Scandals & nihilists

Young director Robert Quebral takes the sociologically explosive subject of the proliferation of sex scandals on video compact discs, and turns it into a softporn B-movie that leaves the viewer grasping at too many loose ends as if these were straws or stray pubic hairs.

Released by Digital Viva, which gave us the more coherent Boso, Coed Scandal, however, exhausts its early impressionist goodwill by making the material an excuse to show skin and more skin going into this and that position, without really satisfying anything but our curious, baser instincts.

Even then Coed Scandal, which has all the hallmarks of independent filmmaking with an obvious eye for the U-belt market and its pimply denizens with raging hormones, leaves much to be desired. For material as rich as this urban legend – indeed you see these VCDs everywhere, scandals galore from Quiapo to Catbalogan and Dumaguete and back – Quebral and company fail to mine the deeper sociological implications of a convoluted sexual voyeurism.

Or do they? Maybe we were too distracted by Jennifer Lee’s beauteous breasts, Avi Siwa’s ample chin, Ryan Eigenmann’s cute bald head that we too missed the point of this roiling, nihilist kama sutra that lapses periodically into incoherence.

In fairness to Quebral, he like most other independent filmmakers with nothing to lose takes more risks than usual, but the result is that the movie just about gets out of hand and outright derailed. Often we found ourselves wondering how will it end, seeing that the director was quite intent at painting himself into a corner.

Eigenmann, who has an uncanny resemblance to his mother Gina Alajar, plays a college student who has to finish a video thesis for a film subject, and comes up with a not so bright idea of making his own skin flick, starring himself and his girlfriend played by Lee, with some lesbian good measure thrown in courtesy of Siwa.

The ingredients are no doubt provocative, something that would not be out of place with the batch of Experimental Cinema of the Philippines films in the early 1980s that included Scorpio Nights and Virgin Forest, not to mention those potboilers with Irma Alegre.

The use of a semi-comic foil named Jun, the guitar-playing nerdy dude with an enduring crush on the Lee character, somehow falls flat, much like his self-absorbed and spiritless compositions by which he tries to woo the girl. Shots with him in the frame are suffused in cosmic yellow, which turns out to be his favorite color, and makes us wonder on hindsight why samples of the Coldplay hit were not played in the background, although Isha’s piano work and deft touches that verge on ragtime already fill up much of the dead, empty space.

Suddenly too the story takes us with Jun hot on the trail of Lee in Hong Kong, where the scandalous victim has sought refuge among her fellow chinky eyed folk, into a subway train that made us look twice if this perhaps was not the LRT 2? Just as jarring is the Eigenmann character being taken away in straitjacket after he locks himself up in his room, a portrait of abject frustration after unsuccessfully trying to buy up all the existing Coed Scandal copies from his Muslim suki.

The abiding dissonance of the proceedings might pay tribute to postmodernism, surrealism, sexual nihilism among other isms, and the rather repetitious sex scenes would certainly steam up a few spectacles if not peeping tom portholes, but eventually Coed Scandal falls short of expectations because it does not humanize its characters. Any attempted empathy for these sexually active kids in the videocam age gets lost in the mix.

Tikoy Aguiluz’s Boatman may have been just as raunchy, but then he was able to humanize the material, and more than 20 years later Ronnie Lazaro, Sarsi Emmanuel, Josephine Manuel, and Freddie Salanga remain memorable in their roles. Softporn filmmaking is more than merely "ibaba ang lonta, ipakita ang ari" –memorable lines spoken by the toro impresario Goma as played by the late Salanga.

Like the other indies, Quebral relies hugely on instinct and oido, but as he learns the ropes he’ll realize that story is essential. Diffusion can carry style only so far. And the unsettling surrealism that seems commonplace in Coed Scandal is what makes it truly dangerous and, in the end, a trifle odoriferous.