Memories of a Love Story (Joselito Altarejos, 2022)

View master

Early in Joselito Altarejos' Memories of a Love Story Eric (Oliver Aquino) and Jericho (Migs Almendras) lock gazes, and you hear a k-tchak! as the camera cuts to flashback. Annoying sound, but gradually you realize what Altarejos is trying to evoke: the clack of a View-Master stereopticon shifting from one photograph to the next, offering you-- in three-dimensional imagery, no less-- a glimpse into a brightly colored forever frozen past. 

Cinemalaya 2021

Baker's dozen

Cinemalaya 2021 is the first in the longest while I've seen all of a Filipino film festival's competition entries, and that mainly because they're shorts (all available on KTX.PH). I've heard disappointment from some corners--apparently this was how Cinemalaya 2020 went and I understand how they feel but 1) I don't really consider shorts necessarily inferior to features (as with short stories vs. novels each form has its virtues and vices) and 2) I've been so hungry for new Filipino work that for me this was a sprawling table of tapas (in the Spanish not Filipino breakfast sense) featuring a wide array of flavors.

Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Auraeus Solito / Kanakan Balintagos, 2005)

Blossoming to the Max

Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Auraeus Solito, 2005) is a lovely little film, about a young gay boy named Maximo (Nathan Lopez) who forms an attachment with a handsome police officer named Victor (JR Valentin, a former ramp model).

Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)

Sunshine

And what of Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name, his adaptation of Andre Aciman's novel from a screenplay by James Ivory? I mean: two beautiful men, an Italian villa, a sundrenched summer in Lombardy, Italy--what's not to like?

Better films of 2015: The Duke of Burgundy, Force Majeure, The Kindergarten Teacher, Phoenix, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch, Tangerine

Fine wine

A Jess Franco-style pastiche about a lesbian relationship--what else is new? But Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy reminds one of Vladimir Nabokov's most famous novel--you go in expecting a healthy dose of prurience and come out more startled than unsatisfied. The erotica is middling sensual, the kinkiest act in the film performed disappointingly (or titillatingly) behind closed doors, gurgling splash choking gasp and all. Strickland (like Nabokov before him) apparently has other ideas: a precise charting of a relationship's fading glow; the growing sense of obligation, of dreary chore, in what should be sexual play; the encroaching claustrophobic panic as pleasure becomes more and more a dull pain. If Strickland (who wrote and directed) and his good-looking cast (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara D'Anna as the role-playing lovers) don't commit to making an all-out erotic picture they do commit to making a surprisingly supple poignant drama--which I suppose is all the commitment we need, really.  

Esprit De Corps (Kanakanan Balintagos, 2014)

Soldier boi

Kanakanan Balintagos' (a.k.a. Auraeus Solito) latest film Esprit de Corps (2014), based on one of his own stage dramas written over twenty years ago, is an odd choice for adaptation: the play's clearly meant to function as a metaphor for the fascistic Marcos Administration (overthrown before the play was written), and written back when the director was fresh out of high school (the Reserve Officer's Training Program today is no longer mandatory in colleges and attendance--not to mention sense of relevance--has diminished).

But the kind of mindset that demands recruits be tested physically and mentally to the point of cruelty is still present,in both the Philippine military and educational system (we still have hazing deaths: that sophomore in De La Salle - College of St. Benilde, for example); and the notion of 'male machismo'--of strong bull warriors to be celebrated and weak 'faggots' (as the young men in the film so vividly call them) to be winnowed--still thrives in Philippine society.

J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, 2011)

G-Man

Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar, his biopic about the legendary director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, turns out to be his most tender and fully realized love story. 

It doesn't quite start out that well. First time we see J. Edgar as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, he's wheezing along under pounds of prosthetic makeup, meant to make him look old. The makeup is a horrific mess; DiCaprio looks like a half-melted version of himself,  a doughy dumpling that had been left turning in the microwave some twenty seconds too long. Eventually, after one gets used to the unholy pancake mix, and especially after the film presents the younger J. Edgar (DiCaprio sans makeup) and allows us to see the differences and similarities between the two expressions the character's true nature emerges: an intense young man whose focused gaze with the passing years settles into a grim glare (actually he looked uncannily like any number of grumpy old men from childhood, scowling with disapproval when they looked in my direction). We're talking about a man whose basic nature doesn't change but because the world around him does, his significance to that world changes considerably.

The story moves back and forth in time, the later scenes meant to comment on the earlier (a classic tactic, popular with recent biopics). The story really comes to life, however, when J. Edgar meets the love of his life: Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), first a prospective agent, later Hoover's protege and Assistant Director for the FBI. Their initial meeting plays like a meet-cute--J. Edgar is intrigued by the young man's qualifications; soon they're having meals together, shopping for clothes together, so on. Without much comment or fuss, they move gracefully into a comfortable relationship that in its first major crisis (involving Hollywood star Dorothy Lamour) erupts into a full-on lover's quarrel, all passion and hysterics and a single, startlingly uninhibited kiss.

Part of what makes that kiss such a surprise is that there's so little overt physical evidence to suggest such passion; you need to listen carefully to hear the emotions simmering beneath the narrative surface. Dustin Lance Black, no stranger to LGBT material (he wrote the screenplay to Gus Van Sant's entertaining Milk (2008)), tries to make the case that what Tolson and Hoover had was less than a gay marriage, more than just heterosexual friendship. It's a delicate balance he's trying to suggest, and the closest parallel I can think of is the relationship evoked by Anthony Burgess in his novel Earthly Powers, where a gay man (writer Kenneth Toomey) and a straight man (Dr. Shawcross) fall in love. As Burgess writes: “Whatever word I use will probably be wrong...we’ve just been here together. We didn’t have to put it into words. I was never so happy in my life.” It's not physical--which is what everyone assumes, or is interested in--but it is every bit as knotty.

Eastwood's direction plays a crucial role here. What's needed is a straightforward presentation, done at a leisurely, deliberate pace; Eastwood takes the skills he's perfected in Bridges of Madison County (1995)--that patient, novelistic way he has of constructing a relationship, one mortise-and-tenon joint after another--and applied them here. This isn't a tempestuous love affair but a lifetime companionship, less motel-room beds and crumpled sheets and more like an overstuffed living-room sofa, smelling faintly of pet dog.

Eastwood and Black are to be congratulated for their detailed and singular sketch; one wonders, though--does the man deserve it? J. Edgar comes off looking so faithful and temperate (at least domestically) that the film comes off looking like a professional whitewash job. Oh, there's a scene--tellingly, with Tolson dominating--where all is called into question postmodern style, and J. Edgar is accused of manipulating his own narrative to look good. Props are due for the inclusion, but it may be too little, too late: where are the scenes revealing constant persecution and humiliation of, say, Martin Luther King, Jr.? The footage showing how J. Edgar's active participation in the '50s communist witch hunts resulted in thousands of government workers losing their jobs? Where's the “Lavender Scare”--the hunt for homosexuals (often assumed to be also communists) so virulent it defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson's run for president? J. Edgar was a powerful enough and monstrous enough presence to have warped the American landscape for almost fifty years, but all we see here is J. Edgar the tender and intimate BFF; Black could at least have used some of the unused material for dramatic contrast.

One of the better films of the year, then, with the caveat that it could have been so much better--great even--if the filmmakers had along with its surprisingly soft core given it a little more teeth (and to said teeth a little more of an edge).

First published in Businessworld. 1.26.12

French Film Festival 2011

Sandrine Bonnaire in Agnes Varda's harrowing Vagabond

C'est la vie

The 2011 French Film Festival will run from June 9 to 19 at the Shangri-La Plaza, June 23 to 25 : at the Ayala Center Cebu, June 28 to July 2 at the UP Film Institute. Free admission, except for the Philippine premiere of Terence Malick's Tree of Life (whataminit, is that French?) which is by invitation only.

A little frustrating trying to find a single website with all the schedules, and not have to go through an extended Google hunt (makes you think it's some kind of state secret). But some of the films are really, really worth seeing...

...like Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie (The Ceremony, 1995). Adapted from Ruth Rendell's novel A Judgement in Stone, it's a horrifying comedy (or a comic horror story) about two women--one, Sophie, is a housemaid; the other, Jeanne, is a post office worker--who set out to undermine an upper class French family.

It's told with a chilly detachment; one thinks of Hitchcock, Kubrick--yeah, those guys. But Chabrol is a flavor all his own; he wields a scalpel to upper class French society the way a serial killer in training might flay open a live bunny rabbit--slowly, leisurely, with absolute relish. You watch a pair of potential sociopaths conspire together, through the lens of a filmmaker who seems able to assume the point of view of sociopaths with all too apparent ease (Is he or isn't he? Chabrol never really lets on).

Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie (the films is part of a festival retrospective on the actress) is all nervous tension and repressed resentment; Isabelle Huppert is pure amoral, volatile energy--they make a wonderfully odd couple, capable, you feel, of anything (that's what's so funny and scary about them). The ending is, needless to say, horrific and ironic in equal measure, but perhaps the single most interesting image in the film is the final shot--one has the sense of God's hand finally moving, of belated justice on the brink of being served; knowing Chabrol, though, one doesn't quite know if that really is His hand poised to strike, or blind chance playing a final practical joke.

Agnes Varda's Sans Toit ni Loi (Vagabond, 1985) is, if anything a possibly even more harrowing film. Bonnaire (who plays Mona, the eponymous wanderer) was all but eighteen when she did this, but her face onscreen feels ancient--as if she'd spent centuries wandering hungrily through the desolate French countryside. She meets people, and they form opinions about her, usually not very flattering (they talk about the grime; they also mention the smell). More often than not, their opinions say more about them than about Mona.

Varda's film can seem difficult, inert, much like the central character; at the same time it seems honest, without affectation. Easy to dismiss it as an unenlightening exercise in nihilistic despair, but--again like the title character--it stubbornly sits there, refusing to conform or go away, an uncomfortable reminder not just of the fragile tissue that separates a reasonably good day from unstoppable disaster, but of the utter unknowability of a fellow human being.

I may whine and moan about petty details, but the festival does have its heart in the right place, and one of its more admirable efforts is in promoting some of our better Filipino filmmakers--in this case, Auraeus Solito, who recently attended the Director's Fortnight at Cannes with his film Busong (Palawan Fate, 2011).

That film is not available, alas, but Solito's first feature Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005) is, and a good thing too--this is possibly his most accessible work to date. Where Chabrol is distant and Varda inscrutable, Solito is tender, warm, totally open-hearted--he doesn't hide anything from you, nor does he wish to.

It's the coming of age of a gay young man (or as the community sometimes puts it, a "queer boi") and he does not fit the stereotype of the unhappy martyr, persecuted by family and friends; if anything, his family gladly accepts him, a mother substitute nursing his family of older brothers and a father, a startling affirmation of gay life that does not follow preordained patterns or preconceived notions. Yes, there is a drama here, and yes Maximo will go through transformation and not a little suffering, but not quite in the way casual viewers might expect.

Along with this charming little feature is his documentarylike Basal Banar (2002) which is a little difficult to describe--as much chant and meditation on Palawan spirituality as it is a beyond gorgeous celebration of Palawan's rainforests, Basal Banar is pretty much a mystery too, but not mysterious--one feels Solito's love and total absorption for the subject, his need for spiritual transcendence.

First published in Businessworld, 6.9.11

A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2010)

Mr. Lonely

A Single Man (2010) is one hundred minutes of Colin Firth struggling with his pain, as seen through the honeyed lenses of director Tom Ford's camera.

Bruno (Larry Charles, 2009)

Bruha

One had expectations. Larry Charles' 2006 mockumentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was made for a slim $18 million and generated some $260 million worldwide, earning both director and writer-producer Sacha Baron Cohen the reputation of pop provocateurs as they interview hapless Americans under misleading pretences, exposing latent racism and Anti-Semitism.

(Why Kazakhstan, by the way? Cohen uses the name; the language, written and read, is made-up gibberish. Couldn't he have given Borat's country something made-up, instead of the moniker of an actual country too small and powerless to fight back?)

The filmmakers attempt to repeat the stunt with Bruno (2009). Bruno comes with an estimated price tag of $42 million, an altogether more expensive affair though the picture itself doesn't necessarily look more expensive (the amount breaks down into a reputed production budget of $20 to $25 million, plus perceived added value to Universal of $20 million). Distributors pay a higher price for a known quantity, even if returns are slimmer (Bruno earned a relatively smaller $136 million worldwide to date); that smaller amount is almost as good as cash in the bank.

One wonders if perhaps the filmmakers should have heeded an old warning: repetition kills, or a gag isn't as funny the second time around. Borat was a freak accident; it proposed the terrifying idea that people would find two ugly, hairy men mashing their buttocks in each others' faces funny (20th Century Fox timidly released it in a scant 800 theaters). Part of its appeal--well, a huge part of its appeal--is the surprising fact that audiences did find two grown men grinding their nose into each others' behinds not just funny but hilarious (Fox quickly put the picture in 2,500 theaters when it earned $29 million on its first weekend).

Repetition kills surprise; that's the downfall of most if not all remakes, sequels, sophomore efforts from a filmmaking team. With Bruno we pretty much know what we're getting, and so does the rest of the world--the number and size of celebrity 'gotchas' is considerably smaller, less varied. Some of the 'unstaged encounters' either look less than spontaneous, or the victims seem to have quickly suspected what they're in for and are understandably cautious.

Bruno has more problems than mere freshness--Cohen has misconceived the character in a number of ways. Borat for all his cluelessness and lack of impulse control was an innocent abroad who traveled America with Azamat (Ken Davitian), his intermittently faithful if considerably more hirsute Sancho Panza; he was an impoverished Don Quixote tilting at the windmills of (even if he didn't see it that way) anti-Semitism and racism and xenophobia. Bruno's idealism is half assumed pose, not so much a humanitarian quest as a calculated publicity bid. Borat's is the classic American story, the immigrant underdog who comes to America seeking knowledge and understanding and, of course, a beautiful woman (he wants to impregnate Pamela Sue Anderson and give her many children). Bruno is a media-spawned creature desperate to be noticed and his victims are decidedly less prosperous (the Alabaman hunters, the Arkansan cage-fight audience), more deserving of sympathy than scorn from an audience. Perhaps the crucial difference is that Borat conducts his odyssey on a shoestring (he drives an ice cream truck to Los Angeles to seek out his precious Pamela Sue). Bruno, like his picture, enjoys a decidedly bigger budget--hiring a consultant to help with his celebrity image; flying hither and thither to foster world peace; swapping out an Ipod for an African child a la Madonna. Bruno may want to establish himself as a champion for gay acceptance but he does so with deep pockets, and the effect is rather alienating.

Bruno isn't without some laughs. His all-Velcro suit is a howling success, and any occasion where a Milanese fashion show's security is compelled to chuck you out for the sake of public peace of mind has to be an occasion to celebrate. An episode with a minister who specializes in treating homosexuals is funny for its sheer wrongheadedness (though one can't help but feel a touch of admiration for the heroically patient minister, especially when Bruno informs him that he has "amazing blow-job lips." "These lips were made to praise Jesus," the minister primly informs him). His Panza here, Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) is a suitably sad and sweet assistant's assistant, an adoring disciple who takes much abuse from homophobes and from Bruno himself, for the sake of his beloved idol. The few occasions where Bruno takes shots at someone with deeper pocketbooks than himself one feels comfortable enough to savor the humiliation (I'm thinking of Paula Abdul invited to sit on an illegal immigrant bent over on all fours, and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul enduring an unsubtle sexual pass, then being mistaken for RuPaul).

All hail Cohen's intent--he had hoped to do for homophobes what he managed to do for racists, anti-Semitists, and xenophobes, but the scattershot approach injures the implied victors (Man-hungry gays with a bizarre fashion sense? So not stereotypical!) almost as much as the intended victims. Send this one back to Austria, ASAP.

First published in Businessworld 9.4.09

Bruno (Larry Charles, 2009), Catch Me if You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002)

Saw Bruno (2009) and maybe the diciest portion of the picture comes at its earliest stages, in Sacha Baron Cohen's portrait of a gay lifestyle. I can see his strategy--confirm a homophobe's worst fears of decadent homosexuals, parody said portrait, then show the humanity later on (it's the same approach used on Kazakhs in Borat), but where do you cross the line between spoofing and confirming homophobia, and does said line matter anyway?

This kind of comedy thrives on blurring such distinctions, but there are points where he doesn't so much blur as overstep completely into outright slander, and that is possibly why critical reaction is so hostile (boxoffice isn't doing so hot, either). Bluntly put, the gay community has considerably more media clout than the Kazakh community it appears (and I can't say either community is wrong to speak out, either), and their disapproval is hurting the movie's appeal.

Parts are still funny, particularly the broadsides at conservative folk (Cohen's real targets), but we've seen all this before in Borat, down to the martial-arts training session where Cohen's character learns how to deflect an attack from a Jew (a homosexual, here). Some effects take your breath away--the car that nearly runs over a motorbike, the flung folding chair that lands inches away from a pair of grappling wrestlers--but there isn't that sense of transgression and shock you had from the earlier film. This is basically a retread; amusing, but not particularly instructive.

I remember listening to a brief program about Andy Kaufman, and Cohen does take a page from his take-no-prisoners brand of comedy, but Cohen doesn't quite have Kaufman's purity--as noted in the program, when Kaufman played "Andy Kaufman," the neurotic comic celebrity suffering a nervous breakdown, even Kaufman's close friends were wondering if he was really cracking up. Cohen's too smart and sane to go that far, more's the pity, and that I think is what's missing from this picture.

Onwards with my survey of movies Spielberg--Catch Me if You Can (2002) is easily the director's finest, most fleet-footed recent work, and further evidence that Leonardo DiCaprio (who plays Frank Abagnale, Jr., the picture's true-life protagonist) was growing out of the burden of supercelebrityhood imposed on him by the movie Titanic (not to mention its music score is easily John Williams' least characteristic, hence my favorite).

Part of it is the material, of course: a nineteen-year-old acting out the darker aspect of the American Dream by constantly reinventing himself--what's not to like? Spielberg's usually assertive camera plays an uncharacteristically subdued role here, and to my mind hasn't been better in years...especially love the shot of Frank on his first day of school standing by the blackboard as fellow students pass by, heaping wisecracks on his head. Spielberg holds the shot, recording Frank's intensifying resentment, watching his face and body language closely as he squares his shoulders, takes the various insults flung at him and on the spot creates the persona of a substitute French teacher. It's our first glimpse of Frank's capabilities, as simple and precise a summation of the man's brilliance as anything in the picture.

But more than the '70s milieu or the return of the old-fashioned Spielberg, what gave me the sharpest pang of nostalgia were Frank's counterfeiting activities. Worked in a bank some years back, and one of our activities involved applying for an externally-funded loan on evidence that was, well, manufactured (For the record the bank in question stopped the practice, and the loans involved have all been paid off by now). Smudging signatures, gluing-and-pasting, simulating printed text with hand and ink and magnifying glass (all that was missing in Catch was the copier machine, which has since added all kind of tricks to the counterfeiter's diverse bag), watching Frank at work brings back my semi-criminal past. Ah, life.

Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)

Of human kindness

Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008) is hands down the single best mainstream narrative film of 2008. Forget the various critic's circles, forget them Golden Globes, and I could give a flying fig leaf what the Academy picks this coming February; far as I'm concerned Milk is it.

Basically a biopic about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay political figure to ever be elected to public office, Van Sant's film pretty much touches on the highlights of the man's life--his move to San Francisco, his several attempts to run for city supervisor, his championing of gay rights in the face of white-bread, beauty-contest conservatives like Anita Bryant, his eventual fate in the hands of an unhinged gunman.

It's an inspiring, inspired film. Van Sant, who channeled Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr to great effect in films like Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003); who employed Chris Doyle--arguably the world's best living camera eye--to aestheticize teenage skateboarders in Paranoid Park (2007); who had the effrontery to do a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic Psycho (1960) (easily Van Sant's most courageous, most foolhardy act--and not completely in vain, in my opinion), here pulls back from his experimental impulses to give us a narratively conventional, easily accessible film. Milk is important, Milk is informative (in a fleet-footed, unstuffy way) sure, but Milk, I'm glad to report, is also fun to watch. The opening in a New York subway, of Milk (a delightfully nerdy Sean Penn) picking up the very pretty Scott Smith (James Franco, haloed in curly hair) is lighthearted, breathlessly playful--you can tell Harvey is thrilled to have hooked (but not quite landed, at least not yet) so gorgeous a young man, and said young man is tickled to have so profound an effect over his admirer. It's the '70s, sex gay and straight is less a biological impulse and more an expression of freedom, and the A.I.D.s epidemic is years away.

Van Sant isn't concerned with getting the facts right (though he does overall, fudging only a little on timelines and streamlining the course of Milk's life), or making clear the more intricate workings of politics on a city, state, and national level (he does show some realpolitik: the way Milk, for example, made odd alliances--with senior citizens at one point, then with unions); instead he's intent on capturing the heady, headlong feel of the times. He uses archival footage and carefully mixes in re-created scenes; more, he achieves with cinematographer Harris Savides (The Yards, (2000); Elephant; Zodiac (2007)) a kind of distinct luminescence that evokes San Francisco of decades past without condemning it to amber nostalgia, or grainy documentary realism. The anger of the times is there, fueled by police raids, by televised broadcasts of Bryant's flagrant bigotry, by the occasional burst of homophobic violence (Milk at one point panics when he suspects a man walking behind of following him; at another point describes how a gay man had just been stabbed to death fifteen times) but the anger is leavened or at least modulated by an equally invigorating sense of humor "I'm Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you!" he tells straight audiences again and again as a way of both disarming their hostility and announcing his intentions (no, he may not persuade you to switch over and "play for the other team," so to speak--but he does want your support for whatever he has in mind).

The script by Dustin Lance Black, a TV writer (Big Love, (2006 onwards) and documentary filmmaker (On the Bus, (2001)), doesn't spend too many words telling Milk's story (what there is functions to convey key info, sketch characters, deliver punchlines). Black's framing device--Milk talking into a microphone of provisions to be made on the event of his death, plus a few other confessions--gives us an Our Town view of his life, of Milk ruminating over this or that event, expressing delight, regret, anger, grief accordingly. It adds a note of mortality, a foreshadowing early on of Milk's ultimate fate; it's a conventional device (one thinks of the protagonist in many a biopic, narrating passages from his own diary) that Van Sant treats with straightforward simplicity, letting Penn dictate how much he should act--or underact--for the scene. Penn doesn't lend much energy here, and that performing choice alone is telling--this is Milk at the end of things, not a little exhausted at the boisterous, bewildering life he's led.

The tape recorder may be the framing device, but the meat and heart and soul of the film is Van Sant's lovely, often poetic, images--men on streets, flinging their signboards high and defiantly yelling slogans; sitting side-by-side on stoops, arm round the other's shoulder; passing each other and throwing kisses (Van Sant gives us a '70s kind of casual, often bright-eyed eroticism, in marked contrast to sexuality today, which if not cheerlessly athletic can at times be downright grim). Often Van Sant employs more than just expertly stitched-together documentary footage to convey the drama of a scene--shown a scribbled death threat prior to speaking before a crowd, Milk decides to go ahead and deliver his speech. Van Sant frames Milk directly facing the crowd, the lens pulling the crowd close so that Milk appears to be addressing an approaching wall, an oncoming wave of faces; the sense of vulnerability and helplessness evoked is almost palpable. Later, when Mayor Moscone (Victor Garber) welcomes his would-be killer to his office, Van Sant pans to their reflection on a clock face, the killer pulling his gun out and taking aim--again the sudden distancing, the startling sense of helplessness; much later Milk kneels on his office floor and Van Sant grants us a glimpse of the last thing the man sees--a banner for Puccini's Tosca (Milk's favorite opera). Such grace notes inserted throughout the film help make Milk a transporting experience--the conventional biopic done with unconventional skill and spirit.

Milk couldn't come at a more opportune time--as if life were imitating art, California had just passed Proposition 8, a homophobic law banning gay marriage (unlike the Proposition 6 dramatized in the film, this time there was no Harvey Milk to fight its passing). One wishes a happier ending with the present Proposition (repeal, in effect); otherwise we have this film which, intentionally or not, acts as a reminder of how it used to be, with people gay or straight uniting to fight conservative nibbling at their basic human rights.

Someone once commented: "Harvey Milk was in effect the Mayor of Castro Street; that was his nickname. Why then didn’t the filmmakers give the picture the title of The Mayor of Castro Street? It would have been more easily recognized, and more dramatic." Mayor of Castro Street would have been the title of a specific kind of film, I think, a political drama that outlines the career of a specific if crucial politician. Van Sant's Milk aspires to an impact more than just political--like the beverage, it wants to be cooling, nourishing, comforting; it wants to be a pick-me-up, after the long, arid spell of relative inhumanity in America's political landscape. You don't watch this Milk so much as you drink it, in long and deep draughts, to the very last drop.

First published in Businessworld, 2.6.09

Adam and Steve (Craig Chester, 2005)

Brokeback Manhattan

Craig Chester's Adam & Steve is a 2005 gay picture that for some undecipherable reason the distributors thought would actually make money in Manila theaters, three years after its initial commercial run, (don't ask me--I just write about them, I don't decide them). Might have worked too, for all I know; problem is, they should have picked a comedy--a funny one.

Chester's picture starts out amusing enough: Chester plays Adam, dressed and made up as a Goth; Malcolm Gets is Steve, a Danceteria Dazzle Dancer Adam for once in his loser life manages to take home with him. Steve does a striptease, commits a traumatically embarrassing act (he'd been doing some serious cocaine, cut with all kinds of inappropriate substances), and runs off forever.

Fast forward fifteen years later. Adam's rushing his dog into the emergency room--why there and not a veterinary hospital, I don't know. "We don't treat animals here" a security guard naturally and very sensibly tells him; Steven, now a psychiatrist, agrees to treat the canine anyway. Adam doesn't recognize Steve from years before, but sparks fly; before you can say "Holy powdered laxatives!" they're dating each other steadily, in post-9/11 New York.

Odd sidenote: the movie wears its New York City setting proudly on its sleeve. At various points we're treated to a longtime New Yorker's walking tour of the city, from rowboating in Central Park's Lake to crossing the length of the Brooklyn Bridge's wooden walkway, with its magnificent East Side view; it's constantly throwing in details of the city's social life, from exotic coffees and soda drinks to rehab meetings for various addictions. One might consider it the gay, low-budget equivalent of Sex and the City; it's certainly self-absorbed enough--New York is the entire universe, the rest of the world just some shadowy afterthought existing in the margins. And there's sex everywhere, and the need--no, hunger (no accident, I think, that Chester looks vampiric in the pic's opening scenes)--to connect.

For the most part the whole unlikely thing works: Chester and Gets make a remarkably sweet couple, and even the occasional running gag about beer bottle-tossing homophobia has its appeal, with a punchline that one may or may not find amusing, depending on one's tolerance for amateurish flinging. They get able support from Parker Posey and Chris Kattan as their respective best friends, and a minor constellation of comic talents: Sally Kirkland, Melinda Dillon, among others.

Maybe the comic high point of the picture is when Adam presents Steve to his family, incurable victims of the Bernstein Curse. Adam's mother turns out to be Julie Hagerty, which explains a lot about Adam--she's as wide-eyed and demented and unflappably cheerful as she's ever been, from Airplane! (1980) to Lost in America (1985).

That's the good stuff; the movie starts to fall apart when Chester decides to get serious on a decidedly unserious premise: he has Steve recognize Adam as the hapless Goth he'd turned onto drugs (among other shameful acts), and breaks up with him. One wants to ask: why this, why now? Because the picture's been coasting along on good will and character detail, Chester must be thinking, and requires some kind of third-act conflict, to wrap things up (too bad--if he had ended on a less hysterical note, we might have found out what a collaboration between Jacques Rivette and John Waters might have played like).

Adam plays the part of the jilted bride and is by turns hurt, bitchy, furious. No cliché is left unmolested, no sentimental device left brutally unmilked; in the movie's extreme low point, Steve pulls Adam aside and sings him "Something Good" from The Sound of Music (1965). No stomach was left unturned.

It doesn't help that the dialogue, which up to this point had been more or less persuasive (besides the constant subliminal "I love New York" advertising) descends to treacly sloganeering: "I may be damaged goods, but I'm goods none the less;" "I choose you! I choose you!" Was not aware that there was an urgent need in this world for a gay equivalent to Jerry Maguire--the original was blood-curdling enough as is.

It doesn't help that Chester has all the visual sense and gift for depth of a publisher of pop-up books; it's possible he's trying to emulate John Waters' it's-all-there amateurishness but for all of Waters' faults, he had a distinct and powerful philosophical view: perversion and pleasure and pain are indistinguishable from each other, and should be savored accordingly; Chester doesn't seem to have anything more on his mind than a simple romantic comedy, with onscreen diarrhea thrown in for good measure.

Just think what the late, great Joey Gosiengfiao might have done with all this, and on a considerably smaller budget? Gosiengfiao would have thrown in the laxative (only with more immersive results), would have included the surrealism (only with more wit), would definitely have made sure there were dance numbers (only more gracefully staged), and even had someone sing something out of Sound of Music, only it would have been horrifyingly funny, instead of just horrifying. A wasted opportunity, all around.


(First published on 8.2.08 in Businessworld 8.1.08)

Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)

Miss agitated

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) is as direct as a white man's contemptuous glare, as mysterious as a black man's serene gaze.

Fassbinder uses color, stylized theater acting and camera movement to point up the extreme isolation felt (and developing bond shared) by two lovers--Emmi (Brigitte Mira), an elderly cleaning lady, and 'Ali' (El Hedi ben Salem), a young Moroccan immigrant worker who came to his name by mistake (his real full name is El Hedi ben Salem M'Barek Mohammed Mustapha).

Their first meeting at a bar, for instance: we first see Emmi entering the establishment's front door, the row of small tables (topped with a rich red tablecloth) emphasizing her distance from the camera. Fassbinder cuts to a reverse shot where Ali, bar owner Barbara (Barbara Valentin) and friends stare at Emmi as if at a personal affront. Cut back to Emmi, who at this wordless assault gropes for a chair to pull back and sit down.

Ali is asked to dance with Emmi; he goes forth to comply. Cut to the seated Emmi as Ali asks; their shared posture--Emmi at her chair looking to the left, Ali standing behind her bent slightly in the same direction--already has the look of a casual pas de deux. Emmi seems flustered at the question, somehow finds the perfect answer ("why not?") then stands up; like a butterfly shedding her cocoon she drops her black overcoat to reveal a bright white-and-yellow dress; not spectacular, but a bit startling to see on such a humble mouse of an old lady. She and Ali walk to the back, Fassbinder not cutting (as he did when Ali went to Emmi's table) but following them, underlining the drama of their gesture (handsome young man asking, shy senior citizen accepting), the fact that both ends of the bar has suddenly been united.

A red spot is turned on; the couple dances slowly under its heavy glow. We listen to their conversation and it's easy, casual; the two feel totally at home with each other, chatty Emmi curious at her dance partner, Ali easygoing and open despite the stumbling block of his faltering German. If there's any electricity to the moment, any tension, it's coming from Barbara and friends, who stare at the shuffling couple as if at a personal affront doubly insulting (now there's two of them).

Emmi returns to her table, Ali following; behind them Barbara walks up to set Ali's beer (which he had left at the bar's other end) on the table. Barbara walks away, and the camera which had held the table in a medium shot glides sideways to catch Barbara stopping midway down the bar to turn and look at the couple; Emmi's table up close, Barbara in mid-distance, the figures at the far end--all three sets of figures plus the bar's considerable length help emphasize the distance between elderly stranger, Moroccan, and disapproving watchers. 

Emmi decides to go; Ali decides to escort her home. As they stand up to leave the camera suddenly pulls back from them, Fassbinder's way of underlining the significance of the moment. But the shot has yet another function: when Fassbinder cuts to a reverse shot it's to Barbara, looking at the departing couple; we realize that the camera has leaped from table bystander to Barbara's point of view--from sympathetic viewers, in effect, to silent onlookers, silently judging the two. 

At the hallway of Emmi's apartment building we see Fassbinder building their intimacy through dialogue, staging and, again, camera movement. The scene begins with a long shot as the two enter the front door; Fassbinder breaks this into two separate shots, cutting from Ali asking questions to Emmi answering. Then Fassbinder brings them together again by having Emmi walk from one side of the room to the other while Ali is standing but behind her, out-of-focus. Emmi is talking about her job; suddenly she turns to look at Ali (who snaps into focus) and notes that he would look better in lighter-colored suits (turning her focus to Ali transfers our attention from her and her past to him). When she talks of children, Ali moves forward to finally stand beside her; mention of family, of being with them and being without, has brought the two closer together. From polite strangers trying to maintain an interested conversation Fassbinder swiftly and persuasively shows them becoming real friends, sharing secrets, sharing vulnerabilities. 

When the two finally become lovers Fassbinder makes this such a natural, uncomplicated development it takes one's breath away: Fassbinder, master of melodrama, baroque storytelling, extremes of suffering and emotion, is also capable of creating scenes of simple tenderness and transcendent joy--in some ways the more difficult achievement. 

As their intimacy grows, so does resistance to their union. Fassbinder uses a variety of means, but the gossipy women chatting in scandalized voices is such an old and familiar device I had to laugh--Lino Brocka, whose sensibility comes closest to Fassbinder's than any other significant Filipino filmmaker I know, has used small-town gossip-mongers at least one other time, in his early masterwork Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Judged and Found Wanting, 1974) (and in fact there Brocka also had his version of the aliented couple, in the form of a leper and a madwoman (Mario O'Hara and Lolita Rodriguez, in arguably their finest onscreen roles)).

In interracial dramas the character whose race is the issue is often a paragon of virtue, and for at least the picture's first half that's what Ali is: patient understanding, charming, somewhere this side of lifeless. In the film's second half Fassbinder adds flesh to this walking cliché: he grants Ali the right to be willful, self-destructive, even cruel--to be fully human, in effect, free to experience and inflict every form of suffering such a state of existence implies. At this point Fear Eats the Soul transcends its racial issues and becomes a meditation on the mysteries of human nature; the relationship, unhappy because of stresses without, starts to crack from stresses within. The strange and somehow beautiful finale brings the film full circle, and we can see Emmi and Ali continuing on, but on a sadder, not necessarily wiser level (or if wiser, not necessarily capable or willing to act on that expensive bit of wisdom). A great film, one of Fassbinder's finest. 

The Goethe-Institut’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder film festival kicks off on July 5 with a screening of a documentary on the director, I Don’t Just Want You to Love Me (3 p.m.), followed by a discussion on Fassbinder by Teddy Co at 5 p.m. and a screening of Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) at 6 p.m. The film festival, which will run until July 26, will be held at the Goethe-Institut Manila, 5F Adamson Center, 121 L.P. Leviste St., Salcedo Village, Makati City. The movies will be screened on Fridays, 7 p.m., and Saturdays at 3 and 6 p.m. There is also an exhibit of posters of his films which will run during the duration of the festival. For more information, call 817-0978. The screening schedule is available at www.goethe.de/manila. Admission is free. 

Coming of age films

I've been tagged by Andy Horbal (on his birthday no less) for this Coming of Age movie meme (along with bloggers Matt Riviera and Teresa).

1. What are 3 movies that exemplify the Coming-of-Age movie genre?

I'm not a big fan of the genre, and I doubt if I'd know what would constitute an "exemplary" coming-of-age film, but if it's youths growing up you want…

Nathan Lopez, Ang Pagdadalaga Ni Maximo Oliveros

Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005) probably comes closest to being "typical" of the genre in this short list of examples, but even then, how many 'blossoming' films do you know feature a gay boy, and how many films show said gay boy living with such a nurturing family, in such an unfussy film? Maximo (Nathan Lopez, in a wonderful performance) acts as surrogate mother to a testosterone-stuffed family of sneak thieves, made up of a widowed father and Maxie's two straight older brothers. The film presents his situation (not as unusual in the Philippine where, despite its fervent Catholicism, homosexuals are accepted to a startling degree--we even have an openly gay senator) as being the most natural thing in the world, and that's the beauty of it. Despite being about a youth, Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros is a delightfully adult film, in the sense that it assumes the fairly best, and procceds to demonstrate that even this fairly happy condition isn't enough to guarantee perfect happpiness. There's more to gay life, the film seems to say, than having to contend with homophobia--first love, for one; the anguish of choosing between family and friend; and the pain of brute disillusionment.

Lolita Rodriguez (Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang)

Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed But Found Wanting, 1974) seems inspired by several sources: Federico Fellini's 1953 I Vitelloni, for one (the sensitive youth who leaves town to come back a celebrated artist), and Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 The Last Picture Show (the mysterious older man who turns out to be the catalyst and mentor for the youth's transformation into manhood). Two other sources I should cite: Jose Rizal's social-reform novel Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not), which is the source for the the mother (driven insane by the loss of her child) and her leprous husband, and Brocka's own life--the town where he shot the film was the same one he lived in as a bastard child; he seems to feel no regret in leaving the town nor, apparently, does he feel any coming back to paint such a witheringly satiric portrait of its people.

Actually, I never thought the coming-of-age storyline or the Brocka surrogate at the middle of it (the sensitive youth self-rightously poised to judge the entire community) was very interesting; more memorable is the story of the crazed homeless mother and her disfigured husband--the two lowest figures in the town's heirarchy, presuming to teach (via the example of their humble lives) one of the town's crown princes (the aforementioned youth) a lesson in love and tolerance.

Hilda Koronel, Insiang

Filmmaker Tikoy Aguiluz noted that almost all of Philippine cinema has chosen for its theme the self-sacrificing mother and the importance of the family; Lino Brocka's masterpice Insiang is the rare exception. The eponymous character lives in the slums of Tondo, and what her mother, her mother's lover, and the slum itself has to teach her would not be found in any self-respecting parenting textbook: hate, cynicism, the art of betrayal, and the even subtler art of manipulating people's desires to get what you want from them.

The irony of it is that Insiang learns her lesson too well; she turns into a young, beautiful monster, and sets out to destroy all around her. Brocka presents a world upside down where mothers abuse their children, children respond with bloody revenge, and the audience is left feeling sorrier for the rapist than for the rape victim. It's a great film, but for the sake of our sense of self-worth and relative peace of mind I, for one, am happy it's the only one of its kind.

2. What is your favorite coming of age movie and why?

Lilia Cuntapay, Pangarap ng Puso

Easy--Mario O'Hara's Pangarap ng Puso (Demons, 2000). About a pair of children who grow up near the Negros' enchanted rain forests, fall in love, and are pulled into the tumultuous currents of history. Their growth can be seen in the evolving ways in which the two lovers view the magical creatures that dance about them--as a child's metaphor for the wide, unknown world; as a pubescent's metaphor for emerging sexuality; as a young adult's metaphor for the demonic impulses that drive terrorists and military fascists alike, locked in a never ending cycle of violence and revenge.

And it's more, so much more; the girl's mother (Hilda Koronel) recites Florentino Collantes' "The Gift," part of which I translated (very roughly):

Our love is like the heaven and earth
like the union of mountain and sea.
Too close together to be clearly seen
drinking bitter tears.
I remember my lifelong love
and how he lay ailing
and how I said that if he ever died
I would quickly follow

The daughter would inherit this love of poetry as she grows up. But the times being as troubled as they are, she is drawn to darker, more unsettling fare, such as Amado Hernandez's fiery lines about political prisoners (again, very roughly translated): 

Bright as lightning the guardian’s eye 
on this locked and forbidding gate; 
the convict in the next cell howls 
an animal trapped in a cave. 

Each day passes like a chain dragged 
along the floor by bloody feet 
each night is a mourning shroud draped 
on my place of entombment. 

Sometimes someone's furtive feet pass, 
clink of shackles marking passage; 
the sallow sun blinks, reveals 
countless wraiths spewing from the dark. 

Sometimes the night's peace is shattered 
by alarm--an escape!--gunfire; 
sometimes the old church bell tolls 
and in the courtyard someone dies--

The girl grows up, faces her demons, conquers them (but not entirely; as we shall see in the film, not entirely); she becomes involved in the region's violent politics, though not as deeply as her childhood sweetheart, who has a bounty worth thousands of pesos on his head. Her speeches are admirably progressive, but--in what I find to be a curious reaction to the young man's rebellion, her poetry is more personal than radical (these lines written not by a famous Filipino poet, but by O'Hara's niece--again, a rough and probably incompetent translation):

At the graveside of childhood
in this tract of red-stained and fetid soil
the dying is done.
The final breath was deep
filled with purpose
because the heavens do not mourn a man
and begrudge tears to a garden reserved
for standing, stagnating saints.
Orphans begging by the tombstones of cemeteries.
But the dead understand.
Beneath their burial and putrefaction
is mourning and begging.

Remarkable coming from a young woman--but not her best; her best are recited towards the end of the film, and they are heartbreaking: the story of two lives, captured in a handful of words.

I was asked once, after a screening of this film (by the late Nika Bohinc, if I remember right!), why would children be frightened of the spirits of the forest when all they have known is innocence and joy? I had an answer then, a fairly good one I thought, but having mulled it over, I feel this is how I should have answered: that what children know is so very little compared to what they can see going on about them, and that even with their handful of knowledge (or, rather, because of it--what was Socrates' definition of a truly wise man?) they can sense danger and darkness beyond their small, secure circle. Children can sense, and see, and in this way know (even if they are not sure of the particulars); thus equipped, and not incapable of imagination, they can fear. When they grow up into flawed adults (a budding poetess and crusader, a feared rebel killer), their knowledge increases and the width of their circle widens; but the darkness is never completely dispelled, and the fear never really goes away.

(I suppose I have to do this: I tag girish, The Little Round-Headed Boy, and, uh, Nathaniel R. in The Film Experience)