SARI-SARING SINENG PINOY

     Nympha (Regal Films, Inc., 1980) is a silly, classy, enjoyable erotic film that was an all-time box-office success. It’s not remotely significant enough to deserve that honor, but in terms of its genre, it’s very well done, filled with attractive and intriguing people, and scored with brittle, teasing music. It’s a relief to see a movie that returns to a certain amount of sexy sophistication. This tale of a young woman discovering herself was a headline-grabbing sensation when sex in films had gone mainstream. Its characters inhabit a world of wicker furniture, soft pastels, vaguely Victorian lingerie, backlighting, forests of potted plants and lots of diaphanous draperies shifting in the breeze. It’s a world totally devoid of any real content, of course and Nympha (Alma Moreno) is right at home in it. She’s the eldest daughter of Don Bernardo Monteverde (Johnny Wilson), a shipping magnate allegedly raped by one hundred young men. This experience propels her into a dizzying series of sexual encounters that range from the merely kinky to the truly bizarre. The screenplay from Toto Belano brought some class to the continuous bumping and grinding while Joey Gosiengfiao's direction shone the spotlight on the female star that gave the film much of its success. Nympha is executed with a patina of respectability. The cinematography takes advantage of the scenery, the dialogue is polished to the point of pretentiousness and there’s tact to the film’s atmosphere that definitely sets it apart from crasser approaches. This being said, much of the material feels ridiculous, offensive or hopelessly naïve by today’s standards, lending the film a veneer of sophistication, which if you looked a little closer doesn't ring true. If we were to be grown up about sex, then we must be as liberated as Nympha. 

     The concept of Boy Kaldag (VMX, BLVK Films, Pelikula Indiopendent, 2024) is undeniably clever. Size is both the film's hook and flaw, an amiable but ambling comedy that collapses under extended exposure. Thankfully, there is more to Boy Kaldag than just its one-dirty-joke premise. A prodigiously endowed young man builds a reputation around his singular natural talent. People will always want sex and a man with a giant penis might not think it’s that crazy to try and make some money with it. Benz Sangalang is well-cast and interesting as Dax. He has an easy-going, casual style that fits the material. If Boy Kaldag is more often touching than salacious, it's because Sangalang imbues his character with such a palpable sense of yearning and regret, you end up rooting for him. Dax, in a voice-over explains what didn’t need to be explained. As he talks about the way things used to be, the tediousness of Dax’s interior monologue becomes funny. He winks at his failure to recognize how good he actually has it, making the viewer respond more tenderly toward him. The secondary characters include Jayner Santos as Gorgeous in a lovely comic performance filled with world-weariness that I found refreshing and largely believable. A farce with sensibility both mordant and whimsical, Boy Kaldag delights in its phallic symbols. So exuberant as to be unafraid of looking juvenile, it revels in illustrating the pathetic circumstances of Dax, whose only solace is being well endowed. 

     In fact, Boy Kaldag is less interested in its conceit than it is with what drove Dax to prostitution, the emotional baggage and the questions of morality that accompany the profession, which makes it far more interesting than one about a guy with a tripod plowing his way through lonely and horny women. Dax, faintly reminiscent of Dirk Diggler, Mark Wahlberg's porn star from Boogie Nights (1997), a big, slightly confused man without the slightest trace of self-doubt on board, a temperament that not coincidentally, is absolutely imperative in the man-whore trade. Because, let's face it, most regular, thoughtful men, men of ideas, men with flaws, would have more than a little trouble getting it up and keeping it up. Boy Kaldag gets a lot of elements right, including the baby steps it takes into Dax's new side. It's rather a rueful look at the lengths to which one guy will go to capture a life that has gradually slipped away from him. Director Roman Perez Jr.'s interplay, his willingness to let the story gradually unfold and its disarming sensitivity helps elevate Boy Kaldag well above its gimmicky title.That something, unsurprisingly and as unsubtle as you might expect from Boy Kaldag, is sex. Dax is the meat and potatoes and it’s fascinating to watch him deal with different women. And that’s exactly where Boy Kaldag succeeds; when it stops pretending to be something more than it is, it gets back to guiltlessly pleasuring its audience.

Sound Design: Lamberto Casas Jr., Alex Tomboc

Music: Derek Margaja

Editor: Mai Calapardo

Production Designer: Mikey Red

Director of Photography: Rommel Sales, LPS

Screenplay: Ronald Perez

Directed By: Roman Perez Jr.

     Everybody hustles, but in Monti Puno Parungao's The Escort (Lexuality Entertainment, Treemount Pictures, 2011) hustling (in the hard core sense of selling your body for sex) is a way of life. For all its depiction of lurid subject matter, The Escort also balances its heavy drama with a strong dose of romance. It's a precarious and potentially disastrous juggling act and one that The Escort pulls off with genuine flair. There was a time when most people didn't know men sold sex and didn't want to know. The Escort dramatizes the lifestyle at the same time it tells a cautionary tale. The viewer gets to meet the escorts while keeping a safe distance. The world of The Escort seems terribly real,  it even smells that way. Parungao does a good job of capturing the unsprung rhythm of the street. The characters form a loose-knit community at the mercy of strangers. They may spend hours together and not see one another for a week. Parungao shows Karlo’s encounters, one is an old man with peculiar tastes. Miko Pasamonte finds the right note for Karlo. He has plans and dreams, but vague ones and he's often sort of detached, maybe because his life is on hold in between tricks. Karlo has fallen into a lifestyle that offers him up during every waking moment for any stranger. He does it for money, but it pays so badly, he can't save up enough to pay his rent. 

     A film driven by atmosphere and a sense of foreboding dread, Pasahero (Viva Films, JPHILX, 2024)  proves that even though you may think you are done with the past, the past isn’t always necessarily done with you. There’s very little surprise to the movie, as Juvy Galamiton’s screenplay pretty much lays out just who is stalking the six passengers on the last trip of an MMR train and what the apparition’s ultimate intent is rather early on. Instead, director Roman Perez Jr. makes this an affair that’s a bit more about creating a palpable mood filled with tension and dreamlike uncertainty, where viewers are never quite sure just what is fantasy and what is reality. The film’s ensemble of actors all do a wondrous job bringing a sense of gravitas to the picture. Bea Binene (Angel) and Louise delos Reyes (Michelle) give intriguing performances, especially the former, who plays her role with an indescribable, transcendental quality. The mystery driving the haunting is so cold-blooded and practical that you won’t even think twice about its motivation. The movie is told with style. It goes without saying that style is the most important single element in every ghost story, since without it even the most ominous events disintegrate into silliness. And Pasahero, is aware that if characters talk too much they disperse the tension, adopting a very economical story-telling approach. Dialogue comes in straightforward sentences. Background is provided without distracting from the story. Characters are established with quick, subtle strokes. 

     Pasahero adds an extra layer through it’s sense of melancholy. Angel’s personal grief gives a stronger emotional link between her and the spirit - she sympathizes with the dead by trying to help solve their issues so they can be at peace. In lesser films, the heroine simply gets frightened and wants to stop the ghost in order to save her own skin. There’s a sense of wrongness throughout Perez’s film. It feels like a race against time as Angel tries to expose the crime before becoming the next victim. While real life violence provides the aura of dread that pervades the movie, the restraint shown by Perez is just as responsible for the effectiveness of the tale. Instead of inundating us with over-the-top hijinks, he bides his time before introducing the ghostly happenings - a weird noise here, a horrifying vision there - which provides a satisfyingly ominous atmosphere. Perez shot Pasahero in a manner that puts the viewer constantly on edge, with lots of odd angles, perspectives and sound design. Extremely stylish in execution, it’s convincing in a way that few ghost stories are — not in the least because the crime at the bottom of the haunting is particularly nasty. The images we create in our heads to explain bumps in the night as well as everything else horrifying are far more frightening than anything a director can put on screen. Even stripped of the ethereal elements, Pasahero would have made for a compelling murder-mystery, but the supernatural sheen only adds to its power and unexpected poignancy. 

Sound Designer: Lamberto Casas Jr., Alex Tomboc

Musical Director: Dek Margaja

Editor: Aaron Alegre

Production Design: JC Catiggay

Director of Photography: Neil Bion

Screenplay: Juvy Galamiton

Directed By: Roman Perez, Jr.

     In Joel C. Lamangan's Walker (New Sunrise Films, 2022), the spectator is lured into the lives of women who, for various reasons, have been forced into prostitution. Strangely, the single-take sequences and the richness of detail in the mise-en-scène are all in place, but the only movement in Walker is cyclical and back-and-forth, like the lives of its characters, perpetually leaving and returning to their profession. Discursive sequences in which the characters discuss the social causes and effects of prostitution suddenly give way to the conduct of the business itself where prostitutes are literally dragged by their patrons. Through his own obscure passageways, Lamangan charts the various fates of his protagonists as they struggle under the social and economic burdens of their occupation. Most abhor their work and more than one schemes, usually unsuccessfully, to leave it. Lamangan and screenwriter Troy Espiritu creates a diverse range of characters who have varying back-stories but are selling their bodies in one way or another, because of men. Lamangan is anchored by its cast of characters, making Walker a true ensemble effort. Unlike more conventional dramas of the time, which had one or two protagonists and then a larger supporting cast, Lamangan employs a group of performers and gives them equal weight. These women vary in age, possessing different outlooks in life. Lamangan works extremely well with his cast, making  sure to never portray them as anything other than unflinchingly human. These women being in a profession that requires them to sell their bodies doesn’t negate their humanity, the film becomes less about their line of work and more about their inner qualities, which drives both the injustice and the necessity of prostitution, but never stops short of portraying it as tragedy allowing glimmers of possibility and even agency for the characters. 

     Lamangan gives his heroines love and sympathy, pointing his finger at the repressive patriarchal society for allowing the exploitation of women and for reflecting society’s hypocritical attitude towards them. It’s a polished, poignant and unsentimental account of the women who resiliently live in the streets awaiting a better future. There is no doubt whose side Lamangan is on. One by one, in interwoven detail, he shows us how each of the women live. His attention to the trials of womanhood is sustained over his career and yet its meaning is less obvious—and perhaps less laudable —than many would like to believe. The psycho-biographical interpretation of Lamangan—rhymes nicely with the Western conception of a feminist filmmaker. But his attitude toward women is more of an aestheticizer of female suffering, extolling and reveling in the strength and resilience of women, than one who fights against the causes of their hardship. But in watching Walker, there is little doubt where Lamangan's sympathies lie. The film is at once politically engaged and emotionally subtle. Although it puts forth a particularly complex understanding of gender politics, it never seems to relate to any immediate context. The film closes on a note of hope and heartbreak. The brief final scene in which a man takes his first step into a life that has ruined him, evoking a heartbreaking vision of hell is a mark of Lamangan’s genius. Walker is inscribed with a rare urgency that is nonetheless balanced by humanist understanding, an understanding that is remarkable even for him.

Screenplay: Troy Espiritu

Director of Photography: T.M. Malones

Editing: Gilbert Obispo

Production Designer: Jay Custodio

Music: Von de Guzman

Sound: Christopher Mendoza

Direction: Joel C. Lamangan