SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     Maligno (Rosas Productions, 1977) builds tension with masterful patience and detail, not because it relies entirely on the payoff of its devilish finale, but because Celso Ad. Castillo wants to submerge the viewer in paranoia. Through his meticulous study of characters, their naturalistic mannerisms and peculiarities, and the weight he applies to even immaterial trivialities, Castillo constructs a very real sense of horror. Through it, he raises an atmosphere of instability that counteracts his picture’s supernatural menace with a practical skepticism, almost in the same moment that he confirms our worst, most unimaginable fears. Not until the final act does the film reveal itself as a tale of supernatural terror. Though perhaps Maligno remains more alarming for its depiction of a housewife trying to regain agency over her pregnancy and herself. But before any talk of occult conspiracies, Castillo spends about an hour outlining his characters, their relationships, eccentricities, insecurities and desires. The film’s details consume us, such as how three-dimensional these characters feel. Paolo (Dante Rivero) tries to behave like an understanding husband sensitive to his wife’s needs, but his apologetic control of Angela (Susan Roces) is apparent, no matter how much he seems to be grappling with some inner guilt about his impulses. Elsewhere, Blanca (Celia Rodriguez) fusses over Paolo and Lucas Santander's (Eddie Garcia) friendship during lunch with Angela. The credit for some of these details belongs to the actors who bring their characters to life. Watch Blanca in her keen surveillance of Angela or the way she bounces with excitement. But Castillo also layers seemingly inconsequential conversations with curious facets that prove significant later. 

     Realistic mise-en-scène shrouds the elements of horror in a Celso Ad. Castillo film, so that which remains suspect also feels too real and inconsequential to possibly delve into horror territory. His scares arise not from supernatural origins, but from psychological possibility, the horrible things people will do if so compelled. Castillo specializes in obsession and madness, particularly those supplied within a limited space. The film’s dizzying, hallucinatory dream sequences continue to puzzle as Castillo constructed them so much like actual dreams, not typical soft-filtered movie dreams, but an overexposed nightmare of mish-mashed imagery. Voices seem to penetrate Angela’s consciousness, as if Castillo were showing us two truths at once. Images flow in and out of frame. Nothing makes logical sense, and yet it all congeals in an effortless sort of way. Hints to Angela's Catholic upbringing and religious images in her dreams warn of ingrained religious-based fears, countered by the delusional thought that something sinister plots against her. Castillo implants the notion that Angela has fallen prey to hysterics, so the viewer begins to doubt its misgivings about the suspicious behavior of those around her. Roces is phenomenal, tapping into maternal fears and sense of distrust with full vulnerability. She carries this film on her shoulders, even as everyone tries to push her further down, Angela remains headstrong and resilient. Rodriguez’s scene stealing performance is at once comical and foreboding. Rivero’s acting opportunities open up almost immediately. Paolo is a likeable person, you can’t help but emphatize with. Garcia is impeccably cast as Lucas. His performance is one of the great marriages of character and actor in the genre. Castillo has taken a most difficult situation and made it believable, right up to the end. Angela is forced into the most bizarre suspicions about her husband and we share them and believe them. Because Castillo exercises his craft so well, we follow him right up to the end and stand there.

Production Designer: Peter Perlas

Sound Supervision: Rudy Baldovino

Film Editor: Augusto Salvador

Director of Photography: Loreto U. Isleta F.S.C.

Screenplay: Celso Ad. Castillo, Dominador B. Mirasol

Music By: Ernani Cuenco

Directed By: Celso Ad. Castillo

     The Hearing (Cinemalaya, Pelikulaw, Center Stage Productions, 2024) evokes the experience of a molested child in all its furtive anxiety and shame. Sensitively directed by Lawrence Fajardo and cogently co-written with Honeylyn Joy Alipio, The Hearing goes after deeper, harsher truths. For Lucas (Enzo Osorio), reliving the experience at the trial proves fatal. Madonna (Mylene Dizon) realizes how powerless she is in helping her son and we are forced to look at Fr. Mejor (Rom Factolerin) in a different light. Earlier, we viewed him through Lucas' eyes, now we have the shock of seeing him as he sees himself. The horror is filmed with admirable restraint, with Fajardo opting for a less-is-more approach that only reinforces the tragedy of the events depicted. Lucas’ youthfulness makes him an object of our compassion, particularly as he struggles to free himself and stand up to the predatory Fr. Mejor. Audience identification with Lucas is much stronger in this part of the film. Fr. Mejor is certainly the center of the film’s controversy and also the insightful and problematic depiction of a child molester. Throughout The Hearing, we are kept thoroughly off balance, not only by Fajardo’s style which tends to throw us into scenes with few establishing shots, but also by the impossibility of identifying with any of the characters. The establishing shot helps the audience to define and locate themselves within the logic of the film’s diegetic space. The lack of establishing shots keeps the viewer on edge and adds to the subtle discomfort provoked by the film. The Hearing has the dramatic pull of a muckraking thriller revealing something both sinister and ineffable. Although Fr. Mejor is brought to trial, he is neither healed nor forgiven. Lucas manages to testify, but we are left with no sense of either triumph or revenge. 

     The Hearing does not offer us any comfortable assurances about the future and by avoiding closure, it even implies that this kind of crime does not go away. In a film which consistently violates convention, this may be the most difficult truth of all to face. The Hearing is a provocative film inhabited by characters grappling with moral dilemmas in very recognizable and realistic ways. With its highly impassioned tale, The Hearing transcends the earnest weight of its subject through the sympathy it displays for the predicament of its characters. Utilizing his cast of actors, Fajardo resists going too far into their personal lives and never diverts away from the central story. The actors’ unique idiosyncrasies add small yet significant quirks that create the illusion of character depth. Not much about their lives appears onscreen, but the excellent performances make it seem like we’re seeing more than we are. Elsewhere, in dueling lawyer roles, Atty. Francisco Salvador plays Fr. Mejor’s defender while Joel Torre is Prosecutor Alejandro Mariano, who devotes his life to doing the right thing, a particularly difficult quality to come by in this setting. Maya (Ina Feleo), the sign language interpreter is torn by conflicting expectations and contradictory feelings. Fortunately, what remains important is telling the truth in the here and now. Fajardo's sobering drama affects on multiple levels, from personal to spiritual. The Hearing suggests that the cloistered atmosphere of celibacy, guilt and discipline has helped foster a pattern of depravity is not likely to go over well in many quarters. All the more reason why this film should be seen. In The Hearing, artistry and conscience are emanations of the same cleansing, darkly truthful spirit. 

Screenplay: Lawrence Fajardo, Honeylyn Joy Alipio

Director of Photography: Roberto "Boy" Yñiguez

Editors: Lawrence Fajardo, Ysabelle Denoga

Production Designers: Ian Traifalgar, Endi "Hai" Balbuena

Musical Scorer: Peter Legaste, Joaquin Santos

Sound Design: Jannina Mikaela Minglanilla, Michaela Docena

Directed By: Lawrence Fajardo

 

     Decrying film clichés is easy. Replacing them with something worthwhile is much harder. Tropes become tropes because they’re often the straight-line, natural-feeling answer to common story problems. How to make a character relatable, an arc satisfying or a story tidy. While storytellers who try to dodge well-worn, familiar narratives deserve recognition for trying harder, the road to hell isn’t the only one paved with good intentions. Films like When I Met You in Tokyo (JG Productions Inc., 2023) show that avoiding safe, lazy choices isn’t enough to make a strong film. It’s necessary to make decisive and meaningful choices as well. Filmmakers Conrado Peru, Rommel Penesa and writer Suzette Doctolero have their hearts in the right place. They’ve created a film about senior citizens that acknowledges them as people, not pathos machines or wisdom dispensers. They focus on female friendships without making them catty or fickle. They avoid cheap melodrama, big life lessons and predictability. But while they’re steering clear of so many pitfalls, they don’t give the impression that they’re steering in any specific direction. The film is a parade of barely connected events, presided over by a barely connected protagonist. Even among a great ensemble of actors, Christopher de Leon stands out. Joey's no-fuss amusement and gentlemanly version of macho come closest to making the film feel distinctive, instead of droning. He sells the romance well. It’s easy to see why Azon (Vilma Santos) allows him into her life, given how he rolls up with a compliment and an insouciant smirk. The film is at its best when exploring Azon and Joey’s comfortable rapprochement, which comes with more affable curiosity than longing or passion. It’s a film that never exits its holding pattern, no matter what else happens. 

     In When I Met You in Tokyo's case, friendships between older people tend to focus more on a congenial present than digging into each other’s pasts or how inter-gender friendships become easier with age. Santos's performance can be savored for its subtlety, but even that robs the budding romance of its spark. Other than that, the film lacks any visual snap or panache to offset the tonal and narrative blandness. At best, it’s a reasonably sweet, unchallenging character piece that won’t insult older viewers by reflecting them poorly or shallowly. That feels like an accomplishment in itself. But in its relentless lack of significant affect or movement, When I Met You in Tokyo attempts to find a balance between the stimulatingly new and the comfortably familiar. Highly polished yet never quite slick, the film devolves into cartoonish cutesiness with its broadly drawn minor characters, as in a heavy-handed sequence in which Azon and her girlfriends behave like superannuated teenagers. But the main actors' emotional authenticity keeps the story from drowning in unfunny shtick or facile wish-fulfillment. It hangs on a screenplay as random as a dream. It drifts to and fro, leaning too hard on the sparkle provided by its veteran cast, never quite settling on what it wants to say or do. There is a central moment where When I Met You in Tokyo hits a tremendous peak of displayed beauty. That is when Joey steps up to the mic and belts out a rendition of the APO Hiking Society's When I Met You that will leave you speechless. Through song, you feel every ounce of the passionate balance between Joey's independence and loneliness. You see what he was and what he could still be. De Leon's solo is a dynamite moment that the rest of the film cannot match. The few good comedic elements doesn't fit the rest of the film and its weighty take on mortality and love at an advanced age detracts from the heft of what could have been a bigger, bolder dramatic statement or a fuller and more involving romance. When I Met You in Tokyo is one of those screenplays that might have been more interesting a couple of drafts ago, before the detours were closed off. And yet, when Santos’s Azon shares scenes with De Leon’s determined suitor, there’s considerable charm in the results. As When I Met You in Tokyo reminds us, Santos and De Leon are masters in the art of turning ordinary material into little bits of truth and life.

Sound: Armand de Guzman, Fatima Nerikka Salim, Immanuel Verona

Music: Jessie Lasaten

Editors: Froilan Francia, Karla Diaz

Production Designers: Buboy Tagayon, Rey Peru

Screenplay: Suzette Doctolero

Director of Photography: Shayne Sarte, LPS

Directors: Conrado Peru, Rommel Penesa

     Bernal's greatness as a director rested principally in that improvisatory brilliance, in his uncanny knack with actors. In a cast so large and uniformly superb, it seems unfair to pick any of them out even though Gina Pareño is the one who is handed a big, virtuoso, movie-stealing dialogue. It also lies in Bernal’s ability to free up an entire company to do their best work, his unique obsession with the whole process of making movies, the fact that he wouldn’t quit, no matter what. Appropriately, he won back the spotlight in the most impudent way possible, by laying bare the excesses and hypocrisies of Makati itself. Working Girls is one of those marriages of seeming opposites that works. What Bernal does by placing these people in another of his rich, boisterously populated collage films, is to show how every city (especially Makati) is, in a way, a community of the isolated. Bernal may even give us more of a sense of truth than the stories alone, because they recognize more of the absurd and terrible interconnections of life, the consequences that most of us choose to ignore. Part of the films' greatness, which is one of the triumphs of contemporary moviemaking, lies in the inclusiveness of its portrait, the way it gives such an omniscient sense of character, of milieu. And part also lies in Working Girls’ recognition that nothing in life is ever resolved, that there are no happy endings, but virtually no endings at all. Bernal likes the messiness and coincidence of real life, where you can do your best and some days it's just not good enough. Working Girls understands and knows because it is filmed from an all-seeing point of view. Its characters sometimes cross paths, but for the most part they don't know how their lives are changed by people they meet only glancingly. Some of these characters, would find the answers to their needs, yet these people have a certain nobility to them. They keep on trying and hope for better times. 

Sound Supervision: Vic Macamay

Musical Director: Willie Cruz

Production Designer: Benjie de Guzman

Film Editor: Ike Jarlego, Jr.

Director of Photography: Manolo R. Abaya, FSC

Screenplay: Amado L. Lacuesta, Jr.

Directed By: Ishmael Bernal

     Overused and much misused, the word provocative has become a double-edged sword, especially when swung in the direction of Filipino independent cinema. At its best, the genuinely provocative film, off the top of my head, shocks in order to expand our vision of the world it encompasses. At its most dispiriting, it's an exercise in cheap thrills, designed to goose a presumptively stuffy bourgeois audience while positioning a director as some sort of iconoclast and Jun Robles Lana has no such excuse. The characters in Your Mother's Son (The IdeaFirst Company, Octobertrain Films, Quantum Films, Cineko Productions, 2023), belong in their own isolated little world that is self-absorbed and irresponsible. Lana and co-screenwriter Elmer Gatchalian come to the conclusion that some people would prefer to spend their days with those who are much younger, abandoning their social responsibilities and families. This is a film that seems divorced from any moral sensibilities. Your Mother's Son needed serious judgment: someone to have a firmer opinion on these terribly unappealing characters. It lacks plausible psychology and context for the film’s characters and their love circle. The performances from some normally reliable talents do little to strengthen our sympathy and help us understand them. As Sarah, Sue Prado has the hint of a beautiful woman aging, unused to such desperation in her loneliness. She is truly enigmatic, delivering a surprisingly strong and powerful performance for a film and a screenplay this superficial. Elora Españo (Amy) can convey nuance and quiet intelligence even when seeming to do nothing in particular. Both Kokoy de Santos (Emman) and Miggy Jimenez (Oliver) are given terribly uninteresting and inexpressive roles, spending most of the film underserviced by flat dialogue. There’s no sign of coltishness in either De Santos' or Jimenez’s performances. These characters don’t inhabit the real world: they remain lodged in this seaside idyll from beginning to end and whenever an opportunity is presented for them to leave. Your Mother's Son is poorly paced and concludes with an ending that is frustratingly detached from comprehensible human behavior and personal responsibility. There's a germ of genuine transgression to be located in this three-way affair and it has to do with the overlap between maternal and carnal love. But it's less explored here than it is sidelined. 

     Your Mother's Son is incredibly hard to watch. It's a completely illusory and nonsensical film and is one that would benefit greatly had Lana not taken the material quite so earnestly. The film needed to play on the frivolous nature of the premise in order to work or alternatively go completely the opposite way. It’s a messed up situation and if handled with more conviction and devastation it could be really affecting, yet we don’t get a sense for the severity of the scenario nor the destructive implications. It lingers nonchalantly between the two notions making this entire situation seem almost normal. The movie tacks hard into self-serious waters, piling on the consequences. We don’t get into any of the characters’ heads either, though to be honest, there isn’t particularly much going on inside any of them. Lana manages the trick of making sex joyless. Like porn, he tops that by draining his film of variety and longing. Within that framework, Lana makes some serious missteps. He always had a fondness for these kind of highly symbolic, far-fetched stories, but he still feels the need to give his characters more mundane motivations, to make us like them. It’s an understandable miscalculation and let’s applaud these two insanely talented actresses for gamely lending real vulnerability to these broken creatures, but it’s a catastrophic one, because it threatens to bring Your Mother's Son into the real world, and that’s not a realm where this story can survive. This sort of thing threatens to make the movie about sex and as far as I can tell, that’s not what it's up to. There’s a potentially interesting attempt here to explore without judgment why older women might be drawn into relationships with much younger men. Physical pleasure, reassurance and unencumbered freedoms that often vanish over the course of conventional long-term unions. But the film sticks to the surfaces right up to the climactic exposure. That makes these characters not much more than irresponsible narcissists living in self-satisfied isolation. The movie wants it both ways. It asks not to be judged by standards of realism, but then tries to inject realism and naturalism into its absurdist narrative. One imagines what other directors who deal in similarly symbolic, hermetically sealed environments could have done with this material. Lana, for all his talent and ambition, doesn’t seem up to the task; in the end, Your Mother's Son doesn’t quite go far enough.

Sound Engineer: Allen Roy Santos

Music: Teresa Barrozo

Editor: Benjie Tolentino

Production Design: Roy Roger Requejo

Director of Photography: Moises Zee

Screenplay: Jun Robles Lana, Elmer Gatchalian

Directed By: Jun Robles Lana