Direk Dante and the fate of Phl cinema

We first met director Brilliante “Dante” Mendoza when we were asked to cover
the Cannes Film Festival of 2008, where Dante had an entry titled Serbis,
a bold exposé of
the illegal sex trade going on to this day in Angeles City, Pampanga where Dante was born. The title Serbis, most obviously, is about the sexual services openly and indiscreetly performed by hustlers inside the theater despite all signs otherwise.

Location for the film was
an actual movie theater since,
we would discover later, direk
Dante never used sets but actual
locations in his movies. He had
found an actual movie theater
whose appearance for the theme
of the film was perfect. The plot
of Serbis also refers to the daily
business of running the theater,
picking up the reels for the week
after, collecting tickets, cleaning
the restrooms, arguing with cus-
tomers who feel either cheated by the scenes of the film or are scandalized.

A Filipino reviewer gave the film one of its best reviews which read: “Serbis is also Mendoza’s finely- detailed portrait of a family struggling to keep both their business and themselves together. The gray- haired matriarch Nanay Flor is played by the regal Gina Pareño, in a performance simultaneously quiet and angry. The emotional core of the film is Nayda (the always superb Jaclyn Jose), who runs the ticket booth and stands firm despite the mini crises that affect the family. Nayda is married to Lando (Julio Diaz), who cooks in the grimy canteen on the first floor. (In a subtle inversion, Lando performs the more domestic chores in the
family, serving up food and
doing the laundry.) Running
the theater is a family busi-
ness in every sense of the
word: The adopted daugh-
ter Jewel collects the tickets
at the door, and two cousins
paint the lurid billboards
and run the film projector.”

A much-discussed scene in Serbis is centered on the character of Coco Martin, who was always present in all of direk Dante’s early films until he moved to mainstream cinema and became ABS- CBN’s darling. Coco had problems at home with his wife and children, and other than that, had an overripe boil on his ass that needed to be popped. The entire pro- cedure was shown on the screen which to many was yucky and to a few extremely educational. This and other real-life portrayals in Serbis made most of the foreign audience walk out in a huff with the opinion that Serbis was the worst film they had ever seen and Dante was the worst direc- tor in the world.

The following year, 2009, was when Dante was again invited to Cannes and won the 2009 Cannes Film Festival Prix de la mise en scene Sitges Award for Best Director. His entry was Kinatay where criminology student Coco accepts
a job of joining a syndicate where those who do not follow instructions to the letter are abducted, raped and killed until her body is chopped into many pieces. The victim is played by Maria Isabel Lopez, a former bold model, and Coco, part of the syndicate. If Serbis was yucky, Kinatay and its butchery were inacceptable but the jurors read through the horror and the blood and so did others.

Those in the new media wrote: Sinali niya ito, at nanalo! Dun pa lang he deserves all the praise. Who can argue with the win! Brilliant ka direk Dante Men- doza! From another reviewer: You make some good points, dementedness. One problem: Your wrong us-age of the word “transcend” which as defined by Webster is “to go beyond a limit, to surpass, to excel.” Given what

I am reading, I don’t think there is any surpassing or excelling being done by the filmmaker. Could you have meant “empathizing”?

After these storied begin- nings, Dante has matured in many aspects. Now no longer one to shock the audience, he has decided to use his influ- ence in being a guiding spirit for the future of Philippine cinema all over the world. His next indie film produced by Sen. Loren Legarda is titled Yolanda and again is a true-to- life portrayal of the victims of the typhoon, where again he will be using actual footage of the Tacloban tragedy.
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