Gritty realism
January 28, 2002 | 12:00am
Let me go back a couple of weeks to an e-mail message I received in response to my reviews of the Metro Manila filmfest entries, from a reader I can identify only by his or her e-mail address, "ncct." I had written that "if I had to put a finger on the worst technical weakness of our movies… it would be poor conception and control of dialogue."
The reader wrote: "May I add my two-cents worth to that? How about unrealistic make-up and wardrobe?! I call to mind countless Tagalog movies and soaps where actresses fall asleep and the camera closes in on their heavily made-up faces. With curly, mascara-ed lashes to boot. Are the actresses afraid to have their faces portrayed "in all their naked glory"? Whose call is this anyway? (The director’s? Make-up artist’s? Cameraman’s?) As for wardrobe, how about movies with nuns and sisters who still wear the pre-war habit, i.e., the kind that leaves only the face exposed. Or worse, of soldiers or men in battle who manage to fight and retain immaculately clean clothing."
Ay, sinabi mo. I’ve said this myself about a number of the movies I scripted as well as others I’ve seen. Our war or wartime movies look like the war started three days before the shoot, with the uniforms still crisp and spotless.
I suppose, on the most basic level, that it’s a problem of time and of the budget. Most of our movies get shot in a great rush within a month, with not much more time for preparing sets and costumes; thus, production designers end up having costume-uniforms made wholesale by, say, the ROTC suppliers on Claro M. Recto, with no further provisions for "aging" the costumes properly (remember "stonewashed" Levi’s jeans?). Bigtime Hollywood studios maintain huge wardrobe collections that can dress up whole armies, or otherwise have access to private suppliers of period-perfect costumes. (You can, in fact, buy some of them on eBay, where Bo Derek’s leather bikini – used, of course – was selling a couple of months ago for less than $300, all for a good cause, natch, alongside Bruce Willis’ Armaggedon flight suit and other, uhm, wearer-friendlier items of celebrity clothing. Now you know what keeps me up until the wee hours.)
The bigger answer to why we can’t make realistic movies is that, well, with few notable exceptions and until recently, we never really did, or hardly did. We don’t have a strong tradition of truly realist, documentary-quality cinema, where the characters look and speak like they would in real life.
But haven’t we seen a slew of movies set in the slums – De Leon, Brocka, and, most recently Jeturian and Lamangan? Indeed – but again, save for a few cases, most of these movies still employed the likes of Sharon Cuneta as improbable if commercially viable slum-dwellers. We’re still hung up on movie-star looks, and it took a Nora Aunor to break the mold. (And our film producers – understandably, from their point of view – are still hung up on profit, which you can’t maximize with leading ladies and leading men with tomato noses, gaps in their front teeth, and dead toenails.) Let’s not forget that our film industry is mainly in the business of idealization and romanticization, which means pretty faces, rosy outlooks, and exaggeration of effect.
Our directors, on the other hand, have become extremely adept at capturing the look and feel of low-life Philippines – yes, the slum milieu, which Imelda Marcos so deplored in directors like Brocka, but which remains home to millions of Filipinos, and a fertile locale for dozens of Filipino movies aspiring for gritty realism. Today, no self-respecting Filipino director would be caught without at least a few scenes steeped in the rank exhalations of a dumpsite.
But it’s one thing, I think, to faithfully depict slum life and even to celebrate its insistent vitality and the inadvertent beauty of the commonplace, and another to wallow in it, or to romanticize poverty. I don’t think I can accuse any of our modern directors of the last point, although they sometimes come pretty close to romancing or prettifying ugliness, if not evil. (And lest anyone misread my point, I’m not saying that you can’t find goodness, virtue, joy, or beauty in the slums; of course you can, but it’s no reason to conclude that squatters are better off where and as they are.)
By sheer coincidence, I was working on this column last Thursday and approaching this point when I had to dash off to the UP Film Center for a film preview I’d promised to attend, that of Lav Diaz’s Hesus, Rebolusyonaryo, starring Mark Anthony Fernandez. It was a very well-attended event; I spotted film directors Carlitos Siguion-Reyna, Joel Lamangan, Gil Portes, and Kidlat Tahimik in the audience, as well as writers Pete Lacaba, Rio Alma, Vim Nadera, and Krip Yuson, among many others. I took a seat beside documentarist and Regal Films busybody Gil Magnaye, and waited for the film to roll.
I don’t recall having seen any of Diaz’s earlier movies (the five-hour Batang West Side being the most recent and best-received among them) but I’d heard of his prodigious talent, and was excited to see it for myself, especially after Lav visited me in my office to invite me to the screening.
I don’t like to put a good man down, but I’d have to say that Diaz, an Ateneo economics major, has surely done better films than Hesus, which – while it took only the regular two hours instead of five – somehow felt longer than it actually ran, and that because of Diaz’s penchant for lingering if not loitering around a scene. There can be a charm and a purpose to slow and silent sequences – that long soundless scene in Summer of ’42 following the receipt of the news of the boyfriend’s death comes to mind – but I’m afraid that in Hesus, the device approaches indulgence and affectation.
Hesus, Rebolusyonaryo is set eight years in the future, during which the Philippines is ruled by a junta, and all kinds of rebels are up in arms against the regime, one of them Jesus Mariano, gunslinger extraordinaire. Under instructions from his cell leader (played with the usual reliability by Ronnie Lazaro), Hesus wipes out his own cell, only to discover later that he has been manipulated by various masters, whom he then proceeds to eliminate, before he escapes to some never-never land with his mute girlfriend (Donita Rose).
Mark Anthony Fernandez – never mind, for the time being, his real-life bad-boy image – is a gifted actor, and we saw this as well in Biyaheng Langit. But again the material here is simply too thin for him to be able to do much more than he delivers.
The figure of the tormented assassin is an attractive one (heck, I even wrote one up myself, in a long story called "Voyager"), and it can’t be timelier than this, with the recent publication of Bobby Garcia’s excellent if harrowing To Suffer Thy Children (Anvil Publishing), an account of the hyper-paranoid Ahos purges carried out by the CPP-NPA against suspected agents within its ranks.
I like Lav’s preference for a stylized and stylish approach to his subject; the deserted streets, with garbage skittering about like tumbleweed, evokes a moral wasteland. I’ll even admit to liking low-key shoot-‘em-all flicks, like Badlands and Natural Born Killers, with their compelling cold-bloodedness. Diaz clearly has the cinematic eye, but he needs a stronger story – actually, a good scriptwriter (he undertook the scripting himself) who can challenge and engage him. Dramaturgical basics, like clarifying the larger context and establishing the stakes so we can care about the character, are always worthy of consideration, no matter the specific technique or approach the film maker may employ. Like my writing teacher used to hammer into me, "Don’t forget the narrative line!"
I had to skip the symposium that followed on "Militarization and the Collective Filipino Psyche"; I quickly get overwhelmed by ponderous subjects, and I think they would have done better to talk about "History and Violence in Filipino Cinema," or something more to the point of the film itself, which if anything else, can generate much constructive debate about the film maker’s art in this society, at this time.
The reader wrote: "May I add my two-cents worth to that? How about unrealistic make-up and wardrobe?! I call to mind countless Tagalog movies and soaps where actresses fall asleep and the camera closes in on their heavily made-up faces. With curly, mascara-ed lashes to boot. Are the actresses afraid to have their faces portrayed "in all their naked glory"? Whose call is this anyway? (The director’s? Make-up artist’s? Cameraman’s?) As for wardrobe, how about movies with nuns and sisters who still wear the pre-war habit, i.e., the kind that leaves only the face exposed. Or worse, of soldiers or men in battle who manage to fight and retain immaculately clean clothing."
Ay, sinabi mo. I’ve said this myself about a number of the movies I scripted as well as others I’ve seen. Our war or wartime movies look like the war started three days before the shoot, with the uniforms still crisp and spotless.
I suppose, on the most basic level, that it’s a problem of time and of the budget. Most of our movies get shot in a great rush within a month, with not much more time for preparing sets and costumes; thus, production designers end up having costume-uniforms made wholesale by, say, the ROTC suppliers on Claro M. Recto, with no further provisions for "aging" the costumes properly (remember "stonewashed" Levi’s jeans?). Bigtime Hollywood studios maintain huge wardrobe collections that can dress up whole armies, or otherwise have access to private suppliers of period-perfect costumes. (You can, in fact, buy some of them on eBay, where Bo Derek’s leather bikini – used, of course – was selling a couple of months ago for less than $300, all for a good cause, natch, alongside Bruce Willis’ Armaggedon flight suit and other, uhm, wearer-friendlier items of celebrity clothing. Now you know what keeps me up until the wee hours.)
The bigger answer to why we can’t make realistic movies is that, well, with few notable exceptions and until recently, we never really did, or hardly did. We don’t have a strong tradition of truly realist, documentary-quality cinema, where the characters look and speak like they would in real life.
But haven’t we seen a slew of movies set in the slums – De Leon, Brocka, and, most recently Jeturian and Lamangan? Indeed – but again, save for a few cases, most of these movies still employed the likes of Sharon Cuneta as improbable if commercially viable slum-dwellers. We’re still hung up on movie-star looks, and it took a Nora Aunor to break the mold. (And our film producers – understandably, from their point of view – are still hung up on profit, which you can’t maximize with leading ladies and leading men with tomato noses, gaps in their front teeth, and dead toenails.) Let’s not forget that our film industry is mainly in the business of idealization and romanticization, which means pretty faces, rosy outlooks, and exaggeration of effect.
Our directors, on the other hand, have become extremely adept at capturing the look and feel of low-life Philippines – yes, the slum milieu, which Imelda Marcos so deplored in directors like Brocka, but which remains home to millions of Filipinos, and a fertile locale for dozens of Filipino movies aspiring for gritty realism. Today, no self-respecting Filipino director would be caught without at least a few scenes steeped in the rank exhalations of a dumpsite.
But it’s one thing, I think, to faithfully depict slum life and even to celebrate its insistent vitality and the inadvertent beauty of the commonplace, and another to wallow in it, or to romanticize poverty. I don’t think I can accuse any of our modern directors of the last point, although they sometimes come pretty close to romancing or prettifying ugliness, if not evil. (And lest anyone misread my point, I’m not saying that you can’t find goodness, virtue, joy, or beauty in the slums; of course you can, but it’s no reason to conclude that squatters are better off where and as they are.)
By sheer coincidence, I was working on this column last Thursday and approaching this point when I had to dash off to the UP Film Center for a film preview I’d promised to attend, that of Lav Diaz’s Hesus, Rebolusyonaryo, starring Mark Anthony Fernandez. It was a very well-attended event; I spotted film directors Carlitos Siguion-Reyna, Joel Lamangan, Gil Portes, and Kidlat Tahimik in the audience, as well as writers Pete Lacaba, Rio Alma, Vim Nadera, and Krip Yuson, among many others. I took a seat beside documentarist and Regal Films busybody Gil Magnaye, and waited for the film to roll.
I don’t recall having seen any of Diaz’s earlier movies (the five-hour Batang West Side being the most recent and best-received among them) but I’d heard of his prodigious talent, and was excited to see it for myself, especially after Lav visited me in my office to invite me to the screening.
I don’t like to put a good man down, but I’d have to say that Diaz, an Ateneo economics major, has surely done better films than Hesus, which – while it took only the regular two hours instead of five – somehow felt longer than it actually ran, and that because of Diaz’s penchant for lingering if not loitering around a scene. There can be a charm and a purpose to slow and silent sequences – that long soundless scene in Summer of ’42 following the receipt of the news of the boyfriend’s death comes to mind – but I’m afraid that in Hesus, the device approaches indulgence and affectation.
Hesus, Rebolusyonaryo is set eight years in the future, during which the Philippines is ruled by a junta, and all kinds of rebels are up in arms against the regime, one of them Jesus Mariano, gunslinger extraordinaire. Under instructions from his cell leader (played with the usual reliability by Ronnie Lazaro), Hesus wipes out his own cell, only to discover later that he has been manipulated by various masters, whom he then proceeds to eliminate, before he escapes to some never-never land with his mute girlfriend (Donita Rose).
Mark Anthony Fernandez – never mind, for the time being, his real-life bad-boy image – is a gifted actor, and we saw this as well in Biyaheng Langit. But again the material here is simply too thin for him to be able to do much more than he delivers.
The figure of the tormented assassin is an attractive one (heck, I even wrote one up myself, in a long story called "Voyager"), and it can’t be timelier than this, with the recent publication of Bobby Garcia’s excellent if harrowing To Suffer Thy Children (Anvil Publishing), an account of the hyper-paranoid Ahos purges carried out by the CPP-NPA against suspected agents within its ranks.
I like Lav’s preference for a stylized and stylish approach to his subject; the deserted streets, with garbage skittering about like tumbleweed, evokes a moral wasteland. I’ll even admit to liking low-key shoot-‘em-all flicks, like Badlands and Natural Born Killers, with their compelling cold-bloodedness. Diaz clearly has the cinematic eye, but he needs a stronger story – actually, a good scriptwriter (he undertook the scripting himself) who can challenge and engage him. Dramaturgical basics, like clarifying the larger context and establishing the stakes so we can care about the character, are always worthy of consideration, no matter the specific technique or approach the film maker may employ. Like my writing teacher used to hammer into me, "Don’t forget the narrative line!"
I had to skip the symposium that followed on "Militarization and the Collective Filipino Psyche"; I quickly get overwhelmed by ponderous subjects, and I think they would have done better to talk about "History and Violence in Filipino Cinema," or something more to the point of the film itself, which if anything else, can generate much constructive debate about the film maker’s art in this society, at this time.
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