Cinemanila Sky
August 18, 2002 | 12:00am
Once a year, Manilans are treated to an embarrassment of riches that makes you want to drop what you’re doing for two weeks and gorge yourself on cinematic goodies like a housewife on a supermarket shopping spree. I’m talking, of course, about Cinemanila, now completing its fourth year as an international film festival.
The venue this time out is Greenbelt Cinemas, Ayala Center, and it’s always a rush to see the milling of film fans outside moviehouses, waiting for the next feature from Italy or Taiwan, or avidly discussing what they just saw in feverish little circles. A bit crowded, that tiny bit of milling space at Greenbelt Cinema, but that’s part of the adrenaline rush of film fests in general.
Seventy-five or so films from around the world packed into two cinemas from August 1 to 30 – everything from Japanese horror movies (Ring, Ring 0 and Ring 2), Inuit legend from the Great American North (Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner), to side fests featuring Philippine shorts and Director in Focus Mike de Leon. Logistically, this means you have to be a very dedicated film fan indeed, one capable of reshuffling – or just plain shucking – your day-to-day real life in favor of reel life. A tempting proposition.
Because, let’s face it, where else are you going to get a chance to see Topless Women Talk About Their Lives, the latest New Zealand offering, alongside God’s Children, a Japanese documentary about the plight of Filipino families caught in the deadly landslide of garbage at Payatas?
Where else are you going to view uncut, controversial films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, the latest feature by German director Tom Tykwer (Heaven) or the early Christopher Nolan study Following, without having to listen to the pious billowings of the MTRCB or CBCP (which recently declared Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings "disturbing," yet rarely goes to the trouble of denouncing local trashy offerings because it’s just not newsworthy)?
Nowhere, I say. (Well, actually, there are other fine film fests offered each year in Manila, particularly by the local French, Spanish, British embassies. But this is the biggest and the best). There’s more food for thought, more artistry and more daring cinema available at Cinemanila than you’ll encounter in a year – in 10 years – of Hollywood offerings. And it’s all amazingly cheap at P76 per showing.
My only regret is that I can’t find time to watch more movies. Maybe if I simply bought a sleeping bag, curled up in a corner of Greenbelt and lived off the fast-food court for two weeks, I’d stand a better chance of catching more films, and fulfill my craving for new and interesting moviegoing. As it is, I was only able to view six of the featured films, none of them local, but all of them worthwhile in their own way. Long live Cinemanila!
• Lagaan (India, 2001) India’s most popular movie to date is epic in scope, fulfilling both the demands of Bollywood (plenty of musical/dance numbers) and Hollywood (a "triumph of the underdog" tale, complete with every single sports movie twist you can think of). In 1895, a small farming village called Champanar waits for rain, while the local British rulers wait impatiently for their double lagaan (tax). In order to cancel the debt, a scrappy young farmer named Bhuvan challenges the British rajahs to a cricket match. What follows is rather like The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training set in India, but with more entertaining twists, including intrigue, cricket lessons, and the expected dose of bumptious dancing and singing. A fun, if overlong, spectacle.
• Y Tu Mama Tambien (Mexico, 2002) The crossroads between teen sexual fantasy and adult sexuality is explored in Alfonso Cuaron’s funny and picaresque tale (the title translates to "And Your Mother, Too"). Two teen boys persuade an older woman (whose husband is sleeping around) to join them on a road trip to "Heaven’s Mouth," a semi-mythical beach. Naturally, a threesome is pretty much all they have in mind, but the three end up talking, fighting and humping more than any other teenage flick in memory. The pleasure is also in the dialogue, full of Mexican slacker gems, and in the understanding that sex is only the beginning of knowledge. Only an intrusive narrated voiceover about the inequalities of Mexican life distract from an otherwise funny, horny sex comedy.
• The Man Who Wasn’t There (US, 2000) The Coen brothers plunge into existential arthouse noir in this black-and-white tale of Ed Crane, a Santa Rosa barber who wears his bleakness like a five o’clock shadow. Billy Bob Thornton gives the haunted, understated performance of a lifetime as a man whom everyone overlooks, including his cheating wife, his scheming business partner, and even his lawyer when he’s tried for murder. Beautifully photographed, full of the Coens’ patented American grotesquerie, including traveling salesmen, fast-talking shysters, jail-bait teens and murder, but this time delivered in muted, elegiac tones. The final line is a heart-killer.
• Central Station (Brazil, 1998) Director Walter Salles’ slice-of-life drama opens in a Rio de Janeiro train station, a perfect panorama of Brazilian life in all its variety. Central Station focuses on Dora, a middle-aged woman who writes letters for illiterate passersby for a living, then usually tosses them in the trash after she’s been paid. She meets Josue, a nine-year-old who asks her to send a letter to his dad, then is suddenly orphaned when his mother is hit by a bus. The hard-bitten Dora decides to reunite the kid with his father in the provinces. It’s one of the more cloying staples of foreign film – an unlikely duo who find a way into each other’s hearts – but director Salles’ gritty view of Rio de Janeiro includes black-market human organ syndicates and the city’s teeming population of homeless children. Worth the clichés.
• Following (UK, 1999) Almost a warm-up to his later American film, Memento, Christopher Nolan’s 72-minute black-and-white feature develops the relationship between a would-be writer and one of the strangers he obsessively trails for "material": a well-dressed burglar named Cole. With its cut-up time frame and unsettling closeups, the narrative energy of Memento is already fully on display here; but Following is easily equal – if not superior – in tone and theme to the later film. While the writer thinks heís learning about burglary, Cole proves the keener observer of human behavior. Throw in a voluptuous blonde, a safe, and a vicious nightclub owner and you’ve got neo-noir with a cool British twist.
• In The Mood For Love (Hong Kong, 2000) The festival’s closing film, director Wong Kar-Wai’s take on romance in 1962 Hong Kong is like his other films: quirky, obsessed with pop surfaces, full of appealing actors who are easy on the eyes, and sumptuously photographed. Romance is in the air for Chow, a newspaperman (played by Tony Leung), and Li-zhen, the married woman down the hall (played by Maggie Cheung). But it arrives by a series of indirections, subtle hints, intimate moments and accidents: they learn their respective spouses are cheating on them. In an era of strict social code, these two impossibly gorgeous people can’t simply rip their clothes off and go at it. And thus, the film is an aching meditation on yearning, filtered through the dark, wet streets of an earlier Hong Kong by night, a place of Hollywood dreams.
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