Movie review 'Kinatay': Truth, violence and morality

MANILA, Philippines - The exciting part in Kinatay is not the murder and body-part dispatch of the female drug dealer-victim (played by Isabel Lopez). It is the flat-tire ending, a baffling moment for Peping, the main character played by Coco Martin.

The movie begins with a wedding. Peping and his live-in girlfriend Cecille (played by Mercedes Cabral) are happily rushing through the streets to go to the City Hall for an appointment with the Justice of the Peace. They weave through the hustle and bustle of the Barangka neighborhood in Mandaluyong City.

It begins with an upbeat rhythm of high expectation. Peping and his fiancée have deposited their baby with a neighbor. He is about to legalize his status. There is no trace of guilt in Peping, of trying to right a wrong in his relationship with his girlfriend. Rather, it is played out like a natural process: that now he can marry Cecille, his beloved, in anticipation of his becoming a full-fledged policeman with a career ahead of him.

A good part of the beginning follows Peping through the marriage ritual — bleached of any religious affiliation. It is the secular state, in the sala of the Justice of the Peace (played by Lou Veloso), that is in charge of overseeing and legalizing the bond of Peping and his wife. As they proceed to the municipio for their appointment, they witness a high-tension scene between a man perched like Humpty Dumpty high up on top of a steel structure near Edsa, and his distraught mother, hysterically calling out to her son, to come down from the high beam. This image of precarious self-destruction is glimpsed amid the happy expectation, if not euphoria of Peping, Cecille, and family on the way to the wedding and reception.

The next episode brings Peping back to school attending a class of would-be rookies. The excitement of the wedding that just happened in the morning infects everyone in the class. There is much bantering among his classmates and teacher.

After class, Abiong (played by Jhong Hilario), his friend, informs Peping of an urgent assignment that same night: The boss wants them.

Here, the movie shifts into the dark bowels of the city. A female drug dealer (Isabel Lopez) is picked up from a bar-night club, and whisked away in a van. A journey through Roxas Boulevard and Edsa, ends up via the NLEX in some remote town in Bulacan or Pampanga.

The female is interrogated and beaten up in the van. Much of these scenes are filmed in dark shadows with a constant barrage of incidental car and road noises.

At the safe house, the victim is dragged into a basement, revived by a pail of water, and interrogated further about her shortcomings, betrayals, and failures to deliver the promised money. All the while, Peping watches the proceeding helplessly in one corner. The assistant to the boss, Kap (played by Julio Diaz), orders him together with Abiong, to buy cigarettes and a lighter. They take the van to town. Abiong hands him a gun. He says Kap told him it was a present for Peping for his personal use. Agitated and confused, Peping contemplates abandoning his friend. He stealthily slips away, attempts to take a bus, fleeing the scene. His cell phone rings. Abiong is wondering where he is? He reluctantly goes back to meet his companion.

Back at the safe house, Peping returns to the basement with the cigarettes. At this time, the victim attempts desperately to negotiate some deal with Kap. Instead his friend, Abiong, rapes her. The horror mounts effectively due to the fact that the scene is staged matter-of-factly. No melodramatic effects are resorted to. Screaming for her life, we hear her panic amid the black shadows, “Huwag n’yo kon gpatayin, me anak ako!” (Don’t kill me, please, I have a child!”)

She is killed, and then hacked, limb by limb, body part by body part. Mendoza stages this episode in a detached style, showing the efficiency of the murderers/executioners. He is careful not to choreograph a sensational rhythm of brutality, given the mounting emotions of all concerned. Absence of melodrama is sustained. We are far from Hollywood. To me, this is atypical Pinoy cinema!

When they return to the city, it is nearly dawn. The body parts, wrapped in plastic, are strewn one by one, or hurled onto different garbage sites.

Back in the city, somewhere in Grace Park, the team stops by the wayside for a breakfast meal. Peping, by this time, is stupefied by the nightmare. He asks to be excused. He can’t eat. The Boss allows him to go home. He gives him money to take a taxi.

In the taxi, Peping pulls out the gun from his bag. And while staring at it, we hear an explosion. The taxicab has had a flat tire. Freaked out, Peping goes down from the taxi and weakly tries to hail another cab. In the meanwhile, the driver changes the tire.  Once fixed, the driver bids him to come back in. It takes a long while for Peping to come to grips with himself. Then he goes back in. The scene is tense and dramatic. It reminded me of Kafka’s story, Metamorphosis. Peping has become exactly like Gregor Samsa. In the Kafka story, Gregor Samsa wakes up in bed, and discovers he has become a bug. The horror of that story is not that he has been transformed into an insect. The horror is that he and his family take it for granted. At the end of the story, Kafka describes the room of Gregor lying in bed with the bedroom window wide open. Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian novelist, in analyzing the story, was bemused to ask if Gregor was a bug in his bed, with a window wide open, why did he not use his wings to fly out to freedom?

Peping has become a reincarnation of Gregor Samsa. Totally disoriented, and psychologically dislocated, Peping stares at his new weapon given him that night. The movie began with hope and expectations. The images of self-obliteration (the would-be suicide at Edsa) disturbed his wedding ritual. The experience of brutality and violence interrupted his wedding feast, annihilating his sense of self. Peping has lost his wings. Is the trauma temporary or permanent?

Mendoza has wonderfully designed this nightmare of a movie in a bold palette of pale ash grays to pitch/charcoal black with an occasional sudden dash of scarlet (the victim’s dress) amid the grays. The whole film is carefully calibrated in terms of color to deaden the atmosphere. The choice of the roadside Tapsilo gcafé with the towering structure of the LRT as background reminded me of Piranesi prints of endless arches, of disorienting perspectives. The scene is carefully filmed to capture the gray of dawn with just a small smudged promise of the morning sunrise.

Mendoza is rare among Pinoy directors. He is one of the few who consciously constructs metaphors in his cinema.

Kinatay is not just a horrific story of a butchered bitch. It is rich with layers of meaning. And the art that conceals art is in the climax of the narrative. When the victim screams out for mercy, to spare her life — that she has a family, a child — the whole scene takes on a whole new meaning in retrospect. Present in the scene is Peping, witnessing the violence. It is not just the physical woman that is being ripped apart into disiecta membra, what in Greek dramaturgy is called sparagmos. Symbolically, the soul of Peping (and perhaps the viewer’s) is also being hacked to pieces. The hymen of innocence is ripped. Is the silent Peping crying out inside him, “Me anak rin ako!”? Do we partake of the crime? The movie is not really an expose of police brutality and corruption. It is the drama of a moral dilemma of spiritual habituation — how insidiously and subtly we fall into evil when moral guideposts disappear and moral ambiguities prevail.

When the police force, as embodied by the Boss (played by John Regala), decides to execute the victim in the name of business, he embraces efficiency and pragmatism. But in tearing her apart, we partake of a sacred ritual. By throwing her body parts all over the city, we share in the scandal and travesty of life’s sacredness. Literally, binabasura ang buhay! We share in the devaluation and desecration of the divine aspect of human life.

Peping’s wedding ritual ends in a bloodbath that rips apart, perhaps totally annihilating his sense of self.  

The movie ends with a sunrise image of his bride preparing him a breakfast meal of fried rice with egg. The wedding feast has ended and a new life begins, or rather, the agony begins. In Greek dramaturgy, after the sparagmos comes the agonia. The ambiguous image of hope, of family values, is dimly reasserted.