SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     It is the love Carmina (Dawn Zulueta) and Gabriel (Richard Gomez) share which builds the foundation for Hihintayin Kita sa Langit (Reyna Films, Inc., 1991), Carlos Siguion-Reyna's tale of broken promises made and revenge exacted. Carmina’s heart is broken and filled with sorrow. It has weakened her. She no longer has any will to live. Feeling the intense power of her love and pain, death is the only ending to quiet her longings and broken heart. It was her own doing, breaking Gabriel’s heart first, then abandoning him for propriety, to live in her virtuous life of dullness, leading her to marry Alan (Eric Quizon) and the abandonment of her soul when she leaves Gabriel behind. The life she chooses is one that is hollow. Her dreams with Gabriel were broken with her heart. When Gabriel returns several years later with a moderate fortune, he marries Alan’s sister, Sandra (Jackie Lou Blanco) for spite. Nearing the end for Carmina, Gabriel arrives at her death bed. They share a loving moment, as he holds her up, speaking softly with love in their voices just before she dies in his arms. Love is more important than any tangible riches or objects of wealth. Let the heart be filled with love. Live for life not for the shackles that destroy the soul. 

     Showing the destruction that comes from not following one’s heart, Hihintayin Kita sa Langit begins with the growing attraction of friendship and love between Carmina and Gabriel. It also shows the class struggle between Gabriel and Carmina’s brother Milo (Michael de Mesa). Their father, Don Joaquin (Jose Mari Avellana) found the young boy on his travels. He took him off the street, bringing him home to be part of their family. But Milo was not generous of spirit like his father and Carmina. He felt it was within his rights to degrade Gabriel whenever the hatred turned in him. He tried to whip Gabriel into submission, but it would never happen. Milo is a weakling, whereas Gabriel has inner fire. No one had the power to break him except Carmina. When Milo feels he has the right to lord it over Gabriel, as so many today feel they have been blessed with the power to rule over people, you know there will never be equality. The human race is too ingrained with prejudice, class superiority and inferiority, and the unjust. That really hasn’t changed. Carmina had the power. She had two separate worlds in which to choose where she wanted to be and with whom she wanted to be. Carmina thought she wanted the dress-up world with Alan, but she hid from herself as much as she longed for the Carmina who was wild with abandon and filled with love. It is what drove them apart. Her vanity and broken promises from childhood and Gabriel not being the perfect gentleman that Carmina desired him to be, instead he was the outcast and the reject, a stranger in a strange land. 

     This sparkling new 1080p transfer present the film in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio for the first time on home video, but the level of clarity, detail and texture on display here is like watching a brand new film. Depth is outstanding and the film's particular color palette is represented perfectly, while a natural layer of film grain is present to remind us that excessive digital noise reduction hasn't been performed. The image is smooth and extremely natural, which will undoubtedly please long-time fans, it's been said before, but it's likely that Hihintayin Kita sa Langit hasn't looked this good since its original theatrical run. I'd say it looks even better, but for now this absolutely flawless transfer is reason enough to revisit the movie. Audio rarely gets equal praise in comparison to a crisp visual upgrade after all, screen captures are easier to share. What we get here stays true to the source, with most of the action spread widely across the front channels. It's an effective presentation that really gives the film a lot of charm, as the crystal clear dialogue and effects are balanced nicely with occasional music cues that don't fight for attention. Hihintayin Kita sa Langit simply captures a specific period in Filipino film history that a sizable chunk of audiences will always remember fondly. There's a lot to live up to here and this brand new restoration absolutely steps up to the plate, delivering a landmark audio and video presentation. 

Production Design: Joey Luna

Sound Supervision: Gaudencio Barredo

Music: By: Ryan Cayabyab

Photographed By: Romy Vitug

Screenplay: Raquel Villavicencio

Directed By: Carlos Siguion-Reyna

     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