From La Salle teacher Marj Evasco: "Walang script according to Sari at the open forum. Or if there was, it kept changing every day for the duration of the 11-day shoot. I found it too unstructured. Parang pastiche of Pinoy-in-America portraits leaning heavily on Bulosan and Villa."
Okay. When I texted back if I should try to catch the UP premiere of Rigodon, Marj said by all means yes, so we could discuss it further.
From Jon Red, at his mini-festival in Roundeye Glass Adriatico: "I liked it. Sort of like Lav Diaz meets Nic Deocampo. That’s why I invited her here para makaganti ako."
From critic Iskho Lopez also at Roundeye while shooting the crap with other kibitzers in late night Malate, having come from a screening of Rigodon at the CCP: "Maganda. It’s an art film. I felt as if I had just walked into an art gallery and the paintings were moving. Our own independent digital filmmakers can learn something from (Keith and Sari). Malinis, pulido ang pagkagawa. They know what to say and how to say it."
From Ruben Lee, brother of Rox: "Okay naman, pero parang Lav Diaz pa rin."
From where I sit, there really are some truths in the separate though not disparate commentaries. Sari now teams up with real life partner Keith for this take on Pinoys in America after the infamous 9/11, a subject not entirely foreign to Dalena, one of whose previous films is Memories of a Forgotten War, this time about the largely undocumented Fil-Am war at the turn of the previous century.
Comparisons with Lav Diaz, best known for his more than 10-hour epic Ebolusyon ng Pamilyang Pilipino, are not unjustified. Rigodon also employs a subtle lyricism in real time, so that it may seem longer than its listed 80 minutes running time. Both Diaz and Dalena/Sicat also cast actors who are veterans in the indie scene: Joel Torre, Chin-Chin Gutierrez and Banaue Miclat.
Descriptions of it being an art film are apt, too, as a number of frames indeed have lighting and composition worthy of framing in a canvas. But the tableaux is never forced or contrived, and sometimes the actors move in and out of the viewfinder.
One viewer also noted that there were hardly any close-ups. My only reaction to that was: just like Buñuel, forefather of surrealism, who abhorred close-ups. It was after all Buñuel who said that when the camera starts dancing, that’s when he walks out of the theater. Call it old school if you will – the camera keeping a respectful distance – but his films alternately had the power to bore you to death or to start riots in moviehouses.
As for Rigodon’s being unstructured, that’s Kidlat Tahimik echoing for you. The beginning of Rigodon in fact quotes Kidlat re Pinoys living in a cocoon of American imperialism, if memory of our DVD copy serves us well.
At midpoint, there is this surreal lyric ménage-a-trois among Torre, Gutierrez and Arthur Acuña, the poet, the devotee and the fighter, respectively in present-day New York.
From what we’ve seen, we can already tell that Rigodon is a rare film, and the viewer who found time to catch it in the various venues it had been playing, from UP to CCP to Conspiracy Garden cafe and back, would have been well rewarded.
Also helping usher in a brave new world in digital Pinoy indie filmmaking is Brillante Mendoza’s latest film Kaleldo, meaning summer in Kapampangan. Mendoza even ups the stakes from his homoerotic debut Masahista, which won in the Locarno filmfest and received generally mixed reviews in the local circuit.
Kaleldo has strains of both Japanese and European cinema in its solid storytelling, indeed something unusual in the often-postmodern narrations of Filipino high-definition artists. It also has the same strengths as Masahista, not least of which is economy of words and just letting the images and visuals do the talking.
The script, co-written by Mendoza and fictionist Boots Agbayani Pastor, focuses on an offbeat Tres Marias and their Padre de Familia in a dysfunctional yet persevering family in rural Pampanga.
Johnny Delgado puts in another worthy patriarchal performance with daughters Cherrie Pie Picache as the tibo Achi Jess, Angel Aquino as middle child Lourdes and youngest Julianna Palermo all providing equal to the task.
The movie starts with a wedding and ends almost with a funeral, except that life should begin again by way of another wedding, not necessarily with everybody laughing in the end.
In between we are treated to a very sympathetic narration of life in the central plains, as cyclical as the seasons in the sun. Something can be said too about the real time exposition of Mendoza, a director not in a hurry.
Meanwhile, the obscure group of artists and filmmakers unofficially known as the Obscenarists continued to make waves late last year and into the new one. Animation man Roxlee screened his latest Juan Kaliwa and House of Sin in Roundeye Glass in mid-December; Dante Perez held a record fourth exhibit in 2005, the latest a joint one with Arnel Agawin at Galerie Astra along Reposo; and in far-off 5th Avenue in the Philippine Center in New York, the now New Zealand-based Pinggot Zulueta opened his show of acrylics and oils on canvass, "Aotearoa," which we assume is NZ’s Maori name meaning "Land of the Long White Cloud."