Comfort in your Strangeness & other Cinemalaya soundtracks

It hadn’t really occurred to me while reading the script of Katski Flores’ Still Life, finalist in the recent Third Cinemalaya film festival, that Cynthia Alexander’s Comfort in your Strangeness would be an apt soundtrack.

The movie is about a painter struggling with self doubt, not least of which is a sickness that prevents him from keeping a steady grip on his paint brush. I caught a little more than the last half of the digital film one Saturday afternoon at CCP Little Theater, which was filled to capacity with mostly students and other fans of the visual arts.

It is an unusual story, set in idyllic circumstances, with breathtaking cinematography and use of flashbacks to highlight the painter’s plight as he tries to heal himself through both his art and solitude.

In the artist’s rest house a young woman comes a-visiting, and we are treated to rather enlightening dialogue between the sexes, no malice or cheap shots here, not the usual give and take one might expect of a man and a woman in a secluded place. There are unforgettable shots that play on light and shadow, as well seeming existential sequences suddenly lent more bravura by a lone acoustic guitar strumming in the background.

One line stands out in the script where an interviewer (played by John Lloyd Cruz) asks the painter if there is life after art, and the anti-hero replies, “Kailangan, meron,” or similar words of affirmation.

Still Life plays back and forth in time, with the painter realizing, amidst recovery from a suicide attempt, that he had befriended his real mother in that gray area between life and death. Then as the credits roll at the end we get to hear the new version of Comfort in your Strangeness in its entirety, which certainly fit like a glove to the rest of the movie.

Cynthia Alexander said she liked the story, though suggested some tinkering was needed in the scoring and sound design. Since we’re not professional musicians, we can only agree with her, and add that her song served Still Life well, and vice versa.

Winner of the Best Sound Design in Cinemalaya was also named the Best Film, Tribu by Jim Libiran, whose soundtrack featured all-Filipino gangsta rappers in their native Tondo. Now Young Cent and OG Sacred, real-life gang leaders of the inner city district, are not your ordinary pa-cute hip-hoppers that come a dime a dozen on primetime teen TV. On the contrary, these dudes are tough as they come, and their lyrics seethe with the grimy, seedy violence of their ’hood. Libiran is not exaggerating when he says that Young Cent can be a deadringer for Snoop Dogg, and on Tribu’s theme song Matira ang Matibay we get an inkling why in Tondo only the fittest survive, but that does not mean the district lacks for any tenderness or compassion.

There is another song in the Tribu soundtrack that has a rapper spitting out the words machinegun style, and though we can hardly understand what he’s saying, we get the drift of his staccato desperation.

The director Sigfreid Barros Sanchez in a group e-mail initially expressed reservations about the authenticity of using hip-hop as soundtrack for local setting, but upon watching the Libiran film took his mohawk off, as if to say, the ghetto is the ghetto whatever country it’s in, and the Pinoy gangsta rap hits the spot in Tribu, where everything has a reason and a time and place under heaven.

Aureaus Solito’s Pisay, on the other hand, features some nifty ’80s style new wave songs on its soundtrack, which was already selling at the CCP gift shop at the time of the festival. We remember well those post-punk days, and the music serves as an avid aural backdrop to a coming-of-age story of high school students in a school for scholars.

If the sun is the center of the solar system, best director Solito gives us this heartfelt tribute to his alma mater, and his swan song too for Cinemalaya since he has graduated from the neophytes festival.

Jury prize winner Endo has the lead characters sharing earphones listening to what could be indie or alternative music, while Kadin with its ethnic fixtures is memorable for its indigenous, nondescript instrumentation.

Ligaw Liham with its diffuse camerawork and look halfway between color and sepia, has lead actress Karylle composing and singing the theme song,  Minamahal Kita. The invalid grandfather gives this advice to his simpleton ward who had forged love letters to Karylle: “Hindi  porque marunong ka nang humawak ng lapis, pwede ka nang mamasukan sa buhay ng may buhay.”