez has given us a compelling love-letter to cinema itself.

Sound Supervision: Joe Climaco
Production Designers: Ray Maliuanag, Raymond Bajarias, Gerry Pascual, Freddie Valencia
Cinematography: Ricardo Jacinto
Editor: George Jarlego
Musical Director: Lutgardo Labad
Screenplay: Jake Cocadiz
Director: Elwood Perez

ABSORBING AND BEAUTIFUL

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     Carlos Siguion-Reyna's Ikaw Pa Lang ang Minahal  (Reyna Films, 1992) demonstrates the filmmaker’s keen eye for composition as a means of enhancing his actors’ performances. The ornate home at the center of the film is befitting of the considerably successful Dr. Maximo Sevilla (Eddie Gutierrez). Yet the ample space left between objects in a room hints at a hollow, impersonal atmosphere that envelops Dr. Sevilla’s daughter, Adela (Maricel Soriano). Plain, naive and shy, Adela comes across as a woman so socially awkward and insecure that the coldness of the family home seems comforting compared to the world outside. Despite Adela’s shyness, the young woman does want to socialize and she accompanies her father one night to a party where she meets David Javier (Richard Gomez), a handsome but hard-up young man. If Adela’s array of nervous tics, widened eyes, reflexive but forced smiles alienate her from others, David’s magnetism is such that everyone is drawn to him. He takes a keen interest in Adela and effortlessly carries the conversation when she gets flustered and doesn’t know what to say. Soriano painstakingly captures Adela’s manic, disbelieving glee at seeing a man talk to her and in this moment, the camera moves more than it does for the remainder of Ikaw Pa Lang ang Minahal, not only in sync with the dancing at the party, but with Adela’s sudden rush of infatuation. David thoroughly charms her and even puts on a face of mock dejection. When he calls on Adela the next day, their courtship turns into an engagement in short order.

     Adela’s impending nuptials should be wonderful news for Dr. Sevilla who rejects the union on the grounds that no man as handsome and suave as David could possibly be interested in his dull, homely daughter and as such must simply want her for her inheritance. The disdain that Dr. Sevilla reveals for Adela shocks her to the core and to make matters worse, her father may be right about David. The dual blow of discovering that the men in her life see her largely as an object is shattering and if Siguion-Reyna’s mostly static compositions first communicated her introversion, slowly they come to reflect her abject misery. Some shots endure for so long that you can almost see as Adela’s sorrow and humiliation harden into bitterness in real time. Siguion-Reyna’s willingness to set up a shot with exacting formal precision, then cede prominence to the actors who move within the space of the frame, results in a multivalent study of not only the story’s characters, but of the markedly different styles of acting. Gutierrez portrays even Dr. Sevilla’s more subtle gestures of contemptuousness with the most theatrical of cadences. Elsewhere, Gomez’s facility with intoxicating yet repellent characters stresses the ambiguity of David’s devotion and the longer any of David’s scenes last, the harder it is to tell whether he’s manipulating Adela or genuinely interested in her. There’s even the character-actress bawdiness that Charito Solis brings to Paula, Adela’s widowed aunt whose genuine affection for her niece belies her own exploitative tendencies, as she lives vicariously through the younger woman’s romance. Then, of course, there’s Soriano. Here she upsets common expectations by pushing Adela’s innocence to parodic levels before shifting into a tragic-heroine mode worthy of Philippine cinema’s greatest depictions of emotional despair. Ikaw Pa Lang ang Minahal is mysterious when it comes to characters’ intentions, but it’s downright confrontational in the brutal impact of its protagonist’s struggle for social acceptance. The finale, in which Adela finally gains agency in her life only by consciously walling herself up in the very home that previously served as her cage, is an act of cruelty perpetuated as much against herself as those who wronged her.

     This new digital transfer was created in 2K resolution from a 35mm master negative. The results are quite pleasing, but not as stunning. The high-definition presentation is a tad light on grain, but diffuses clarity. Romeo Vitug's cinematography still looks great thanks to deep blacks that heighten detail levels and enhance depth. Close-ups appear sharp showcasing fine facial features. Shadow delineation is good no nicks, marks or scratches mar the source material. Though this rendering certainly outclasses previous home video transfer, it falls just short of expectations. The stereo track sounds quite good. Ryan Cayabyab's romantic score gives his music plenty of room to breathe on both the high and low end. Dialogue is clear and well prioritized while subtle atmospherics nicely caress the action. Ikaw Pa Lang ang Minahal is a quiet, intimate film and thankfully no age-related hiss, pops, or crackle intrude during pregnant pauses or whispered exchanges. Though the audio doesn’t make a statement, its seamless integration into the film’s fabric makes it all the more impressive. Ikaw Pa Lang ang Minahal focuses on a painfully shy spinster’s fraught relationships with two men, her brilliant, aloof, often critical father and a dashing suitor who may or may not be after her fortune. It's an absorbing and beautifully photographed film that examines delicate relationships with maturity and insight.

Sound Director: Gaudencio Barredo
Production Designer: Raymond Baharias
Music By: Ryan Cayabyab
Edited By: Jess Navarro
Photographed By: Romeo Vitug
Screenplay By: Raquel Villavicencio
Directed By: Carlos Siguion-Reyna

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