Gates of hell (revisited)

It’s pretty easy to lose your innocence — if not your soul — in Metro Manila. At least that’s the sense one gets from watching Sean Ellis’s Sundance Audience Award winner Metro Manila, starring Jake Macapagal, Althea Vega and John Arcilla (STAR Lifestyle’s own Celine Lopez is a co-producer). The film premieres here on Oct. 9.

Oscar Ramirez (Macapagal) is a rice farmer in Banaue who can’t afford seeds for next year’s crop, let alone a dentist to fix his daughter’s toothache, so he and wife Mai (Vega) hop on a bus to Metro Manila with their kids and quickly find it’s not the heavenly place they initially imagined it to be.

Every possible horror scenario happens to these out-of-towners: Oscar gives all their money away to a “landlord” who sets the family up in condemned government property; they’re promptly evicted by crooked cops; Oscar tries to find day work unloading rocks from a trucks — and is paid in snacks instead of money.

The term “hand to mouth” applies to the Ramirez family, who can never seem to hold on to cash for more than a few moments before it’s snatched away.

All this is helps set up a fast-paced tale of desperation and bleak survival on the mean streets of Manila, a place depicted by Ellis — who wrote, directed and acted as cinematographer — with an almost poetic, pitiless gaze.

Yet this is not mere poverty porn. Despite its relatively low budget Metro Manila has big style, and bigger ambitions: the denouement brings everything together with a touch of poetic irony. (It’s not surprising that the plot has universal appeal: the script is already being remade in at least one other country: the US.)

My wife and I recall meeting director Ellis at a dinner party a year or so back. He had praise for Lopez, who seemed born to produce: the director recalled how he needed an armored car; he asked Celine and she simply flipped open her cell phone, punched in a number and asked, “Anything else?”

Oscar manages to land a job as an armed car guard, and this leads to interesting plot twists, as Ellis ratchets up his story to what will become an inevitable conclusion.

The script touches on many a social issue — overpopulation (Mai, who seeks a job as a GRO to supplement the family income, is expecting baby number three, even while she breastfeeds baby number two); police corruption (obvious); the sad plight of farmers and their desperate migration to the city; squatter life; and the inextricable clutch of utang na loob (Oscar’s partner Ong does him favors, expecting full, cooperation in return).

One of the script’s motifs is the idea of “the postman”: the guy who has to deliver his dead partner’s personal effects to the widow whenever a truck heist goes bad and an armed guard is killed. It may be a fictional device, but with this, among other realistic touches, Ellis stays close to the ground with his observations about day-to-day urban living in the Philippines. (Another detail in the story — about a Filipino who relieved all the passengers of a commercial flight of their wallets before jumping from the plane in a makeshift parachute — is actually taken from a true news item many years back, but has now acquired the feel of urban myth.)

Helping the project succeed immensely is the acting of Macapagal, as the too-innocent Oscar, and Arcilla as his partner Ong. Arcilla is particularly effective, whether he’s holding forth in the driver’s seat on past deliveries gone wrong, playing his mix tape of opera favorites, or holding a drinking session after hours. His eyes radiate a hawk’s intensity, and a wolf’s cunning. Macapagal perhaps gives his best performance yet, capturing the earnest desire of a Filipino to rise in the world, while grappling with daily miseries that make this dream so elusive. Also strong is Vega, especially in the scene that alternates between her nightclub duties and Oscar’s desperate attempt to escape in alcohol.

Perhaps Ellis is able to present such a vivid portrait of Manila life because the essentials — too many people, not enough work, corruption at every level — are present in so many other modern metropolises. It becomes the story of every modern city, though Ellis brings elements of many genres to the party, including noir and the heist film (which Brits are stylistically enamored of, from Michael Mann’s Heat to Reservoir Dogs to The Dark Knight).

That being said, it’s not the type of movie that’s going to make the “More Fun” DOT or MMDA chairman Francis Tolentino very happy.

Streets are shot with an eye for ugly realism; the metro only looks “pretty” from way above, when characters are looking down at it from condos or rooftops. Tolentino, who chided Dan Brown for describing Manila as “the gates of hell” in his latest novel, might struggle to find nice things to say about Metro Manila. But though it ain’t pretty, it’s still pretty accurate.