A third golden age?
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from June 1 to the 25th will hold an exhibit titled "A New Golden Age: Contemporary Philippine Cinema"--basically a sampling of seventeen Filipino films from a broad range of directors: Erik Matti, Ato Bautista, Brillante Mendoza, Raya Martin, Lav Diaz to name a few.
Wonderful tribute to what I agree is a wonderful development in our turbulent country: a (relatively) young generation of filmmakers funded by new forms of financing taking up the digital lens and recording not just what's happening around them but what's happening in their heads their memories their imagination.
And here I was, thinking Pa-Siyam (Nine Days, 2004) was Erik Matti's best work--Matti, the director of such seminal works of Philippine Cinema as Ekis (Crossed, 1999), Dos Ekis (Double Cross, 2001), and Prosti (Prostitute, 2002)--one of I suppose you can say my favorite Filipino filmmakers, if only because he's given me endless opportunities for honing my critical blade.
Pa-Siyam showed what Matti was capable when he dropped his many affectations and concentrated on storytelling, reined in his self-indulgent style enough to serve the story more than itself; the result is pleasing, like De Palma doing a conventional action film (The Untouchables) or Cronenberg a neo-Western (A History of Violence) albeit on a lower, cruder level.
Nine
Erik Matti is a talented and commercially successful filmmaker, but coherent storytelling isn't exactly his strong suit. He likes style, lots of it, slathered heavily over flimsy characters and nonsensical plots, filling up the space usually reserved for a film's themes and ideas. He likes to borrow, magpie-like, images, moods and colors from a wide range of filmmakers--Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Wong Kar Wai, San Miguel Beer commercials--tossing them in without rhyme or reason, to ferment in his celluloid chamber-pots. It would be nice to think he's aware of how hilariously his films play onscreen, but no; he's been heard to declare with the utmost solemnity about this or that oeuvre that he's consciously tried to emulate the works of a master like Ishmael Bernal, only to say "fuck it, I'm going to do things my way." Which he does, with inimitable results.
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