Sirat (Oliver Laxe, 2025)

Just deserts

Oliver Laxe's Sirat is a little hard to describe: Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his son Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona) look for his daughter Mar in a rave in southern Morocco. The pair wander aimlessly while the dancers surround them in an assortment of clothing haircuts hair dyes tattoos piercings, all swaying to the pulsing rhythm. They talk to people, hand out photos; no one has seen her, but there's another rave, closer to Mauritania, where they might find her. 

(Warning: story and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail!)

Oz the Great and Powerful, Valhalla Rising, Volver, Story of GI Joe

By Popular Demand

Never had much use for boxoffice figures; never thought the approval of the moviegoing public was all that important, or an indicator of a film's quality, or relative lack of.

Once in a while, though I find myself in the embarrassing position of agreeing with everyone else. In which case I plead pure coincidence, and point to that old adage-- how does it go again? A stopped clock is right twice a day? 

Well, maybe not that one. But I do suspect that public opinion is smarter than the critical establishment is willing to admit. 

Case in point: Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful. Critics describe it as not "knowing its own mind," or "visually overcrammed, empty mega-spectacle"-- which is funny, because Raimi has never been known for sticking to one genre, even in his own movies, and was never a believer in visual restraint. The man likes over-the-top comic-book action, and unlike some filmmakers I can think of who can't even do that properly, he is superb at it.

The Coffee Table (Caye Casas, 2022)

Black, no sugar 

Watching The Coffee Table-- picture the ugliest piece of furniture on the face of the earth, a pair of gilt nymphs loosely screwed to a gilt base arcing unsteadily towards each other (every time someone walks around, actually every time someone makes an emphatic move anywhere near, the furniture shudders as if flinching), supporting a reportedly unbreakable glasstop. Picture a chubby mustachioed salesman (Eduardo Antuna) looking up at his prospective customers, meekly if gamely trying to sell them on the table's virtues. Facing him on either side are Maria (Estafania de los Santos) and Jesus (David Pareja) and for the next five minutes they bicker-- Maria about how expensive and godawful tacky the furniture is (she's not wrong), Jesus on how he's spent the day following her and doing what she wants and their whole life-- insisting on having a child, naming the child (Cayetano, which he hates) has been devoted to making her happy. Now he wants a table, this table, for himself alone, just because.

Lav Diaz retrospective at FilMadrid

(Due to popular demand: the original English text used by the organizers for their Lav Diaz retrospective at FilMadrid: Festival Internacional de Cine de Madrid)

Evolution of a Filipino filmmaker

Lav Diaz's visual and storytelling style has been in a constant state of flux starting with his first produced film Burger Boys (1999)--a crime caper so surreal the producer delayed its released--to his first commercially screened feature Serafin Geronimo: Ang Kriminal ng Baryo Concepcion (The Criminal of Barrio Concepcion,1998) to his first fully realized work, the four-hour Batang West Side (West Side Ave., 2001).

Espiritu de la colmena (Spirit of the Beehive, Victor Erice, 1973)

Reprinting this because--well, there's no reason not to read about Victor Erice either.

The greatest Spanish film ever made?

First saw Victor Erice's Espiritu de la colmen (Spirit of the Beehive, 1973) maybe seven or so years ago, on a poor video projection with a standing crowd in the way, and it looked impressive, but I wasn't moved--which was a pity; in a thirty-three year career, Erice has made only one film a decade, starting with this one (he makes Terence Malick look prolific). Saw it again in TCM recently (I just caught it by accident) and it's just tremendous--he plays with the metaphor of the Frankenstein creature, transforming Shelley's myth of hubris and failed responsibility into one of the lonely outsider (which is more in line with Whale's vision, and with what kids readily respond to). Over that is the metaphor of the beehive, which Erice has Fernando Feran Gomez looking at repeatedly like a god observing his subjects under glass. And over that is the developing consciousness of the children, which sees all through enchanted eyes, transforming the Spanish countryside into a fantastic dreamscape.

It draws from disparate sources: Spanish political history, Grimm fairy tales, Mary Shelly's novel, and I would say Swift in Gulliver mode (the creature is to the girls as the girls--or the father--is to the bees; perception shaped or modified by perspective), and I suspect Rene Clement's Forbidden Games. In turn, it has probably influenced films like Cinema Paradiso (a coarser, more sentimental treatise on the power of the cinema to fascinate the youth), My Neighbor Totoro (two girls exploring a lovely countryside, and encountering a mysterious figure (both have their threads of pathos, which the creators take in different directions)), much of present-day Iranian cinema (especially those that deal with children) and even The Shining (dysfunctional family in a large habitat; plus a shot of Ana at the typewriter, hearing a strange noise, moving away (along with the camera) from the typewriter into a series of doorways, to glimpse something terrifying behind a closed door). 

 Incredible complexity, and yet it comes across as hushed, simple, moving: you choose to see the connections if you so wish, but it works supremely well as the story of a young girl who wishes to make a friend and finds one, with all the attendant consequences.

Some notes: Erice rhymes and repeats images, sounds, textures, emotions. The day after the children watch Frankenstein, a schoolteacher unveils the figure of a man without internal organs; her lesson consisted of the kids putting the correct organs in place, a schoolroom parody of Dr. Frankenstein's work method. The sequence ends with Ana putting in the crucial component--the eyes--with which the figure, previously a collection of colored cardbored cutouts, suddenly acquires life and expression and perhaps even a soul. Ana looks on her creation with an ambigiuous expression: just what is she feeling? Longing? Fear? Pride? A masterful example of child acting. The mother writes to a French lover, posts the letter at a drop box by a train's side, spots a handsome young man seated in a cabin. When her husband prepares for bed, the camera remains focused on the mother's face as she pretends to sleep, the father heard clomping around much as Frankenstein's creature does; when he finally climbs into bed, we hear a train whistle, and we're almost certain we know what--or who--she's thinking about.

Erice creates incredible imagery (with the help of the great Luis Cuadrado, who started to go blind during this production, and took his life in 1980). There's one that stays with me, even if it has little other significance: the father comes out of the house, the day just dawning, the the windows still lit, the house beautifully framed in the strengthening light; we follow him as he crosses down the path to the fields beyond and suddenly it's another composition, this time of the sun breaking over the horizon, the camera moving slowly past some tree branches to get a better view.

I read a college website that considers Ana a representation of the innocent Republicans, the older Isabel a representation of the corrupt, materialistic Nationalists. Possible, but I can't help but recoil from such bald symbolism. Isabel tells lies and teases Ana, but they both seem equally innocent, equally caught up in their childhood world (Isabel just seems more capable of using it to her own ends). One startling image of her developing beyond childhood is a scene of her with the cat. She strokes it lovingly, then in a fit of childish pique or excess affection, squeezes it; it hisses and bites her finger. She goes to the mirror and, looking at her face, spreads the blood across her lips. Remarkable image of oncoming sexuality, with the blood on her lips forshadowing the blood that will come forth another time (it's her only film role, incidentally). 

This is considered by some the greatest film ever to come out of Spain. I don't know if I disagree; at the very least, I think I understand where such people are coming from.

9.6.06

Biutiful (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 2010)

Passion play

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, one might say, does not do things in halves. He does not waffle; he does not prevaricate; when his films state something they do so declaratively, forcefully. His protagonists faced with the ultimate struggle do not go gentle into that good night--they kick a few garbage cans along the way, shriek their lungs out, and for good measure toss rocks through the back window.

Take Inarritu's latest, Biutiful (2010)--no; backtrack a bit. Inarritu has a tendency to employ multiple story threads in his movies: Amores Perros (2000) used a car crash to unite three separate narratives; 21 Grams (2003) used a hit-and-run accident (vehicular mishaps figure heavily in his pictures); Babel (2006)--his most ambitious work to date--follows four stories in as many countries, and does not involve a vehicle as a major plot element, though a bus rider is, at one point, shot.

With Biutiful Inarritu seems to have forsworn this tendency by focusing on only one protagonist, Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a single father raising two kids--seems, that is, until one looks at the protagonist's situation more carefully. Uxbal's wife Marambra (Maricel Alvarez) is an ex-drug addict and suffers from a bipolar disorder; he is torn between denying her the children and leaving them in her unreliable care. He finds jobs for twenty-five Chinese workers smuggled into Spain illegally; along the way finds himself concerned for a young woman sick with colds (she and her fellow workers sleep in an unheated basement). He sells drugs through a series of Senegalese vendors (also in Spain illegally) and is later saddled with the problem of caring for a Senegalese woman and her child.

Any one of these responsibilities would be enough to weigh down even the strongest men but no; Inarritu continues to pile on the poor man--Uxbal learns that he has prostate cancer, and that with chemotherapy he only has months to live; a friend urges him to put his affairs in order before he goes (duh). He also sees dead people (where did that come from--Shyamalan?) and at at one point has to tell a boy's father that his son was a thief.

It's at about this far in that you want to throw up your hands and yell “Okay!” Innarritu doesn't know when to stop; it's his most glorious virtue and most damning curse. The movie ranges all over the place, from urban hyperdrama to domestic melodrama to Twilight Zone supernatural; each narrative is accompanied by its own garish color scheme, each strains for its own memorable climax.

If anything in this escudella i carn d'olla--a kind of Catalan Christmas stew--sticks out, if anything in this overheated, overflowing bowl of mushy potage remains distinct in memory, it's Bardem. He's like the MGM lion with sad, Castillan eyes, a monument of a figure with a magnificently sculpted head and mane (Bardem's hair worn loose and long is like a mark of Biblical profundity--that's why the ridiculous 'do forced on him by the Coen brothers was so unforgivable, Oscar award or no Oscar award); he is like a supersized silent stone figure meant to commemorate some great tragedy (in Inarritu's eyes, three or four of them). Bardem as Uxbal somehow makes all this work; he sells the absurd plot with his heroic forbearance, his almost inhuman way of glaring at one unspeakably sad image after another and making his reaction somehow fresh and honest (even if for the film's last hour he's been racking up enough tragedies to fill a dozen socialist operas full to brimming).

Bardem does more than his share in selling this silliness--you almost want to bow to him in respect for what he's trying to do. You want to say “what a pile of shit!” but the scorn catches in the throat; the attempt, after all, is made with noble (if simpleminded) intentions, and the failure is still of Brobdingnagian scale, and impressive as hell.

The picture does remind one of other, more successful attempts: one remembers the Dardennes brothers' La Promesse (1996) which also dealt with illegal immigrants, but was as beautiful and persuasive in its austerity as this is confusing and ridiculous in its prodigality. It helped that the Dardennes filtered the story through the eyes of a child; when detail after damning detail finally clicks into place in the child's quietly perceptive mind, he (and through his eyes we the audience) gasp at the monstrousness of what's going on. The understated heroism of the child's final gesture seems earned, where the tragedy of Bardem's downfall here--and it does feel tragic despite, not because, of all the hoo-hah--seems forced and artificial. The Dardennes are masters of gracefully neorealist storytelling; Inarritu, it seems to me, is a master of garishly sensationalist poverty porn. All in all, I much prefer the Dardennes.

First published in Businessworld, 10.6.11

Los Ultimos de Filipinas (Last Stand in the Philippines, Antonio Roman, 1945)

Last man standing

For years now Instituto Cervantes has been presenting Antonio Roman's Los Ultimos de Filipinas (Last Stand in the Philippines, 1945) and no matter how many times I have seen it it's still a hoot, a real jaw-dropper. Imagine this: it's the middle of the Philippine Revolution in 1898; the Filipinos are winning the war on land, the Americans winning the war at sea. In the town of Baler, formerly of the province of Nueva Ecija (since re-allocated to the province of Aurora), fifty soldiers abandoned by their hard-pressed government (Spain was too busy surrendering to the United States) hold out in a yearlong siege, representing the country's last stand in the country (hence the title).

Any Spaniard watching this film will probably discover a quaint but nevertheless stirring hurrah for Castilian courage; any Filipino watching will stare, wide-eyed, at the way Filipinos are portrayed--as a tireless, implacable, near-invisible enemy, quick to exploit any mistake or risks taken, and willing to wait out a desperate opponent running low on food and ammunition. To find a more recent and familiar equivalent to the picture's view of the unstoppable foe, one might look at American movies on the Vietnam War. In films like Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), and John Irvin's Hamburger Hill done a year later (my personal favorite of the genre), the enemy is faceless and mysterious, an unknown quantity that will pull down and kill the unwary given half the chance. In each of these as in Roman's film the emphasis is on the American (or Spanish) soldier, on his crisis of faith and morale, his physical and spiritual suffering, his eventually bitter Pyrrhic victory.

Strange to think we Filipinos--who are rarely implacable and who almost never give the impression of being quietly mysterious, not when there's a chance for food and drink nearby--should be seen this way; stranger still to look at the landscape behind the Spaniards as they fight their lonely, drawn-out battle. Never mind the studio sets, one can forgive those for their airless, artificial quality, but when the action moves outdoors the countryside, while recognizably hot, has plenty of palm trees--no end of palm trees, from the towering kind to the chest-high variety, roughly half of them visibly drooping. One wants to ask--where are the forests of coconut trees, with gracefully swooping trunks? Where are the banana trees with their oar-like armsand heavy necklace of fruit? Where are the mango trees with their spreading limbs and distinct spearhead leaves? One badly wants to believe the film is set in the Philippines, but every once in a while you see a palm frond with dried-out leaves and your fingers twitch, wanting to reach for a hose or watering can. Actually, American films about Vietnam look more persuasively like they were shot in Southeast Asia, and no wonder--most of them were shot in Southeast Asia, in the Philippines to be specific, with perhaps the most notable exception being Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (made the same year as Hamburger), which was shot entirely in London, with (what else?) visibly drooping palm fronds.

Still! Antonio Roman is a formidable craftsman who directed most of his thirty-plus films in the '40s, and is a friend of horror master Mario Bava. Watching the film one thinks of Michael Curtiz, and his way of advancing and retreating with the camera for dramatic effect; one also thinks of Curtiz whenever Roman uses shadows expressively--to add mood or atmosphere, or throw a cruciform shape on soldiers, suggesting the comforting presence of Christ.

The film isn't so much a war film as it is a siege drama (think Cy Endfield's Zulu (1964), only not as claustrophobically confined, and with less emphasis on siege tactics)--instead of drawn-out battles, we have men standing around, looking wearier and more dispirited with every passing minute; instead of flag-waving, we have mournful musical interludes. At one point the hymn "Ave Maria" is sung while the camera trucks past a sea of melancholic soldiers wearing a scraggly collection of 5 o'clock shadows, pans past the walls of the distinctly dilapidated church, comes to rest on the figure of the Catholic priest saying mass--again, the film reminds us of the invincible, unyielding hand of the church, sustaining its supplicants (Roman, one might dare observe, is no Bunuelian skeptic, at least not here).

A later and more affecting sequence is of a beautiful lass sitting by the window, singing a melancholic song. The camera pulls back, taking in the small nipa (dried grass) hut she inhabits, then cuts to several men in various stages of exhaustion and despair, listening to her sweet voice. Cut to the camera descending from its vantage point back to a more intimate view of the girl as she ends her song, bowing her head in quiet resignation.

I said the film is a hoot to watch, and it is; part of the pleasure is in watching a Spanish filmmaker struggle to portray a country he obviously has not once visited (and probably received little support from) during the length of production; part of the pleasure is in watching ourselves as the bad guys, the Implacable Other seen in so many Hollywood-made Vietnam war movies. But the keenest pleasure, I suppose, is in watching the Spanish ultimately hold their heads high as they leave their beleaguered fortress, finding victory in defeat and honor in humiliation; in a way it's a left-handed compliment to the Filipino freedom fighter, and the dismay he is capable of inspiring.

First published in Businessworld, 6.26.09