BITTER REVENGE

Posted by Jojo Devera ,



     Although Lino Brocka’s Bona (NV Productions, 1980) might seem like an unlikely place from which to launch a discussion of the craft of one the great Filipino actors, it illuminates several threads that run through Nora Aunor’s body of work. Foremost is her adaptability and range as a performer, which are unparalleled. Bona also demonstrates the centrality of collaboration to Aunor’s practice and the rigorous preparation that facilitates her singular spontaneity and openness to chance in the moment of performance. Her almost otherworldly range has generated certain tropes in reviews of her work: she is said to disappear into the character. But this take, which suggests an innate and natural ability for imitation or even an erasure of the self, doesn’t capture the careful calibrations of Aunor’s craft. Rather than disappearing into her characters, she deconstructs the performance process on screen. Aunor achieves layers of reflexivity, performing the character’s own fleeting performance of the self. Her ability to highlight the incongruities within a character without resolving them is one of her greatest strengths as a performer. Aunor’s face has a striking ability to embody that luminous star power while also cracking it open like brittle armor. As Bona, Aunor draws the camera to herself, seducing us like her mark, even as she tilts her face to give in to Gardo’s (Phillip Salvador) sexual advances. That same face sours when she claims her bitter revenge. Indeed, across a range of characters, Aunor’s carefully tempered expressions bring to the surface an array of subtle revelations and momentary ruptures. Across many projects, Aunor has embraced different facets of her characters, resisting the temptation to explain them. One is left with the impression that for her, anything is possible, a prospect that is at once thrilling and a bit terrifying.

     From its opening moments onward, Carlotta Films, Kani Releasing and Cité de Mémoire's new 4K restoration of Bona is a sight to behold, one that leaves a very strong first impression. Far and away, the biggest upgrade here is in the area of mid-ranges and shadow detail and in some cases, clearly boosted contrast levels reveal a more finely-detailed picture, one where many new background elements and small details can be easily picked out. Textures are also granted new life, especially in cinematographer Conrado Baltazar’s tight close-ups and elements of Joey Luna’s art direction. Black levels remain consistently deep with no perceivable crush or posterization, while the tasteful enhancement revitalizes light sources and background signage without compromising any of its darker sections. Film grain is also finely resolved and consistently present, but never intruding. Likewise, the audio mix benefits from its new restoration. Bona’s overall sonic aesthetic still apply here and the soundtrack has been refreshed and tightened, with much of the persistent hiss either reduced or eliminated. Dialogue remains crystal clear - even Aunor’s vocal tones - with suitable balance levels leaves more than enough room for Max Jocson’s original score. It's a fine effort overall and similar to the excellent presentation, there's really not all that much room for improvement here.


Screenplay: Cenen Ramones

Director of Photography: Conrado Baltazar, F.S.C.

Music: Max Jocson

Film Editing: Augusto Salvador

Art Direction: Joey Luna

Sound Engineer: Levi Prinupe

Directed By: Lino Brocka

BRISK, TAUT AND FOCUSED

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


      While movies such as Paluwagan (Vivamax, Pelikula Indiopendent, 2024) don't exactly depend upon a wealth of logic, such an obvious gap is all too common in a film that survives solely upon the strength of its talented cast. Director Roman Perez Jr. has chosen his actors well. A trio of performers each at the top of their game playing shrewdly on their respective strengths to create three compelling characters. Victor Relosa, in a role he can sink his teeth into really nails the vulnerability caused by Hector’s predicament. There are moments when I was watching his eyes and body language thinking to myself that this is as impactful as Relosa’s devastating performance in Jerry Lopez Sineneng's Rita (2024). Micaella Raz has become quite adept in roles that suggest a certain physical frailty and vulnerability, especially when it can be stoked into wounded fury and ferocity. She evokes the viewer’s total sympathies as Julia. Perez uses Shiena Yu to excellent effect. Even at her most centered, Yu grants Marites a perpetual internal desperation. It is entirely possible that you will find yourself surprised by exactly what unfolds in Paluwagan, while Perez does his best to keep us guessing, he hits a home run by casting Relosa, Raz and Yu, actors able to portray parts with the same steady presence. The result is that even as you've decided exactly what's going on, the three principals convincingly plant continued doubts. 

     Julia's narrative voice has Perez keeping the plot brisk, taut and focused. It’s a work of wonderful manipulation because the story remains firmly about Hector. Perez effectively ratchets up the tension with cinematic devices such as closeups and noisy startles from, say, a helicopter crash overhead. It's a tried-and-true device, but one that's justifiable here as a reflection of the characters’ state of mind. To say more would spoil the surprises. Perez steers the story toward its inevitable revelations with an old-fashioned sense of tension. The viewer, meanwhile, is a little more patient. Thanks to the director's steady pacing and unsettling atmosphere. Every gesture makes sense and is consistent with the truth as revealed. Relosa, in particular, takes honors for his smart, unshowy work. Perez does a good job at giving his actors a playground that adheres strongly to genre conventions, but with a bit more mature leeway. Amnesia has driven plots throughout a broad spread of genres. The biggest difference is, however, that Hector isn't pursuing his own past so much as he’s having it thrust upon him. Perez has a nicely tuned eye, and the careful look of the film (shot by Albert Banzon of Adan and Salakab) may be its best attribute. Paluwagan is small-scale, but it succeeds in telling a story. 


Musical Scorer: Dek Margaja

Sound Designer: Alex Tomboc, Lamberto Casas Jr.

Editor: Aaron Alegre

Production Designer: JC Catiggay

Director of Photography: Albert Banzon

Screenplay: Ronald Perez

A Film By: Roman Perez Jr.

BODIES IN MOTION

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     For filmmaker Lawrence Fajardo, social interaction with the audience is far more important than sexual interaction on the screen. Some of the men solicit attention, others determined to avoid it. But all are in search of human connection however short or sordid. Cinema Parausan, one of Erotica Manila’s (Vivamax, 2023) four episodes functions best in its voyeuristic, sociological mode, offering fragmentary glimpses of complicated lives and the complicated social rituals that shape them. Lorna (Azi Acosta) and Gab (Alex Medina) are acting out an elaborate choreography of desire and denial. There is no need for secondhand moralizing in the presence of such rich and varied human material. Girl 11 is predicated on the power of loneliness and longing, an inarticulate desire to connect to life and this desire delivers the dramatic thrust. Each emotional misfire provides a new layer of meaning. Girl 11 is governed by a narrator, in this case Manila Daily journalist Steven (Joseph Elizalde) whose world folds into and out of itself. Fajardo demonstrates with the execution of the last line of dialogue, one of devastating, succinct finality and all that leads up to it, a mastery of dialogue as sound and sound as delivered through the cinema-specific device of voiceover narration. The MILF and the OJT, mixes an existential study in anomie with comedy in the person of haughty actress Beatrice (Mercedes Cabral). Her attitude gives a predatory (even proto-cougar) quality. Less interested in the fluidic facts that dominate teen sex comedies, The MILF and the OJT examines varieties of discomfort. Fajardo specializes in extruding just enough of the vulnerability underlying Beatrice’s facade, never better than in the scene where she lays out her expectations. 

     Fajardo takes a character whose actions and vacillations veer to the contrived and makes us believe her charm as well as her capricious whims. Jico (Vince Rillon) is ethical that we are forced to act pretty much as he does, even in his most extreme moments. His acute honesty is accurately drawn that we hardly know whether to laugh or look inside ourselves. Sex is a disruptive force in Death by O that it succeeded in reducing screen sex to a fashion accessory. Its purpose is to embellish a story with enough discrete fillips of titillation and soft core fantasy to quicken the pulse without causing palpitations. It crashes through the mold by acknowledging that sex can have catastrophic consequences. Brix (Felix Roco) and his wife Elya (Alona Navarro) are so besotted that when the urge overtakes them, they have sex and their frantic rutting, instead of satiety leaves them raw and aching for more. Death by O has a taut script that digs into the characters' domestic life without wasting a word. It helps ground the film whose visual imagination hovers somewhere between soap opera and pop surrealism. Fajardo knows exactly the type of effect he wants to achieve and gets it. He builds a complex relationship between his characters and the viewer. Fajardo wants us to see sex as a cocoon, so he genuinely tries to show what attracts his characters to each other. His earnest objectification of actors’ bodies is often compelling. We look at bodies in motion and see them as body parts first and then people trying to get lost in each other, giving each other pleasure and to remain lost in sensations that will always remain mysterious to anyone who isn’t experiencing them first-hand. 


Sound Designer: Dale Martin

Music By:  Emerzon Texon

Editors: Lawrence Fajardo, Jobin Ballesteros

Production Designer: Jed Sicangco

Director of Photography: Nor Domingo, LPS

Screenplay: Jim Flores, Miguel Legaspi

Directed By: Lawrence Fajardo

SURPRISINGLY CONVENTIONAL

Posted by Jojo Devera ,


     Ivan Andrew Payawal's Table for Three (Vivamax, The IdeaFirst Company, 2024) follows successful couple Marlon (Topper Fabregas) and Paul (Arkin del Rosario) as they explore being a throuple with Jeremy (Jesse Guinto). There's little doubt that Table for Three bears few similarities to Payawal's Two and One (2022), as the film unfolds in a deliberate and surprisingly conventional manner that effectively prevents it from becoming anything more than a well-acted (and well-made) domestic drama. Payawal even seems to be going out of his way to prevent viewers from wholeheartedly embracing the spare narrative, as the director offers up a trio of underdeveloped protagonists that remain completely uninteresting virtually from start to finish. Not helping matters is Payawal's sporadic emphasis on oddball elements, as the film's tenuously authentic atmosphere is undoubtedly diminished significantly each and every time the filmmaker indulges his notorious sensibilities. Table for Three  feigns interest in its characters as three-dimensional beings layering them with dilemmas and hang-ups, but rarely gets deep enough under their skin to make them seem like more than devices in a socio-political thesis. That’s especially true of Jeremy, who receives the least attention and thus comes across as the most paper-thin of the film’s three protagonists and his featurelessness ultimately sabotages the increasingly tense threesome dynamic at play, since none of these people’s attractions to each other are ever fleshed-out or potently felt. 

     Simplistic as its core may be, though, Payawal manages the not-inconsiderable feat of habitually distracting attention away from his material’s underlying didacticism through aesthetic dexterity providing the material with far more urgency than does its let’s-all-get-together plotting. Give credit to Payawal for trying to dissect a relationship and then build it up again. But despite its fascinating moments, one can't help but be frustrated when at times it switches away to pretentiousness. All the aesthetic tangents the director throws at us play as just that, tangents. To what is actually a slightly enervated drama of not-so-complicated romantic geometry, the the film is frequently ravishing in its visual construction making the drama go down easy. For all its complicating intrusions, Table of Three can’t help but register as somewhat less than the sum of its disparate parts. As Payawal frames them threading the waves in symmetrical compositions, he captures all the mystery and romance of a new relationship that isn’t necessarily communicated in the film’s less stylized sequences. For a while, Payawal gets by on his talent for conjuring up interesting exchanges. But no matter how hard he tries to make his characters distinctive, no matter how much he attempts to flesh them out through elucidating their interests, the drama they enact ultimately feels flat, the hermetic actions of hermetic conceptions of character. In a few tender moments, Payawal conjures up the feeling of necessity, but for most of the rest, it’s just eye-filling, soul-starving emptiness that no amount of intermittent assaults on the sensorium can paper over.


Directed By: Ivan Andrew Payawal

Written By: Ash M. Malanum

Cinematographer: Juan Miguel Marasigan

Production Designer: Jaylo Conanan

Editor: Kristian Marc Palma

Music: Emerzon Texon

Sound Designer: Nicole Rosacay


A FRESH TURN

Posted by Jojo Devera ,

     This beguiling romance offers a fresh take on a familiar premise. At its heart is a story about love, tolerance and honesty. For all its anodyne rom-com silliness, however, 4 Days (Phoenix Features, 2016) is also funny, sad and beautiful in equal measure. Mark's (Mikoy Morales) facial expression is most affecting. With a few well-placed glance, a furtive look at his college roommate Derek (Sebastian Castro), a pained expression, a brow sorrowfully furrowed, Morales adeptly manages to capture the anxiety of being gay with dexterity. He is this film’s emotional rock. Morales navigates excitement, happiness, sadness, guilt and anger equally well and Castro lends strong complementary performance. This movie’s storyline does come carefully encased in an unassumingly conservative plot superstructure, but what a smart, fun, engaging film. Director Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr. (working from a sharp and funny screenplay he co-wrote with his lead actors) does a nimble job of placing us in Mark and Derek's shoes. The story’s lightness is, in a sense, the source of its charm. The issues that gay youths face are, in many respects, more interesting and the breakthroughs on that front continue apace. Alix brought an idyllic authenticity to 4 Days just like picking the right person in your love triangle or finding love before the big dance.Yes, the film does everything it can do to parboil the flavor, color, consistency and fabulousness out of its queer romance, until all that's left is the familiar beige, featureless pap of overcooked heterosexual rom-coms. But that's kind of the point. Why shouldn't queer kids get the chance to see generic, mass-produced versions of themselves onscreen, overcoming minor obstacles on their path to true love? They absolutely should and with 4 Days (and the films that follow) they will, but it's the quieter, deeper storyline that forms its true emotional center.

     The cast and filmmakers stir elements of secrets and lies for all they’re worth, prizing telling details and piercing observation over broad comedy. Relationships that in the film’s first moments seemed simple prove prickly and complex. 4 Days isn’t frank or revelatory in the vein of the best queer cinema. It avoids much talk of arousal and it delays its first same-sex kiss and then scores it to onlookers just in case viewers aren’t sure how to feel about it. This is crowd-pleasing filmmaking, so, of course, it’s in some ways behind the times. There may be little in this movie that you haven’t seen before, but the perspective through which you’re seeing it makes all the difference. The events aren't really surprising. Rather, the film focuses on the one thing it does differently, making the romantic quest at the center of the story gay rather than straight and it can't be denied that it does make the tired formula feel ever so slightly fresh for having done so. When the movie shifts into its inevitable third act, it takes a fresh turn which we obviously don't get from standard romance. The formula works regardless of the sexual orientation of the characters involved. 4 Days is a dubious step on the road to equality, proof that conventional romantic dramas are no longer limited to straight people. The polished soundtrack still allows for a procession of acutely observed details, from the hypersensitivity around how others discuss sexuality to the unspoken jealousy aimed at those able to conduct themselves with more surface-level comfort. 4 Days seems a bit too tame to be entirely plausible from start to finish, but it’s hard for find fault with any film that addresses a changing world with such compassion and decency. An unexpected delight in more ways than one.


Directed By: Adolfo Borinaga Alix Jr.

Sound: Jason Conanan

Music: Mikoy Morales

Production Design: Arthur Maningas

Cinematography: Albert Banzon

Screenplay: Adolfo Alix Jr., Mikoy Morales, Sebastian Castro

 

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