Slouching toward Wazakland
It’s not surprising that people refuse to take Khavn de la Cruz seriously, jack of all art trades that he is, being filmmaker, poet, musician. His films in fact begin with a disclaimer that these are not films, which approach is technically honest, as he works with digital. And what’s this story going around that he once submitted almost half the entries in a Cinemalaya scriptwriting contest some years ago? The guy’s incorrigible, no doubt, but eventually the works will have to stand by themselves, whether poem, musical composition, or not a film, stand or fall as isolated cases as they happen, oddly, and make themselves known to you. How does that song go? The more you ignore him, the closer he gets. (Morrissey.)
The latest to do the rounds, as far as we can tell from the sampler he has sent over, is the fairly recent Kalakala, a semi-documentary part-feature but wholly a monster of a not a film, about a taong grasa shell shocked by the onslaught of storm Sendong last December in Cagayan de Oro. Footage of the mud caked fat man wandering the devastated streets of the city in the aftermath of the storm, interspliced with that of a dancing Manobo woman as if leading the vagabond on. In the background, a voice declaims the Filipino translation by Bien Lumbera of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” London Bridge falling down in the wilds of Mindanao. This is the art of juxtaposition, of breaking down images and concepts, and putting them back again together as if in a bizarre, surreal jigsaw puzzle. And don’t get Khavn started on the p-word (postmodern, oops, there it goes), because he has a penchant to make the camera speak freely, in plain sepia and ochre tones, let it roll through the night in the vain hope that daylight is just around the corner.
So Kalakala is a trip in the eye of the beholder, and we become the vagabond led on by the dancing woman to his watery end. Redemption, if ever it is required, might be found in the margins of the translated verse, for here poetry becomes the last refuge of the hopeless, angling for at least something indestructible.
Pusong Wazak is a short film that has done the modest rounds of the international circuit, and tells another deathless tale of love/hate/love between a criminal and a prostitute. Again Khavn works on found images meticulously assembled, as if throwbacks from a dream or nightmare, and the influence of early works in the genre can be gleaned — the quirky camerawork, the almost pa-cute one-liners, the music video ambience that is alternately staged and haphazard. In presenting the quasi-narrative in a he said, she said mode, we get a drift of this not a story that owes less to Dostoevsky as it does to Eisenstein on the beach. In terms of film language, Pusong Wazak is as fluent as they come, with great fleeting shots of Intramuros at night.
Perhaps Khavn’s most critically combustible work of late is MondoManila, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the city of our affections or is it affectations, with references to Tarantino with its in-your-face gutter language and unapologetic depiction of the deepest slums of Manila, the prototype looban or mazelike inner district, where unfold the lives of a carnivalesque pageant of characters from dwarves to rapping disfigured toughs selling grilled sweetmeats on the side, white trash pedophiles to sex-starved laundrywomen. Based on a novel by Norman Wilwayco, Mondomanila is at once entertaining and frightening, a fable of Manila maybe even the ghost of Lino Brocka would cringe at. Khavn is the ringmaster of proceedings, and the at-times stomach-turning scenery and developments are definitely not for the fainthearted, but these are toned down with the not-a-filmmaker’s trademark black humor and snappy editing as well as the incontrovertible evidence of a rock and roll heart in the soundtrack. As if to say, if there is no city but this city, we can at least recreate and reinvent it with the detritus of our collective subconscious.
This also is most likely the late comedian Palito’s last film, and the end credits in fact dedicate it to his memory. There are compelling performances too by an apparently pregnant Marife Necesito as the single mom labandera, and Whitney Tyson as the usurious 5-6 landlady. Mondomanila received mixed reviews, we heard, possibly due to the fanciful treatment verging on poverty porn, but you can’t ignore it (because the closer the director will get to Wazakland).
Easily the most personal of these not-a-films is Breather (Pahinga), which runs like a home movie hammered and twisted and acetylene torched to become a semi-feature, part documentary, on the hospitalization of Khavn’s father, interwoven with the director’s own hiatus and self-evaluation as not-a-filmmaker. While the ordinary viewer may feel like an outsider to this domestic drama, there are splices of street wisdom in the interviews of Khavn with his father, and so imparts a lesson on the objectification of emotion. The script also tends to question Khavn’s own purpose and motives in his work, and if it feels uncomfortable staring at someone else’s navel this is only intentional, any similarities to actual persons living or otherwise are part of the territory, though some may see it as an abuse of artistic license if not the p-world.
The shortest in the sampler is “How to raise a smart and happy child from age zero to five.” Running at around six minutes tops, it is an impressionist plea against child labor and abuse, and could be promotional material for a special school that seeks to guide one’s children right out of the womb. It could be seen as ironic, but the material looks serious. And it is, man, it is. As short as it is serious black; wakaz, man, wazak.
