Brillante Mendoza's 'Captive': When news becomes film

Ten years after the bloody end of the Dos Palmas hostage crisis, the wounds are still fresh, and nowhere is this more evident than in Brillante Ma. Mendoza’s latest film Captive (Centerstage Productions with European partners). Anyone who has even a passing interest in the news of the day, or the assorted ills that plague society — in this case the dysfunctional, polarized southern Philippine hinterland — would find the film interesting if not worth viewing, based as it is on the Abu Sayyaf raid on the Palawan resort and the resulting cat-and-mouse that dragged on for more than a year, with hostages that included the missionary Burnhams, whose surviving spouse Gracia has already come out with a book on the harrowing experience.

No less harrowing in its depiction of ultra-realism is Captive, with its documentary style approach and Mendoza’s trademark handheld camera, as all events and persons described therein are based on the Abu Sayyaf heist, with maybe a couple of devices inserted in the name of artistic license. Persons are recognizable despite use of aliases, but those who followed the news could pinpoint the characters of Martin and Gracia Burnham, Guillermo Sobero and his Filipina girlfriend, Reghis Romero and girlfriend, the travel writer Buddy Recio and wife and child, the young Fil-Chinese women who had the misfortune to be holidaying at Dos Palmas in late May 2001, the nurse Edibora Yap who was taken captive during the Lamitan siege in Jose Torres Hospital, the bandits Abu Sabaya and Khaddafy Janjalani, the journalist Arlynn de la Cruz as herself. Even the landmarks and dates are faithful to actual events, such that the research and planning and location blocking may have easily taken more time than the actual shooting.

Enter the French actress Isabelle Huppertt as the social worker Therese, a fictional character thrown into the mix for objectivity, and through her eyes this story could well be told. Through Huppertt’s fictional person is the truth laid bare. That scene where she is taking a pee in the jungle and suddenly sees a strange ghost-like multicolored bird that is after all a computer-generated image, makes the artistic license twofold, but so too the terror that lurks in the fringes. If Mendoza has been criticized for taking too much liberty with CGI, this has not been misplaced with Huppertt’s reaction upon seeing the CGI. Even the audience has to do a double take as Huppertt does, because if mirages can exist in the desert, so too can strange birds in the jungle fastness of Sulu and Basilan.

One could only wish that Mendoza, since proceedings were already going at a semi-documentary clip, had apart from the timeline given a trail map of the party of bandits and hostages, from Palawan to Basilan to whatever circle of hell in godforsaken boondocks that ended up in the rescue shootout in Sirawai, Zamboanga del Norte in June 2002.

Aside from Huppertt, also fictional is the character Soledad, Therese’s friend, played by Rustica Carpio, included perhaps for the sake of the human dynamic and to establish Therese’s volunteerism.

Huppertt’s character refuses to leave the dead Soledad behind without first burying her friend with last Christian rites, just as she later befriends an adolescent bandit who considers the jungle his home.

Mendoza makes good use of juxtaposition in the Lamitan siege, where as the bandits and government soldiers exchange gunfire long into the night and well into morning, there’s a woman giving birth in one of the hospital wards, which closeup of the gory parturition is a life-affirming shot.

While much has been said of Huppertt in international reviews, there’s hardly been anything regarding the character Sabaya as excellently played by the veteran Ronnie Lazaro. Now Lazaro has some solid credentials, among them as the boatman in the eponymous film by Tikoy Aguiluz, but his Sabaya is certainly memorable and with longer shelf life than the bandit on which he is based before being consumed by sharks in the high seas.

Angel Aquino essays the character resembling Edibora Yap, the martyred nurse who looked after the wounded hostages as they moved from one jungle hideout to another. She is raped by one of the bandits played by Sid Lucero, and as history ordained is killed in the crossfire during the bloody rescue in Sirawai.

The bandits are given a human face, as many of them are also victims of poverty and injustice, their families long gone or left behind such that they have to recreate themselves as brigands. There’s suggestion too of military connivance and huge ransoms, of misplaced priorities and sleeping with the enemy as bared in the exposes of former Lt. SG Antonio Trillanes, now a senator. 

As with other genre movies of the kidnap and stakeout, Captive is not without faults — the plodding almost halting narrative makes the audience feel as if also held hostage, the drawn-out chase interrupted by bursts of gunfire and the hysterical shouts that remind us how life always hangs by a thread and could fade out or freeze frame suddenly.

As does this movie, which though not a masterpiece is an important work in the Mendoza oeuvre; he’s covered quite some ground from Masahista to Kaleldo, from Manoro to Foster Child to Serbis, from Kinatay to Lola. Is there anything that he can’t do?

The filmmaker of Busilak Street once remarked that he sometimes felt more appreciated in foreign festivals, as evidence his Cannes-winning work in Kinatay, but Captive, though not likely to break any box office records or reap critical hosannas, shows he’s very much in touch with his homeland, the issues and brewing social cauldron underneath. The director knows what it’s like to live under the volcano.