SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     

     There are two lines of thought that dominate any discussion of what makes a movie scary: either it is a great deal of subtlety and implication that allows the viewer to imagine all sorts of terrible things just out of sight or it is being explicit in the most hideous, disconcerting way possible. It is the difference between a creepy ghost story and a bloody slasher flick; I think it's not an undue generalization to suggest that the side any given person comes down on is going to be reflected in their age. Strip away all of its frightening elements, Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara (Rosas Productions, 1974) remains a sophisticated, complex and tremendously subtle character study. Director Celso Ad. Castillo knows to trust his actors to sell the material, starting with Susan Roces who gives a spectacular performance both thrilling and heartbreaking. Emotions are manifested in camera movement, as when Barbara (Roces) and Fritz (Dante Rivero) suspect something horrifying going on inside Karen's (Beth Manlongat) bedroom. Castillo gets a scare from shifting the light-source to cast face-shaped shadows on mirrors. Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara is yet another film ill-served by pan and scan television prints. Castillo brilliantly uses widescreen to strand his characters in odd-shaped rooms or corridors, making the watcher's eye skitter frantically over the screen to catch every ingeniously rendered detail. Rivero's Fritz is self-assured and a little smug. Rosanna Ortiz is especially good at revealing the stubborn strengths that lie within Ruth and makes her, in the end a danger both to Barbara and daughter Karen.

     The real crux of Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara isn’t so much Ruth's hauntings – although these are among the most effective ever committed to film – but the unravelling of her relationship with Barbara. For every action in the film there is a justifiable excuse. Even upon the film’s conclusion, no formulaic reason is given — only suggestions. Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara is fifty years old and it persists to be as effective and scary as any rendition of the same concept. With its stark compositions, sudden camera movements and odd perspectives, Castillo’s film owes much to Master Filmmaker Gerardo de Leon and the restoration work shows this debt off beautifully. There’s a touch of inadvertent grain only very infrequently, but for the lenses that Castillo used and the associated occasional softness of the focusing, everything looks wonderfully sharp, really bringing out the mood of the movie. There are some vertical lines that occasionally pop up. Tiny flecks can be spotted as well. Detail and image depth however, are very pleasing. Generally speaking, contrast levels also remain stable throughout the film. It’s probably beneficial that the audio has been left in the original mono. Any attempt to improve it would surely have ruined the effect. Once free of the overused internal monologues, Castillo dedicates the rest of the movie to establishing genuine fear that's punctuated with carefully timed shocks. Pretty soon, you've forgotten about the slow start and have entered a startling film that still retains effective tension. You might not have a lot of answers by the end but you'll find various scenes stay with you long after the movie is over.

Directed By: Celso Ad. Castillo

Film Editor: Augusto Salvador

Sound Supervision: Angel P. Avellana, Jun Ella

Director of Photography: Ricardo Remias, F.S.C.

Screenplay By; Mike Relon Makiling

Music By: Ernani Cuenco

     Human suffering is an interesting subject for cinema, since it possesses a relative ease in connecting with viewers and evoking emotions. Brillante Ma Mendoza's Apag (Heaven Pictures Hong Kong, Center Stage Productions, 2023) succeeds in emphasizing the events of a hit-and-run accident. From this point on, Mendoza spotlights Nita's (Gladys Reyes) pain and Rafael's (Coco Martin) simmering remorse. His natural softness, so often exploited in decent-menfolk roles, here throws off an air of hesitation and vague moral fidgeting that suggests he could go either way. Yet it’s so manipulated that the dramatics come in for some rather mawkish moments and cries of disbelief. Apag clearly wants to make a stark, profound statement about guilt and fury, responsibility and revenge. The tragedy deeply shakes up Rafael and his father, the contrite Alfredo (Lito Lapid) who somehow gains our sympathy despite there being no excuse for leaving the scene of the accident as he not only learns how to become a better father by turning himself into the police to face the law. Jaclyn Jose plays Elise, Alfredo's reasonable wife and Rafael's mother who has painful issues of her own. But the movie is about Rafael and Nita's parallel but opposite emotional arcs, which it hopes to elaborate through a transference of audience sympathies. As guilt devours Rafael from within, Nita is groping for a way to do right by her husband. This will require a certain sheen of ersatz sophistication. Reyes works in reverse. She's a tough actor with a spiny self-possession that cracks under the weight of Nita's loss. 

    At first, the tragedy plays out with honest and difficult scenes of her family's coping. And Reyes is a broken woman, an actress who grows vulnerable the more we see her. She's human frailty personified. But the film shoves her through a wholesale personality change that stretches credibility or rips it to shreds. Grief eats her. And Mendoza shows a sharp eye for the shading that defines Nita's character. Apag only slowly reveals its real subject in a story that looks more deeply than we could have guessed into the lives of its characters and has a shocking reversal at the end. Apag involves love and some thriller elements, but it is not about those things. It is about people trapped in opposition that one of them must break. Apag finds in the hovering silences between words a depth of sorrow and stifled fury that few films have ever conveyed. Mendoza understands that the essence of violence has little to do with fireballs and the splatter of exploding bodies. It can accumulate over time and can be discerned in people's clenched, drawn faces and choked-back words. Time passes but doesn’t heal wounds; revenge, or at least the thought of it, does. Apag sustains an awful sense of foreboding and dread of the inevitable. Its final disquieting message suggests that the most perfect revenge can be far from sweet, that our darkest passions after discharging themselves may still never fully subside.

Director: Brillante Ma Mendoza

Screenplay: Arianna Martinez

Director of Photography: Rap Ramirez

Production Designer: Dante Mendoza

Editor: Ysabelle Denoga

Musical Score: Jake Abella

Sound: Albert Michael Idioma

     In the wrong hands, Palipat-Lipat Papalit Palit (Viva Films, 2024), Roman S. Perez Jr.'s story of obsession and jealousy could have easily been turned into a tawdry film. Perez avoids this thanks to his use of highly stylized framing. Love scenes are rendered in fragments with each frame carefully composed. Palipat-Lipat Papalit-Palit is steeped in intense, complex interpersonal relationships. It's packed running time offers a catalogue of infatuation, adultery and death, all packaged in imagery so exquisitely staid that the film continually resists classification as mere sensationalist sexploitation – or any classification at all. Here, the film’s seductive surface hides turbulent depths, while at the helm is a woman of questionable reliability. Palipat-Lipat Papalit-Palit is an aesthete’s wet dream – but at the same time there is a tangible tension between its sedate form and its more shocking content, perfectly embodied by Denise Esteban's performance as Edna, whose modesty and grace seem constantly on the point of erupting into a frenzied hysteria. Victor Relosa is a very interesting, vivid actor. Here, he's suitably intense as Larry, but to such little effect. The film plays like a shrill melodrama, but it's also a mystery, with the relationship between Larry, Edna's husband and Amy (Aiko Garcia) depicting the wellspring of desire and destruction. 

     The first half of the film gradually builds the relationship between Larry and Amy. But we soon learn that she may not be quite as innocent as we thought. Larry's obsession with Amy leads him to defy Edna. And when she learns of – and confronts Larry about his affair, he’s unrepentant. But things are complicated even more when Amy falls under Larry’s thrall. They carry on a passionate affair, much to Edna's dismay. There’s a growing abandonment of common sense among the lovers and the instinct for self-preservation becomes consumed by their desires leading to a grim conclusion. The whole point of the exercise is to show how powerful these desires are and that the characters have become enslaved by their unchecked appetites. There’s a thought-provoking secret that transfixes the obsessions of the characters in a way it has seldom been done before on film. Palipat-Lipat Papalit Palit is the kind of movie in which ordinary rational thought processes are cast aside and passions are allowed to reign supreme. It speaks of a love story compromised by deceits, doubts and jealousies. It's judiciously erotic and an unexpectedly potent slice of Filipino cinema.

Sound Design: Lamberto Casas Jr., Alex Tomboc

Music: Dek Margaja

Editor: Aaron Alegre

Production Designer: Junebert Cantila

Director of Photography: Rommel Andreo C. Sales

Screenplay: Ronald Batallones

Directed by: Roman Perez Jr.

     Filmmaker Joselito Altarejos, whose artistry has not been channelled toward making a new movie for quite a while, is instead turning back to tinker with his earlier film. He went back and reworked Pamilya sa Dilim changing the order of several sequences and giving it a bold, new title. Guardia de Honor (ADCC Productions, 2076 Kolektib, 2024) better calibrates our expectations for a mournful, elegiac film. The story is identical; so, for that matter, are its emphases. There’s a carefully parsed opulence to Altarejos' direction. Most of the new edits are a matter of pruning, coming into scenes later and getting out of them earlier to provide a momentum. The film’s tautly controlled turbulence guides the eye to salient details, its clarified lines of dramatic tension calmly burst into images of an explosive yet nearly static intensity. Instead, Altarejos has made cuts that make the lengthy film and its sprawling narratives a bit more concise. The difference isn’t in style; it’s that the movie’s theological passion is inseparable from another aspect of the film, one that’s too painful and intimate to discuss in detail. Is redemption hopeless for the Medialdeas?

 

     Not many films would start with such a bold beginning, but Adolfo Borinaga Alix, Jr. sets the tone of Kontrabida (Godfather Productions, Ovation Productions, 2022) with such a striking opening shot that it causes a ripple effect which stays with its viewer. The moment is blunt and unusual; it flies in the face of conventional storytelling. It’s the kind of story that could only come from the perspective of a filmmaker like Alix. With frequent collaborator Jerry B. Gracio, he would employ familiar faces and places into the narrative. Kontrabida touches a raw nerve but that’s what makes it such a fascinating watch – to see these characters operate within this story and not so far removed from reality. Nora Aunor’s Anita Rosales is one of her great screen performances. It’s such a difficult part to play because she could have easily tripped into parody. Aunor has such control over every inflection of her voice, every wave of her arm and movement of her fingers. She can be charming one minute and dangerous the next. Her expressions are broad and dramatic, the use of her face proves that. Aunor holds Anita together until the very end when her fantasies take over. It’s a performance for the ages and should be studied in its precision despite how outlandish it may appear. The result is a sympathetic character that is also one of the best villains of all-time. It strips away the lines between fiction and reality in a way that’s both dramatic and compelling. 

     Another way in which Kontrabida's outlandish point of view is controlled is in its canny composition. Alix from his initial shots crafts a film that is visually intriguing. There is tension created by the characters' placement and movement in the frames, the cluttered mise-en-scène and the play of light and shadow. Though the transitions are not generally disarming, many of the shots are enticing. There are continual metaphors of dominance in the composition. If the effective visual composition of Kontrabida helps shift us away from our disbelief, so do the lines and situations of Gracio's screenplay. The dialogue is expressive and incisively clever. He gives Aunor some sure-fire lines with which to emote. Suspension of disbelief is a tricky concept; it is in the mind of the beholder and depends on many factors. There will always be those who affirm it and those who dismiss it; but a work stands or falls on how it is able to allow a portion of its audience to be comfortable with its vision and its trappings. Bembol Roco, as Anita's ex-husband Ramon delivers with excellent restraint. Only two other cast members have a chance at more than a few lines but they come over with a wallop. Jaclyn Jose is splendid as Anita's devoted fan Dolly and Julia Clarete plays Chie with complete assurance. Not to be forgotten is how sad and quietly heartbreaking Aunor is. Without saying anything explicitly, she perfectly portrays the tragedy inherent in Anita’s story.

Direction: Adolfo Borinaga Alix, Jr.

Written By: Jerry B. Gracio

Director of Photography: Odyssey Flores

Editing: Aleksandr Castañeda

Production Design: Bobet Lopez

Music: Mikoy Morales

Sound Design: Immanuel Verona