(WARNING: plot twists and story points discussed in explicit detail!)
Comes the time to discuss the late great Peque Gallaga. The past few days have seen tribute after tribute; folks have expressed love and affection, not just for his films but for the man himself. His Oro, Plata, Mata (Gold, Silver, Death, 1982) is oft considered his best-known work, and one of the greatest if not the greatest Filipino film ever made.
I'm not a big fan; yet why does he bother me so? Partly I think because even I can see he's prodigiously gifted--you can't look at the extravagant celebration that opens Oro and fail to acknowledge the talent--partly because I find him so undisciplined. Reportedly the film's original cut ran to five hours--it's said than Ishmael Bernal locked him out of the editing room to trim the length down to a merely intimidating two hundred and ten minutes. You wonder at the excess Gallaga must have proudly put on display before Bernal dragged the production back to earth; you also wonder about each and every one of his succeeding projects, on which would ultimately come out on top: the filmmaking or the recklessness?
Unfaithful Wife is arguably Gallaga's most earnest attempt at domestic drama, with generous doses of sex on the side to help sell the production. Crispin (Michael de Mesa) runs a beer garden with his wife Irene (Anna Marie Gutierrez); Fidel (Joel Torre) walks through the barroom doors and immediately Crispin's face lights up: he misses his longtime long absent friend.
Fidel as it turns out is a handful--when Irene walks in on the two Fidel is weeping and Crispin trying to console him (apparently Fidel did jail time and the experience has been traumatic). When Irene fixes him up with a girlfriend (his wife had passed away years back) he comes on too strong; the girl resists and he strikes her across the face. Fidel is a handful not just for the pair but for the audience--you don't know what to make of him. At one point he's sodden wimp; at another he's foiled an attempted kidnapping of the town mayor;* at yet another he's forced himself on Irene's friend. Did he really love his wife? Did they maybe enjoy rough sex? Was he taking unconscious revenge on an incident in prison--sexual assault, perhaps? Fidel doesn't say; Crispin trying to placate his wife isn't much more helpful:"You don't know what he's been through...do you know how much he loved his wife? When she died a part of him died with her." What does any of that have to do with date rape?
*(On the kidnapping: Fidel's gambit of faking cowardice to catch the kidnappers off-guard is daring, but how smart was he to take on three armed men? Granted it's possible (however unlikely) that Crispin will tackle the second gunman (which he does, luckily enough)--who takes care of the third? Can we count on the man to be sufficiently startled to jump out a window--which he does?)
Then there's Choleng (Lala Montelibano), Crispin and Irene's hot-to-trot boarder. She throws herself at every man in sight; you wonder why she hasn't thrown herself at either Crispin or Fidel and gotten her ass kicked by Irene. After her fourth or fifth man a new suspicion comes to fore: that Choleng belongs to a different far sleazier film. Rumor has it that many of Choleng's sex scenes were directed by Abbo de la Cruz (plays a minor part) and inserted in post-production. The scenes certainly seem so: at one point Choleng fellates a hotdog on a stick; at another she quenches her thirst with a bottle of 7-Up (a throwaway joke about softdrink beauties?); at yet another she has carnal relations with a lotion bottle. The scenes are baldly lit and shot, but they have a playfulness and campy sense of humor (see Pedro Almodovar, or better yet, Joey Gosiengfiao) the rest of the picture badly needs.
Then the dilemma at the heart of the drama which, as it turns out, is not much of a dilemma. Irene and Fidel fall into bed together, almost by accident; Choleng is horribly killed and suspicion falls on Fidel (doesn't help that no one likes his erratic, high-handedly arrogant manner). Should Irene speak up and say Fidel's innocent because he was with her that night? She cares enough to tell Crispin...but when he goes to the police captain he says, roughly translated: "We can't do anything...a mess like this is more than enough, otherwise we'll still be hunting for the killer. It's Choleng's fault. That's why she was punished. Give us Fidel, for the peace of the town."
Not only does that speech make no sense I can't see it persuading anyone to stay silent--even if we allow for the well-known fact that the Philippine constabulary is corrupt, and seeks easy answers for a quick resolution, what's to stop Crispin from speaking up, short of intimidation or blackmail (which the captain doesn't do)? The setup up for the film's finale is flimsy at best laughable at worse; as things play out you watch with jaw dropped and both brows raised.
The flimsy script is credited to Uro de la Cruz--Abbo's brother--and 'T.E. Pagaspas' (reportedly a psuedonym for Peque and friends); to his everlasting damnation (or everlasting credit depending on how you feel about it) lack of logic or structure has never stopped Gallaga. Call the film's melodrama an armature on which Gallaga manages to hang several impressive setpieces: the wonderfully realized three-dimensional space (designed by longtime collaborator Don Escudero and, again reportedly, Peque himself) that is Crispin's bar and grill, complete with walls painted a Dario Argento red, and a mezzanine circling that center space allowing folks (and Peque's camera) to view the action below. Peque explores this set with a roving gliding camera that adds both intimacy and the faint sizzle of a filmmaker exulting in his own style. Taking his cue from Scorpio Nights he builds a community around the trio of lovers, sketching in mini-vignettes of the town's subsidiary characters: an eccentric child-man (played by Abbo) who subscribes to Choleng's symbolic guilt; a lazy alpha male of a mayor (Leo Martinez, complete with phallic cigar); a sinister police officer/detective named Villa (Pen Medina in an early role)--if you haven't guessed by now, a literary conceit straight out of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the police officer as cunning detective and crack shot (when Lav Diaz did his adaptation he sensibly did away with this figure, which may pass muster on the streets of Moscow but would look ridiculous patrolling the provincial towns of the Philippines).
And occasionally a moment of honest passion. Lala Montelibano's Choleng working the farcical sex leaves Anna Marie Gutierre's Irene to be as chaste or as sensual as she wants to be. There's an early scene of her nipping Michael de Mesa's Crispin playfully in various parts of his body which feels sexy because it's so unforced, so natural. Later Irene and Fidel have an intense exchange where Irene flings her worse insult at him: "You're a coward. If you loved her so much that you can't live without her then you should have killed yourself the moment she died." Fidel is mortally wounded; Irene realizes her mistake and tries to comfort him. One thing leads to another: Irene grabs his head yells into his face "What's with you?" kisses him.
Powerful? Yes. You hardly believe they managed it after all the missteps throughout the picture but they do, a tightrope dance that ends in a totally inevitable (because spontaneous, or skillfully made to seem so) clinch. No period music (Al Jarreau, Julian Lennon), no silly artful pretenses, just two actors feeling their way through a scene, and a filmmaker producing--for once--real cinema. The two stare at each other, startled; Gallaga's camera circles them tentatively, almost fearfully, wondering what they'll do next; what gives the scene its erotic charge is the thrill, the sense of limitless possibility. The moment lingers in memory long after the film is over--if anything makes the viewing a worthwhile experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment