When clean teens step out of the scene

Youth knows no pain: “When you’re a teenager, you experiment,” filmmaker Gino M. Santos says of his film. “You’re not aware of the dangers.”

MANILA, Philippines - Being a teenager is a lot like finding yourself naked in a strange place. You’re completely vulnerable and a hundred times more self-conscious than usual. You’re likely to fall and fumble while everyone just stares, waiting for you to make a fool out of yourself. So what do you do? It’s either you find a dark corner to cry in till you’re 40 or you suck it up and tell everyone that naked is the new black.

For young filmmaker Gino M. Santos, he made a movie out of it.

His debut feature film The Animals chronicles a day in the lives of Jake, Trina, and Alex—affluent high school students who give in to the sleazy temptations of hardcore partying to escape from the monotony of the capital’s southern suburbia. When their carefree dalliances go awry, the three are forced to face the consequences of wanting to grow up way ahead of schedule.

As one of the finalists in this year’s Cinemalaya New Breed Full Feature category, the film stands out not only because it deviates from the “poverty porn” tradition of Philippine independent cinema, but also because of how it shares its very spirit with its writer/director.

22-year-old Santos, the youngest director in Cinemalaya’s current roster, is no stranger to the world that his characters inhabit. “It’s what I know,” he said. “It’s a society I grew up in.” He even goes so far as to say that the he and co-writer Jeff Stelton were inspired by real-life events, taking cues from their own lives as well as those of the people around them.

One would think that a piece so explicitly autobiographical would be nothing but a vanity project, and to a certain extent, it may just be. But Santos saves his film from any personal hubris by taking jabs at the pretentiousness of the privileged young, pointing out that in the search for finding themselves, they end up becoming faceless clichés.

Still, that isn’t really the main point that Santos is trying to drive home. He merely uses his entitled upbringing as context to a wider point of concern. “[The media] shows kids in a very wholesome way, and that’s not true. When you’re a teenager, you experiment…you’re not aware of the real dangers of the world,” Santos explained.

The Animals spares no expense at illustrating how the lifestyles of young Filipinos today might just make a Skins party look like Sunday school. The harsh dichotomy between the pretty and the pathetic is seasoned with brash swearing, chain smoking, and a lot of underage drinking. That’s nothing new in Western settings, perhaps, but the taboo becomes a bit more intriguing when set in a country known as a bastion of arguably fundamentalist Catholic beliefs.

Santos is out to make a statement and seems to be undeterred by anyone who may faint at the sight of brutal fraternity rituals or drunken nipple slips, though he claims that a chunk of the film’s significance is how it could benefit parents, who he says “don’t know what’s happening to their children and their parties”.

It’s hard to ignore the nobility of such vision, yet the film itself proves to have been caught naked, somehow unsure of what to do with itself. While Santos does not fail to deliver a film that has just as much gloss as it does grit, it struggles to develop a story that seamlessly sews up a multilateral plot and an ensemble of characters that don’t make you want to punch them in the face.

But when you think about it, that’s exactly why The Animals may just be an unassuming zeitgeist of the nation’s Internet generation. Don’t the patchwork-y plot, the strong desire to belong, and the detestable personalities sound a little bit familiar? Exactly. It’s called your life.

We may feel the allure of succumbing to our basic instincts, especially when we are caught naked. Does that excuse us from reverting to our animalistic ways? Maybe not. After all, no matter how many ways you may go, you can always just pick up some clothes and put them on.

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Catch The Animals at the Cinemalaya Film Festival and Competition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and Trinoma Mall from July 20 to 29.