The execrations of the truth
Several times during a Cinema-nila screening of Serbis, I was ready to bolt from my seat. The very first scene shows a naked teenage girl preening in front of a mirror as if she were starring in a porno. Undue attention was paid to her genitalia, I thought. What for? Cheap exploitation in the guise of art?
Shortly afterwards, a young man is shown bandaging a boil on his derriere.
Do I really need to see a purulent sore on someone’s ass? Is this an excuse to show the actor’s derriere? When another young man is shown masturbating, I thought I had become inured to the director’s shock tactics. But then there is the scene of the overflowing toilet, inviting viewers to disgorge their dinners.
It struck me as I looked around for the nearest exit that the movie was daring me to walk out. The filmmakers were calling me a wimp, a delicate coward who could not look directly at the decay and squalor around her. Because that is the subject of Brillante Mendoza’s movie: ugliness.
He is aiming his camera at the rotten core of society, the sleaze that surrounds us, the filth we refuse to see. We pretend that it’s not there, and the more we pretend, the more it spreads and festers. We take refuge in illusion and artifice, the gloss and prettiness of the movies.
But the movies have failed us. They have lied to us and sealed our minds against reality, and now all that is left is a stinking, decrepit movie theater where people don’t even look at the screen, they just get off. This is a theater with the ironic name of Family.
Squalor is an essential ingredient in current Filipino cinema, particularly among those who aspire to be the next Lino Brocka. Or at least get invited to film festivals abroad. It’s become a cinematic cliché: slum dwellers struggling to survive in a corrupt and oppressive society. Today’s filmmakers have even defined a look for squalor movies: grainy, dirty images; shaky, amateurish visuals; bad sound. It’s no longer the fault of “low-end” technology: the quality of today’s digital video is sometimes indistinguishable from that of film. No, they want it to look that way; it distinguishes the indies (amateurishness being a sure sign of “sincerity”) from the slick mainstream productions (big budgets equals “evil”). It has become the indie signature.
Shot on 35mm film, Serbis has the scratchy, unfresh look of a reel that’s done the rounds of every flea-infested movie house on the provincial circuit. Foreign critics who excoriated the film for its “inept” technical aspects miss the point entirely. It’s supposed to be ugly!
Naturally the atmospheric noise is so distracting, you can barely hear the dialogue. That is the point exactly. These characters live in a city so polluted by filth and noise, they can barely hear themselves.
Their very lifestyle is a violation of their humanity.
How odd to hear the word “lifestyle” applied to the lower depths of society, when the only monograms they own are tattooed onto their flesh with ballpoint pens. But they do have one, and this is it.
Serbis has the distressing reek of authenticity. Granted, I cannot claim to truly know people like them, but I have seen them.
Serbis may be the first movie made in Stink-O-Vision: you can smell the stench wafting from the screen. Its main character is the decrepit Family Theater and its denizens: the haughty matriarch (Gina Pareño) embroiled in a lawsuit with her estranged husband, her daughter the theater manager (Jaclyn Jose), her emasculated son-in-law (Julio Diaz), their small son who seems to have wandered onto the set from the chorus of Annie, and various relatives and employees, including the factotum (Coco Martin) who has knocked up his girlfriend.
The film takes place on an ordinary working day — nothing very interesting happens to anyone. In short, it is just like real life, though we who were raised on movies expect our lives to be action-packed. The manager sells tickets, the factotum patches up the building falling down around them, the kid goes to school, the patrons have sex with each other inside the theater. There is a lot of sex, and in flagrant violation of local cinema tradition, there is nothing arty or titillating about it. It’s dirty. Like life.
Foreign critics have denounced the portrayal of the gay movie patrons as “too swish to be believed.” Obviously these poor critics have never set foot in a beauty parlor in Singalong. They have pronounced Serbis to be “over the top” — pity the First World citizens in their sanitized environments; they cannot imagine that this Manila exists. They need to see it flavored with whimsy and “magical realism” before they can swallow it. Well, there’s nothing magical about this realism: it makes you want to bathe in disinfectant.
The western press singled out Gina Pareño’s performance, noting how her character keeps her dignity despite her degrading circumstances.Pareño is magnificent (her character so unlike her sympathetic jueteng collector in Jeffrey Jeturian’s Kubrador), but her character remains dignified because she does not see her own degradation. Her dignity is a kind of blindness — and this is a woman who owns a cinema.
Respectable filmgoers admire Lino Brocka because he made movies about the noble poor and their brave struggle against oppression. Director Brillante Mendoza and screenwriter Armando Lao say, “F*** respectability.” The people of Serbis are not noble or heroic, they’re just people. Lao, the most influential Filipino screenwriter working today, fixes his unblinking gaze on these subjects. He does not get sentimental about the poor, he does not make them mouthpieces for an ideology; he lets them be.
Towards the end of the movie a goat wanders into the cinema. The patrons do not blink at the “unnatural” acts going on inside the theater, but when the natural world invades the movie house — in the form of a goat — it causes a sensation.
In the end boils are popped, deceptions uncovered, graffiti painted over, a decision reached — Serbis is as small as life. In a kinder time you escaped to the cinema to see a world where people were beautiful and virtuous, where love conquered all, good triumphed over evil, and dreams came true. Serbis tells us that the movies have screwed us over, this is what they have concealed at 24 frames a second. This is the sound of reality taking over fantasy. It ends the only way it could end: in flames. Burn it down, start all over. The cinema is dead. Long live the truth.
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