This continues our coverage of the cinematic revolution we’re witnessing for the Metro Manila Film Festival.
To understand better Erik Matti’s Seklusyon (2016), an entry to the 2016 MMFF, and to see what could have been, one has to go back to an earlier work, a short film he released in 2012 titled Vesuvius.
In that fantastic film, we follow a put-upon man played with a nuanced and creepy stillness by Gio Alvarez. By day, he sells packed lunches to harried office workers, and by night, he prepares the next day’s set meals, takes care of an invalid mother, and when the darkness of the evening turns ripe, entertains vivid visions of the Virgin Mary coming to him in immense bright light–all to exhort him to commit a string of brutal murders.
It’s a frightening serial killer movie with a gripping Catholic angle, beautifully shot by Matti and structured with the usual muscular dexterity of a Michiko Yamamoto screenplay. Vesuvius devilishly plays for us the notion that the Devil has immense powers, that it can in fact take the shape of holy icons to push us further into the embrace of evil. Be careful what you believe, Matti tells us, our fervent faiths are not guarantees to safeguard us from false prophets.
Seklusyon borrows many visual elements from Vesuvius, and takes further its theme and expands it to feature-length narrative–but I am not sure it exceeds the gripping effectiveness of the older, and shorter, film, which was not only truly terrifying, it also made us question the tenets of faith we hold sacrosanct. As written by Anton C. Santamaria, Seklusyon is beautiful to look at and works for the most part, but it is ultimately unsatisfying.
What else can you say about a film you earnestly root for, but remains saddled with so much unignited potential? Can one forgive the lack of tension or the absence of burrowing terror, settling instead on the film’s obvious message about faith and deception to lift a soggy script?
You can tell by the way some people have called the film a “Catholic thriller,” and others a “think piece.” They are too kind, but they are also, in a sense, right. I think they only mean to describe how less than visceral the film ultimately is, and it shouldn’t have been. It could indeed have been a devouring horror as well as a compelling thesis about certain social issues that ail us.
I want it to succeed beyond what it has ended up achieving for real, because it is a gorgeously wrought film. Its production design–for a film set in 1947–is meticulous and rich. Its cinematography is a masterwork and captures so well the unholy atmosphere its story demands to wallow in.
And the material itself is golden: we already know that horror overloaded with Catholic imagery is a staple of the genre that can go so eerily right. One only has to consider the staying power of such classics as The Exorcist or The Omen or The Exorcism of Emily Rose to note the easy transfer between sacred images to icons of dread. Matti himself proved that so well in Vesuvius.
So what happened? Is it the acting? (Could be.)
Is it the story? But the premise of the plot is already quite tantalising. In the aftermath of World War II, four young deacons of the church (played by Ronnie Alonte, Dominic Roque, John Vic De Guzman, and J.R. Versales) find themselves in a hidden retreat deep in the Philippine countrysides, there to endure seven days of seclusion in a barricaded house, where they could try to withstand the worst of demonic temptations and visions before they could finally be ordained as priests. (Apparently, this used to be a common practice for those being initiated into the priesthood, long since discontinued.)
In a parallel story, another priest (played by Neil Ryan Sese) investigates the healing powers of Anghela, a young girl (played with incredible panache by Rhed Bustamante) under the protection and guidance of Sister Cecilia (played by Phoebe Walker), a nun with a mysterious and troubled past. Sese’s Father Ricardo wants to know whether the girl indeed has genuine Divine gifts enough for the church to declare her a living saint.
The two threads collide by the start of the second act, where the sins of the young would-be priests manifest themselves as terrifying visions–perhaps being exacerbated by the presence of Sister Cecilia, and perhaps needing the miraculous intercession of Angelha.
In the maelstrom of hellish visions and subsequent betrayals, especially in the third act, the film gradually falls apart: it dismisses too easily important elements of the story we have been made to invest in, and refuses to expound on others that would have shed light to the needless complexities it finds itself spouting. It is a messy screenplay. (That it won Best Screenplay is the sole enigma of the MMFF Awards Night.)
But even then, Matti is in control of his images. He is a fantastic visual director, and we have seen what beautiful cinema he could do over the years, selling us the premise of voyeurism in Scorpio Nights 2, or lovelorn romance in Sa Huling Paghihintay, or angsty sex work in Prosti, or Tsinoy melodrama in Mano Po 2, or feisty ghetto superheroes in Gagamboy by virtue of beautiful images alone.
His collaboration with Yamamoto, however, gave his beautiful images the grace of beautiful structure, resulting in such rich and resonant works as On the Job, Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles, Honor Thy Father, and of course Vesuvius. I wish that collaboration continued on in Seklusyon. It would have probably elevated the film from something we merely admire, to something that we believe slays both our minds and hearts, terrorizing us and thrilling our sensibilities at the same time.
In a kinder world, however, you do give a grade of A for effort. But the world is often exacting, and as much as I enjoyed, to a degree, Avid Liongoren’s Saving Sally (2016), it fails as a compelling piece of cinema for me. I was suitably entertained, but it never moved me.
Yes, we’ve heard the story of its 10-year inception–a story of an artistic struggle that manages to tug our hearts. Yes, the animation is stupendous and imaginative. Yes, we should marvel at the filmmakers’ ability to create magic out of a shoestring budget.
But the story also bears much of what has become awkward, narrative-wise, since 2006. It’s much too twee, for example, in an age where putang ina has become presidential speech. Its sensibility is perfectly a throwback, especially to a time when the phenomenon of the “manic pixie dream girl” was a beloved cinematic trope, since then much-maligned. But I do give credit to the filmmakers for giving the type a narrative arc deeper than the usual superficial display of interesting quirks.
The girl in question is the titular Sally (played with exceeding charm by Rhian Ramos). Her best friend is the introverted comic book artist Marty (Enzo Marcos), who pines quietly for her, but has no courage whatsoever to reveal his real feelings. Excuses abound, you see, centering mostly on the fact that Sally’s adoptive parents are monstrous people who regularly abuse her and keep her in check with their rigorous rules and overbearing Christian piety. For Marty, Sally needs, well, saving … and the proper loving only he could give.
That Sally comes off as a quirky fashionista girl with a hunger for the bizarre and the unusual, and a talent for literal inventions, is one plot point that remains psychologically suspect–but I suspend my disbelief, of course. Because I want to like the movie. And I do, with some effort, and as long as I remain blind to the holes in the narrative, and a third act that seems completely unnecessary.
However, the fundamental unease that I felt over my immediate critical consideration of the film upon exiting the cinema was this: why did this have to be a mix of live action and animation? The animation didn’t feel integral to the story at all. It remained for me a filmmaking conceit that, while executed quite impressively, didn’t feel organic to the narrative.
It would have been a completely different story had it been produced without any live-action. But we do follow characters who mostly remain human throughout, existing in a world that is a fantasy of illustration art–but the two planes intersect without a convincing explanation why this has to be so. In the most famous example of this technique–Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit?–we do get a clear effort at worldling, that humans do in fact live alongside cartoon characters who mostly come from an adjacent “neighbourhood” called Toontown. The clear premise sets us to accept without question that humans and cartoons do interact in the frame of the film.
I don’t believe for once Saving Sally’s “explanation” that the animated parts we see are merely constructs of Marty’s inventive imagination, his unique perspective and rendering of the much-too-real world around him. Because the animation does overwhelm the live-action in the space of the film, and no sane person could be so overwhelmingly consistent and unceasing in that rendition of the real to the cartoonish. (Unless you’re crazy, and you have a lola like Imelda.)
And also this: despite overwhelming much of the frame, the animation remains ironically “background material.” It is more or less glorified wallpaper for the live actors to play on.
One could also fault the film for its use of English as the main mode for dialogue, even if particular scenes felt like they called for the use of the native language–but I feel I have nitpicked too much a product that has been made, for so long by its creatives with the best of intentions: to create an animated feature film with art that’s very impressive, given the legendary limitations the film’s publicity machine has earnestly profiled.
A for effort then. Mostly definitely a C for story. But also most definitely an A+ for the film’s brazenness to put a giant penis on screen. But thank God for the next film.
When Babyruth Villarama’s Sunday Beauty Queen (2016) was announced Best Picture of the lot of eight at the tail-end of the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival, I thought without hesitation: “Good for the MMFF. The film deserves the honor.”
There is something immensely satisfying in the acknowledgment of that accolade–like it was something long-time in coming–given how its inclusion in the 2016 slate created so much furor among industry people, most of whom found it being a documentary an irritating aberration that should have been grounds for exclusion.
It does mark a first in that regard: in the history of the festival, which was founded as the Metropolitan Film Festival in 1975, no documentary has ever been considered as a contender. That Sunday Beauty Queen won felt like history coming full circle all at once.
That it also won considering that it was the one film in the whole festival that struggled the most in getting itself seen–only a few theaters outside of Manila dared screen it–felt like divine justice for those who had been championing it, who believed in its merits and the importance of its story.
For me, it felt like a decade-long corrective: its win comes exactly ten years after Enteng Kabisote 3: Okay Ka Fairy Ko … The Legend Goes On and On and On was proclaimed Best Picture in 2006, the festival’s most embarrassing low point. Its win is a mark for great change still to come; it is also a clarion call for battles still to be waged ahead. (But of course. Bad taste does take time to overhaul, and it does have its own high priests. Consider, for example, the Manny Castañeda debacle.)
But here, I speak too much of the film in the context of the MMFF’s long troubled history. Does it work as a film, and is it any good? It took me a long time to write this review. I saw the film four days ago, and I felt I had to allow it to settle in my head. Not that it was too complex to understand, or even too cerebral to feel: in these two considerations, Sunday Beauty Queen wins by being a film that is easily digestible and also easily felt. There are scenes aplenty in the film that provoke instant welling up of tears–the scene of someone talking about counting airplanes through the kitchen window, the telephone conversation about someone’s unexpected death, the scene at the halfway house.
And the structure of the story is easy enough to comprehend–Ms. Villarama’s camera simply follows several Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong as they struggle for six days of every week to manage the households of their “amos,” some under the scrutiny of cruel employers, and then on Sunday, on their day-off, they prepare to join an annual beauty pageant.
I think the film successfully sells itself as a very human story by allowing its cameras to linger and explore with so much intimacy the lives of the people whose stories we are following.
After the film’s immediate opening at one edition of the annual beauty pageant–after the beautiful gowns have been paraded and after the crown and sash have been awarded–we are immediately plunged into the women’s every day reality.
In the chaos of Hong Kong traffic, they transform to become the reverse of the Cinderella story: they trek back to the condominiums and apartment buildings of their employers, trying so hard to beat curfew, and in the next six days we see them toil with mop, broomstick, vacuum cleaner, and apron.
Often the film takes us deeper into the dirt-cleaning and babysitting by allowing its subjects to address us through talking head interviews, where they are allowed to explain, to reminisce, to ponder their place in the story of the country they have left behind. Why am I here and why am I not home? Why am I taking care of other people’s children while I have to make myself contented by watching my own child’s graduation through Skype? Why have I allowed myself this debasement by sleeping on the kitchen floor?
Their stories become a reflection of our nation’s frailties and broken promises. We know these stories exist; and yet to be confronted with stark images of these stories in the sweep of cinematic largeness is to feel cowed, and to feel crushed by our country’s seeming indifference. The film thrusts us into an identification with these people in a way we probably have never felt before, simply because cinema is powerful that way: thus their pain becomes our pain, their joys our joys.
And yet, while the film does consider the darkness that often blots many domestic helpers’ lives in foreign places (getting abused by cruel employers, getting fired in the middle of the night, feeling the rush about having to get employment within 14 days at the risk of deportation, and so on and so forth), it also becomes a celebration of the hardy lives of these OFWs, and the film rightly marvels at their capacity to stage a “carnival” even in stark circumstances. That’s the Filipino spirit, I think, illustrated so well.
Ms. Villarama chooses to frame their stories in the simple framework of its witty tagline, “Kayod mula Lunes hanggang Sabado, at rampa ‘pag Linggo” (“Work hard from Monday to Saturday, do the catwalk on Sunday”) which I think is ingenious, considering the complexities of these real-life stories, a lot of which are left out in the name of narrative consistency.
Then again, one documentary is really not enough to contain everything, and so this is an editorial decision I can accept even if I feel it could have more in following, just enough, the hidden depths of the tangential issues it does present.
For example, why is the Philippine Consulate generally unhelpful in addressing the plight of many domestic helpers in need of assistance? Why is the lesbian angle that is so tantalisingly proffered by the film not really explored? We are never given more than a promising mention of consular indifference, or a teasing shot of two women walking away.
One can explain these away by understanding that the filmmakers may not have wanted it to be too serious in weighing political and gender issues, which might distract from the simpler story of “struggle plus beauty pageants”–but I’m not so sure.
One pointed way the film reminds us of a very political problem is by introducing its principals by full names, the number of years of their stay as DHs in Hong Kong, and the most damning of all, the college degrees they have earned back in the Philippines. It is saying our country has done great disservice to its people, reducing college degrees to nothing more than an aberration in a resume destined for servitude. This is never really explored as a problem, only limned at.
Some friends have also likened the film’s structure as being too much like a typical episode of Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho. “I’ve seen BBC documentaries that have tackled these issues better,” says one.
I don’t really agree with that–but I do think it could have borrowed a cue or two from Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, that great 1991 documentary about Harlem balls staged by gay black men in the very fringes of society’s margins.
In that film, their “pageants,” their “voguing” competitions, their practice of “shading” are explained as expressions of a subcultural outrage, as aspirational efforts to counter the fact of their dreams being denied in the reality outside of these balls. Sunday Beauty Queen hints at that promise–it did ask the character of Daddy Leo why he organizes these pageants, and he merely replies with a playful, “Wala lang, feel ko lang”–but proceeds more or less to go the route of regular “poverty porn” storylines without the slums.
But I do think I am expecting a bit too much of Sunday Beauty Queen–and I think I am because the film is so very well-made it could have stood a bit more complexity. Nonetheless, I laughed, I cried, and in the end, I wanted to hug all domestic helpers from Hong Kong coming home for Christmas.
This is a great film every Filipino needs to see.
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Author’s email: ian.casocot@gmail.com
