The perils of international celebrity

Poor Freddie Aguilar! First he was cheated out of millions that should have rightfully been his had he copyrighted his famous song, Anak, which is now sung all over the world in so many versions. Now he is being vilified by stupid Filipinos. The singer/songwriter criticized some of our international celebrities for being copycats by imitating Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson — a tendency many of our artists have long been guilty of, for which reason we have countless Filipino Charlie Chaplins, Frank Sinatras, etc. They called Freddie laos — passé, without realizing that great songs endure. They also say that he is merely craving public attention, which he no longer has; that he is inggit, or envious of the success of his fellow celebrities.

This has always been the shallow, vituperative reaction of Filipinos who don’t appreciate critics. Destroy the critic, demolish him personally so that his criticism will then be invalidated. This is how the malevolent and ignoramus-minded react. The critique is ignored, unanswered, its bitter truth denied when its immediate acceptance could help us rectify our faults and direct our talents towards originality, the creation of true identity in art and culture — all of this as the ultimate imprimatur of our genius.

Now, comes Brillante Mendoza, the director who won the highest accolade in the recent Cannes Film Festival, one of the most prestigious in the world. The award proves what is taken for granted by those of us who know — that we are a very talented people.

But there are those who demean Brillante’s triumph — not that he does not deserve it, but that he should have proven his prowess not with this kind of film, which concerns a prostitute being cut to pieces with various knives.

It is not just sadism, the objectors say; it is that, once more, it portrays us as a savage people; it exploits the all-too-human curiosity for the heinous exotica which primitive societies fester in.

Among such depictions was the exhibition of all those highland Filipinos in their G-strings at the St. Louis exposition in the United States 100 years ago. Our colonizers exhibited them to justify their sovereignty, to show that we are uncivilized and had to be educated by missionary America..

We go back farther to a crime of passion in Paris more than a century ago, when the painter Juan Luna was spared the heavy penalty for killing his wife. The French court that acquitted him considered Filipinos to be uncivilized, thus incapable of keeping in leash their violent emotions.

There is, of course, very good reason for Filipinos to fear that this unhappy country’s image will be damaged further in the eyes of the world — a fact already sustained by the thousands upon thousands of our people working abroad in the most menial, dirty and dangerous jobs because they cannot find sustenance in their own land.

Just in case my readers are wondering why I am now reviewing the work of Brillante Mendoza — I have been interested in films as a form of storytelling since I was a kid, when in the 1930s, I watched Elsa Oria sing Bituin Marikit, Regelio dela Rosa, Angel Esmeralda, Corazon Noble, Arsenia Francisco at the old Dalisay Cinema on Rizal Avenue, I interviewed Manuel Conde in the ‘50s after his return from abroad with his Genghis Khan which I thought was badly produced — film development, lighting and all, but superbly imagined. I watched Gerry de Leon direct the shooting of Sawa sa Lumang Simborio filmed in Santa Maria, Ilokos Sur with the beautiful Anita Linda. Then, sometime in the ‘50s, we set up FAMAS together with the writer D. Paolo Dizon, Vic Generoso, the actress Rosa Rosal, Fred Munoz of Literary Song Movie, Fred Bunao of the Weekly Women’s Magazine and TD Agcaoili who wrote a movie column in the Sunday Times Magazine. We religiously sat through those black and white films at the Premiere Studios in Caloocan, at Sampaguita in San Juan, and judged them according to our best lights.

The other week, the writer and cultural critic Lito Zulueta lent me five DVDs of Mendoza’s films. Here, now, is my report:

• Tirador (Slingshot) was filmed in a slum area probably near Quiapo Church. It is a stark, low-life depiction of Palm Sunday, showing scenes of the feast of the Black Nazarene. The only name player is Jaclyn Jose whose appearance is brief but memorable. Some lighthearted moments: a couple of thieves are caught but pardoned; the girl loses her dentures in the sink, down the gutter; snatchers ply Quiapo; jammers seek rides on the university belt. The camera work is unsteady and disturbing, but the process gives it a documentary quality. It begins with a SONA and ends with irony — an El Shaddai prayer meeting. Rating: Excellent.

• Kaleldo (Summer Heat) portrays a Pampango family. The patriarch,

Johnny Delgado, is stern. A wedding shows the social distance between the father’s three daughters and the rich family of the groom, offering insights on social disharmony. Cherie Pie Picache plays a lesbian. Angel Aquino cuckolds her husband to get a loan, and the youngest does not want to live with her snooty in-laws. The color photography is superb with symbolic scenes and an elegiac ending. San Agustin Church in Lubao, Pampanga, fancy Pampanga cooking and scenes of provincial life — all these are depicted with fastidious care. Mendoza can do a commercial film successfully without violating his superior aesthetic sense to satisfy the so-called bakya crowd. Rating: Excellent.

• Foster Child is about a foster parent who is paid so that the child can grow up in a family atmosphere before being adopted by foreigners. Cherie Pie Pecache is one such foster mother. Her ward is a very young mestizo who will eventually be taken away from her. From the slum where she lives with her carpenter husband and her son who also loves the orphan, she goes to a Makati hotel where a rich American and his wife and children wait for the boy. The end is very moving. Rating: Again, excellent.

• Serbis (Service) is set in an adult movie house where some raw sex scenes, social interaction, grime, etc. are brewed up. One of the most unforgettable scenes in the movie is the appearance of a goat on the movie house stage. Without any foreshadowing, it comes as a surprise. This film was Mendoza’s entry last year and was regarded highly. I beg to disagree with those jurors in Cannes, however. It is boring, lacks depth, and ends lamely. Rating: Bad.

• Teacher concerns a teenaged Aeta girl, Jacklyn Ablong, and her real-life family (they all appear as themselves). Aeta life is difficult. She teaches her people how to read so that they can vote in the next election. She and her father look for a grandfather who went hunting, bringing home a boar that is butchered and shared by the village. A nondescript story and faulty camera work make it extremely dull, where there were chances to show magnificent views of the Aeta domain. The magnificence enhanced by the Mt. Pinatubo eruption could have been contrasted with the harsh life of the Aetas: the dour living, the ravaging of the environment by lowlanders and the incursion of foreigners and tourists. And finally, the ironic irrelevance of an election to a people ignored by government. All these could have rescued this film from dullness.

I can understand the documentary effect Mendoza sought, but it is also obvious that the picture is scripted, even if the characters are acting out their very lives. Rating: Very bad.

The trouble with Brillante and with almost all our fictionists, playwrights and filmmakers is they do not subject their stories and the characters in them to intense scrutiny so that at the narrative level alone, their work — for all the technical proficiency — ends up violating simple logic, the use of elementary narrative techniques like foreshadowing, character consistency, the tension of plot development. What could be a flawless story is tarnished by unexplainable coincidences and disturbing unreality. Such faults are so easy to detect and remedy with just more attention to plotting, character study and adherence to the logic of the narrative.

Having seen five of Mendoza’s films, I need not see his prize-winning Kinatay; these five films are a wide enough window to his talent which can contest the reputations of Lino Brocka, Ishamel Bernal, Eddie Romero and the departed tyros of our filmdom.

Just one caveat, based on the negative comments on Kinatay and similar endeavors that whet the appetite for the grossly exotic. Great art always has nationality. It is for this reason that I never appreciated Jessica Hagedorn’s debut novel in America, The Dogeaters. All too often, we Filipinos — in our haste and colonized desire to get approval from there — feel we have to pander to their morbid curiosity at the expense of our country’s already tattered image. Jessica knew — we all know — that the title is pejorative and uncomplimentary. In the West, eating dogs is taboo, an abomination because dogs are loved as pets. What is ignored is the fact that many Asians eat dogs, that there is even a special breed raised precisely for food in China — a nation whose civilization was already far advanced when Europe was still inhabited by primitive hunters and food gatherers.

But because she was probably too anxious to get published in the United States, she used the provocative title to draw attention to her work and to satisfy a fairly common attraction for the perverse. And there is hardly any mention of dog eating in the novel itself.

To denigrate your own people and profit from it is beyond contempt. But then, Jessica Hagedorn is not Filipino — she is American.

The slums of Mexico City, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, are well recorded in fiction and film. The slums of Bombay were brought to life in the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire last year. In many of these fictional renditions of sordid reality, there is a saving grace — the equal illustration of the courage and the nobility of people living their fate. For all the bleak viciousness and unrelenting darkness in the world, there is the shining glow of humanity to inform us and the generations to come that, in the words of that great American novelist, William Faulkner, “man will prevail.”

Art is also universal and this universality derives from its particularity, from the deeply encoded nationality of its creator. Perhaps, just perhaps, in the end what will validate or gild an otherwise tawdry object is not so much its visceral impact on our consciousness — the first level of recognition, but that the work is truly, genuinely art — with all its enduring virtues, its affirmation of the human spirit. This reasoning may be the only justification for the squalid “reality” which the art object represents, reprehensible though it may be.

But then, several questions arise. What is the purpose of art? Is it moral? What does it really mean to us — a people seeking their tiny place in the sun? Such questions have been mulled through the ages. They are answered not by critics or by public judgment, but irrevocably declared by the artist himself.

Rizal, the Filipino artist, eloquently gave his definition not just with the noble totality of his work but with his life.