SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     Not many movies can lay claim to being a cultural phenomenon. There are certainly hit movies—the ones that make a lot of money at the box office and stir a lot of initial interest—but even the biggest of those often slide from memory after a few years, replaced by the next big thing. True cultural phenomena ties multiple strands of popular and political culture and becoming symbols of an era. There aren’t many of these, but Maryo J. de los Reyes' Annie Batungbakal (NV Productions) is without doubt one of the most memorable. Released in 1979, it encapsulated the surface attitudes, fashions and musical stylings of the disco era. The rhythmic beats of The Hotdog’s hit songs is a thin veneer over the story’s fundamentally despondent nature; it is, after all, a work whose epilogue is minor salve for all the dreams and frustration that fills the rest of the narrative. The story revolves around Annie (Nora Aunor), a young woman working a dead-end job at a record store all week to help her Aunt Beatrice (Chichay). She befriends eccentric neighbor, Gilda Bermudez (Nida Blanca) who invites her to go dancing at the Banana. Annie is like a lot of other ’70s movie protagonists, she struggles to make it in life, but at night on the dance floor, she is the Queen. For now, Annie is content dancing her heart out at the disco. It would seem that the discord between the socially aware and largely despairing narrative and the dance sequences inside the disco would produce a film that is fundamentally at odds with itself, but De Los Reyes merges them quite seamlessly by emphasizing the neon space inside the Banana as a kind of fantasy world of escape. 

     The film functions very much like a traditional musical, with the musical sequences offering a fantastical alternative to the workaday world, even if characters don't break out into diegetic singing. In the movie’s most romantic dance number scored to The Hotdog’s version of Langit na Naman, Annie and Eric (Lloyd Samartino) comes off as a working class disco-era Astaire and Rogers. The number climaxes when the two hold each other’s hands and spin around and around. They’re like young lovers consummating their partnership. Annie’s saving grace is her dancing. To be clear, Aunor is not a great dancer. Unlike Nida Blanca, she lacks natural talent and grace. What distinguishes Aunor is that she’s a better actor. She acts like someone who loves to dance. This is apparent in the movie’s centerpiece dance number, filmed in an unbroken full-frame shot in order for us to see that Aunor is doing all the dancing. The song used for the sequence is the disco banger Bongga Ka Day. It has a propulsive energy that is matched by Aunor’s fluid dance moves. This is what made the sequence an instant classic. De Los Reyes proved that Annie Batungbakal is more than just the soundtrack, it’s a movie filled with rich performances that has both flair and subtlety. The music is everywhere, and when it kicks in, you know that Annie is entering the world in which she reigns, yet it offers no real advancement; her reign evaporates with the morning light. It’s not hard to see how kids in the late ’70s could separate the film’s two parts from each, ignoring the narrative and losing themselves in the disco music but it’s a much richer, more evocative film when those two halves are seen as fundamentally integrated, with the dance-floor as temporary respite from life’s realities.

Production Design and Art Direction: Fiel Zabat

Choreography: Geleen Eugenio

Film Editor: Edgardo "Boy" Vinarao

Musical Director: The Hotdog

Director of Photography: Joe Batac, Jr.

Screenplay: Jake Tordesillas

Directed By: Maryo J. de los Reyes

 

     Making a virtue of simplicity and a vice of melodrama, Imbisibol (Sinag Maynila, Solar Entertainment Corporation, Centerstage Productions, Pelikulaw 2015) is a well-intentioned low-income drama. This is a genre in which work - exhausting, repetitive, unreliable is the story's engine and the characters' sole means of survival. Holding on to a job or finding a better one takes precedence over anything life can throw at them. Without a doubt, Imbisibol forms Lawrence Fajardo’s most assured work, it owes a lot of its initial momentum to John Bedia and Herlyn Gail Alegre’s unhurried screenplay. The film doesn’t lack for integrity, educating the audience on the desperation of living as an illegal entirely from the perspective of its characters. Carefully buried in a wealth of gesture and speech, from Linda, (the perennially underutilized Ces Quesada) and Benjie's (Bernardo Bernardo) plaintiveness to Manuel (Allen Dizon) and Rodel's (JM de Guzman) wistfulness, the actors in Imbisibol are remarkable. De Guzman's superb slow simmer of a performance as a pleading, recessive man is a silent striver who embodies a humanity that is ultimately heartbreaking. Dizon brings crafty venality to his character that we suspect people must actually work in a trade such as his. Bernardo Bernardo conveys decency, enthusiasm and self-restraint. Quesada creates a character that is sensitive and vulnerable. Who can say that pragmatism is less virtuous than innocence? Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov are artists who come to mind when we confront a story told through such tactful revelations of temperament and states of mind. Fajardo often shows a room before people enter and lingers a second after they leave. Every single shot is intended to have a perfect composition of its own. If a character is speaking, he shows the entire speech. He is comfortable with silences, it’s as if every person has the right to be heard in full. In his other films, Fajardo deploys his distinctive techniques more playfully, but here he seems chiefly concerned with creating a quiet world in which his characters’ personalities can stand out. Sometimes they speak little and imply much. 

     An elegantly refined style places people in the foreground, Fajardo focuses on the nuances of everyday life. His is the most humanistic of styles, choosing to touch the viewer with feeling, not workshop storytelling technique. By having established the rhythm of his characters' lives with such precision, Fajardo’s presentation is not conventionally melodramatic or histrionic. From one part of the world to another, Imbisibol stirs with its torrents of feeling. Dramas about illegal immigrants have often focused on the journey, an odyssey pocked with exploitation and fear, but one that ends on a note of road-weary triumph. In Imbisibol, the focus is on the plight of undocumented immigrants who are already ensconced in Japan. How they live in constant fear of immigration officials who want to deport them even though a modern Western economy could not function without these shadow workers. Imbisibol walks a delicate line between visceral cinema and complex emotional trauma, yet it never seems to struggle at balancing the two and if my description of precisely why seems vague, that’s purely because it deserves to be experienced through unfamiliar eyes. The adroit Fajardo doesn't overemphasize the acrid, fetid atmosphere of hard working immigrants clambering from one job to the next. The spartan, bleary-eyed plainness of the urban landscape of immigrant Japan makes Imbisibol more arresting. Fajardo's low-key curiosity toward what drives outsiders is a crucial element that lubricates the tough, noir melodramatics of the narrative engine. As businesslike as the immigrants who work several jobs to stay afloat, Imbisibol grows more compelling as it builds a head of steam.

Directed By: Lawrence Fajardo

Screenplay: John Bedia, Herlyn Gail Alegre

Director of Photography: Boy Yniguez

Editor: Lawrence Fajardo

Production Designers: Lawrence Fajardo, Rolando Inocencio

Sound: Mike Idioma

Music: Jobin Ballesteros

     The tragicomic absurdity of cultural morality is the target of filmmaker Joselito Altarejos' latest feature, Finding Daddy Blake (2076Kolektib, MC Productions, 2023), an unpredictable blast that invites us into its outrage. In the process of recounting the country’s most recent atrocities, Altarejos' funny juxtaposition bursts with the irony of a society too horny to care for its more serious matters. Finding Daddy Blake consolidates the impulses found across Altarejos' work. It’s the searing approach that provides the foundation, giving him justifiable ammo for deepening the surrounding narrative by rooting it in a larger argument. Altarejos' analytic format opposes contemporary media’s narrative failures — the decadent escapism of mainstream cinema that hasn’t gotten up to speed about the pandemic but still treats moviegoers like children who need relentless distraction with entertainment. In the meantime, we see hard sexual innuendos everywhere. It’s an unexpectedly funny way for Altarejos to explore social hypocrisy. What starts as a head-scratching ordeal slowly becomes a hilarious satire on politics and social standards. Paolo's (Jonathan Ivan Rivera) unlucky cosplay signifies a personal restlessness that gets lost into a heedless culture. But sex videos is not what Altarejos finds obscene. He’s riled by the hypocrisy that has become the new normal. It is the shocking immediacy of keeping up with the world and often getting ahead of it — or at least getting ahead of his peers and sometimes, his audience. 

     Signs of the COVID pandemic, the mask-wearing are overlays of absurdity in this expansive social satire. It has something about what is wrong with contemporary life, as long as they don't mind the occasional interjection. What Altarejos posits is that society is the real pandemic portrayed here in an interesting manner. In a captivating scene largely predicated on Dexter Doria's unmatched ability to make Elvira Lopez’s cruelty so charismatic, owning the room, the camera, bending the scene to her will, Altarejos opts for the thornier, more difficult to pinpoint approach of giving us a powerful woman who takes advantage of peoples’ affections, does favors here and there and makes promises in the most banal, quietly damaging way. Doria's way with the angularity of her face and the camera feels thought-through and even more impressively, it’s great, delicious fun. Rivera showcases the grip Paolo has on his life, the controlled sense of domination he exudes. Even as Paolo’s hold over his life becomes tenuous and he begins to lose control over his own narrative, Rivera’s nuanced portrayal captures his character’s cracking shell, the boiling temper and fear that sits beneath the surface. As Antonio, Oliver Aquino's performance complements Carlos Dala (Elijah) and Tommy Alejandrino's (Kokoy) calculated intensity in every scene. Finding Daddy Blake embraces the pessimism and cynicism in Altarejos' vision of individuals and society. The social structure is hopelessly broken-down and narrow-minded stupidity will always find itself reinforced by the bureaucratic rituals of everyday life. It’s somewhat facile to ascribe a bleak sense of humor to our past experiences even if there’s an element of truth in that stereotype.

Written and Directed By: Joselito Altarejos

Cinematographer: Manuel Garcellano

Editor: Jay Altarejos

Musical Scorer: Marco Bertillo Mata

Sound Designer: Andrew Millalos

     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

     Much like Kapag Tumabang ang Asin (1976), T-Bird at Ako (Film Ventures, Inc., 1982) peaks to the creative and sometimes delusional nature of desire. Director Danny L. Zialcita plays their pettiness for some great laughs but at its core, the film expresses something true about love’s power to obliterate all other considerations, including close friendship. T-Bird at Ako is a little too neatly drawn, but Zialcita's enthusiasm and vitality compensate for more than they rationally should. This is a film easier to love than to like. Zialcita has a great feel for hip sophisticates in deep conversations, he also has a great eye. With cinematographer Felizardo Bailen, they've made T-Bird at Ako into a stylish affair. There is cleverness in the film's many tight shots that do double duty, playing to the intimacy of the piece as well as eliminating the need for elaborate sets. There are risky plot choices along the way, but the risks are what keeps the pot boiling as the complexities of the relationship between lady lawyer Sylvia Salazar (Nora Aunor) and night club dancer Isabel Mongcal (Vilma Santos) heat up and cool down. It all serves to make T-Bird at Ako a delightful romance charged with fierce intelligence. As Sylvia, Aunor is the picture of watchful uncertainty whose mixture of physical presence and self-mockery contributes to the film’s quirky, offbeat mood. Her performance is the best reason to see the movie. Santos manages to convey much sensuality infusing Isabel with complexity. 

     This new high definition transfer reveals the movie like never before, yielding a picture so pristine that watching it is practically like seeing the film for the first time. It's clean yet filmic. Obvious elements like skin and clothing textures reveal some of the most innately complex details imaginable, down to the most nuanced fabrics. The biggest improvements however, are in the area of color reproduction. There are completely new color tonalities and saturation is far better. As a result, the entire film looks richer and lusher. Interiors are beautiful, yielding an inviting warmth that’s substantially more nuanced and exacting. Unfortunately, the film's two-channel track is woefully dull and uninspired. Dialogue is often poorly prioritized, effects are typically brazen and weak. None of it strangles the presentation, at least not completely, but it all takes a significant toll. In an earlier scene, Isabel dances to the tune of Queen's Body Language. The song was replaced with a mediocre version of the original ruining the punchline to the greatest joke near the end of the movie. The audio mix is frustrating at worst, but for the viewer who just wants to watch, it's not a bad little endeavor.

Sound Engineer: Rudy Baldovino

Director of Photography: Felizardo Bailen

Film Editor: Enrique Jarlego, Sr.

Screenplay: Portia Ilagan

Directed By: Danny L. Zialcita