My default mode is to believe in the filmmaker and to hope for the best. Sometimes I get what I ask for, and more – Lino Brocka’s Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, Celso Ad. Castillo’s Burlesk Queen, Tikoy Aguiluz’s Boatman, Joey Reyes’s May Minamahal, and Jeffrey Jeturian’s Tuhog come easily to mind among my personal favorites. Many other times, I go home disappointed, stewing in varying degrees of dissatisfaction.
My demands of a movie aren’t really all that great. I’m not even what you’d call a cineaste, the kind who hounds all the film festivals and can tell you who said what in which movie, chapter and verse. My minimum expectations of a movie are that it make sense, that it use images at least as much as – if not more than – words to make its point, and that – if it can’t show me something or take me somewhere sublime – it at least satisfy some basic instinct in me, whether for blood, sex, thrills, or laughs, or draw out some base emotions like rage, pity, fear, or longing. In other words, I’d like to be engaged on one level or other – physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, preferably all.
That means that sometimes I like high-concept movies like Brazil and psychological thrillers like Vertigo, and also that my idea of an all-around great film is any one of the Godfather series, or a quiet, poignant piece like Sundays and Cybele and Death in Venice. I know I’m sounding like a fuddy-duddy who likes anything made at least 30 years ago, but I swear it isn’t just the vintage sheen that attracts me to many older movies (more than enough of which were, let’s face it, pretty awful); it’s the solid narrative line, the careful characterization, the light touches, the ironic humor – before postmodern parody and political solemnity became all the fashion.
I don’t like movies that have "Look at me, I’m so clever" written all over them. My 20- and 30-something students can barely forgive me for this, but I found Pulp Fiction as overblown as popcorn and Contact infinitely cornier – compared to, say, Heat (a De Niro-Pacino starrer which showed at about the same time as Pulp Fiction) and, as far as extraterrestial connections go, 2001: A Space Odyssey. And whatever the critics say, I can even appreciate and enjoy mindlessness for its own sake; sometimes, after watching an overwrought mystery, Steven Seagal can be refreshingly transparent – when you look right through him, there’s nothing there but the same Steven Seagal with the same expression. Ambition or even pretentiousness works only when you’re able to pull it off; otherwise you might be better off keeping your sights low and doing something simple and modest very well.
All this is a long way of saying that, like many of you probably did, I watched a couple of Metro Manila Film Festival movies over the Christmas break, and came away feeling distinctly underwhelmed. The problem could be with me and my biases, or with the movies, or a bit of both – you decide.
The first movie I saw was Tikoy Aguiluz’s version of Nick Joaquin’s Tatarin – two formidable talents brought together on a project that’s been waiting all these years to be realized. The movie’s based on the play of the same title, which was based in turn on the "The Summer Solstice," one of Joaquin’s most popular short stories.
I’m not familiar with the stage version of Tatarin – I seem to recall that it was published in the ‘70s in an issue of Solidarity, a copy of which I have somewhere. But I’ve taught the short story quite a few times, and while my reading of it may have changed somewhat over the years – I’m not so sure, now, that Lupe’s triumph is all that definitive in the end – I’ve never failed to be entranced by its power and charm. Some of that comes from the complexity of the situation – the interplay between the Christian and pagan, sacred and profane, modern and ancient, Apollonian and Dionysian, male and female – and the rest is provided by Joaquin’s inimitable and ultimately untranslatable language. Joaquin’s language is always more than words, more than exposition; it is cadence and rhythm, form shaping content.
Curiously – and unfortunately – it was power and charm that I found lacking in Tikoy’s Tatarin. You’ve got to praise the director and his producer for essaying a job difficult enough to realize onstage. The problem with film – especially with film versions of plays or stories – is that your canvas actually gets much larger, and suddenly you have to fill up all that space with something that feels as compelling and as structured as the original. (Actually, the best film versions make you forget about the original when you’re watching the movie, then make you want to read it – or read it again – when you’re done. They acquire a life and a validity of their own, and could even tower over whatever book may have inspired them. Remember Gone with the Wind?)
I was perfectly willing to yield myself to a different and nuanced Tatarin, but this version just kept reminding me how much better the original story was, and I’ll tell you why. Joaquin’s story is about Doña Lupeng’s transformation from a submissive and proper young matron to a woman aware and assertive of her primal power over man – someone who doesn’t merely want to be respected, but rather adored – with the three-day Tatarin festival as the enabling agent.
Aguiluz’s version does follow Lupeng’s descent – or I should say ascent – to wantonness (in the obsolescent sense of the word: rebelliousness). But there seems to be little real transformation or struggle in the movie, because the movie opens on a high orgiastic note and merely stays there, with hardly any modulation. It’s as if you took a picture of a tidal wave and simply waited until it swallowed everybody up – including, inevitably, Guadalupe. We didn’t have much of a chance to see Lupeng, her husband Rafael, and the Moretas as a traditional family and household, before and quite apart from the Tatarin. The frenetic energy of the festival actually gets dull and flat after a while because it isn’t built up and is merely used as an insistent – even annoying – motif.
I agree with the production’s decision to shift the setting to the 1920s from the story’s mid-1800s – the addition of the Americanized cousin and whatever she represents does add a fresh dimension – but some other judgment calls left me asking "Huh?"
I don’t know if the play specified it, but the decision to situate the balete tree – around which many pagan rituals take place – in the Moreta front yard is a very theatrical move and may have been good for the sake of dramatic economy (that is, of making many things possible within the same set) but it also raises serious problems for the movie, because now everything can be seen, and everything has to take place right down there.
From his balcony, Don Paeng Moreta watches his rakish cousin Guido raise the hem of his wife’s skirt to kiss her foot. And he does what? Nothing more than bite his lip. And this is supposed to be the epitome of traditional machismo? Later, at a party, the same impertinent Guido drops a rock-heavy line that again isn’t picked up on or responded to, least of all by Paeng: "Lahat naman tayo dito, puta!" Huh? Did I just miss an insight back there?
Just as perplexing and ultimately wasted are the occasional references (you really have to watch out for them – there’s one in the beginning and one towards the end) to a mysterious samahan, presumably an anti-American organization. Okay, but to establish what? That primal horniness respects no ideological boundaries? I guess. (Mark it down to my bias, but when I saw the script credited to four names, I said, "Uh-oh, we have a problem.")
Most un-Joaquinesque – and also clearly most commercial – was the decision to cast Rica Peralejo as the possessed maid Amada, Rica whose impossibly round and polished breasts are presumably meant to conjure "the immense, intense fever of noon." But this is precisely what I mean by the absence of transformation. Joaquin’s Amada was a lumpy old woman – the last person you’d think of as a sex or an earth goddess – and her conversion into one at the start of the story is our first inkling of the power of ritual, of spirit over matter, which will transform the equally unlikely Lupeng from the other social direction. Transforming Rica Peralejo into Rica Peralejo is like turning Steven Seagal into, well, Steven Seagal.
That said, the movie is quite a visual feast – you can trust Dez Bautista to get his period pieces right – and Dina Bonnevie and Edu Manzano do their best with what they’ve been given. Those who went to see the movie in the sheer hope of seeing a raft of mammaries probably went home the happiest, having gotten their consuelo de boobs. Those who went to see Joaquin and Aguiluz at their best will have to wait just a little longer.
Oh – the other movie I saw was Hubog, but we’re out of space, so maybe some other time. Happy New Year, all!