Life is Middleaged

Scriptwriter and Director Jose Javier Reyes has of recent vintage been known for the controversy spawned by his movie of some two years ago, Live Show, that stirred the usual Catholic tempest and cost the censors board chief his job. Yet Joey Reyes, as he is more commonly called, was also the scriptwriter for the Peque Gallaga epic of 1982, Oro, Plata, Mata.

The transition from scriptwriter to director seemed a natural one for Reyes, as for many others in the business of making movies; to wit, Jose Carreon and Lav Diaz, to name just two. Of hard-boiled scriptwriters, perhaps only Ricky Lee is sticking to his pen, content with making the film unfold on paper.

But just because Reyes has ventured into directing doesn’t mean he is unfaithful to the writer’s life, for in his collection of essays, Porn Again: Midlife Outtakes and Mistakes (Anvil 2003), it becomes clear that writing is, after all, the director’s first love.

And with or without that Live Show trauma "which no doubt helped the movie in the tills" it would be reasonable to deduce that Reyes will go on wielding his weekly columns in a daily broadsheet.

The fact alone that Jessica Zafra wrote the foreword to Porn Again already speaks volumes that Reyes and Zafra are of the same feather, both of them with an ear to the quick turn of phrase and irony, always brimming with a healthy exuberance tempered with down-to-earth sarcasm. Both have that tart tongue and observant eye and love for movies, with enough wit to dominate the world at large, and the good sense too to tell where celluloid ends and real life begins, and vice versa.

Perhaps the most telling essays here are those that deal with the movie industry, because Reyes knows whereof he writes. His straightforward style would likely disabuse greenhorns determined to make their mark on the business. It doesn’t matter, he says, whether one finished at Ateneo, La Salle, or some two-bit diploma mill, the movie or television set has an uncanny method of leveling the playing field, showbiz becoming a great equalizer in terms of those involved in production.

Reyes also has a word or two on the culture of celebrity, especially the death by bangungot of matinee idol Rico Yan, which he dissects with cool precision taking into account both sides of the coin–the masa’s inclination towards bathos, and the slight felt by the families of two National Artists who died in practically the same week as Yan but whose passing went largely unnoticed, comparatively speaking.

It is though not for nothing that Reyes has made or been part of some of the more memorable films in Pinoy cinema history, because he is always a keen observer of life’s byways and signal events, either on the personal level or taken in the larger context of a forever fermenting society.

Here we are treated to what it’s like to reach middle age in a world less than compassionate, and how important it is to keep one’s sense of humor in order to maintain one’s sanity and jealously guarded equilibrium.

In the essay "Life on Avenida", Reyes does a double take on the Rizal Avenue of his childhood and young manhood, when he asks a production assistant to buy a bandehado of asado from nearby Panciteria Moderna, only to be told that the panciteria closed way back in 1975.

Not only can you not go home again, but the risks are omnipresent if you try to do so: "I was sad for a moment. But then there are people, places and times that you can never come back to the moment you leave them. If you even dare try, what you will receive is an entirely different hurt."

There are other paeans to time passing, as in the bittersweet recollections of high school reunions, concerns about bulging waistlines and receding hairlines, the growing minority of those with nicotine fixations, and tête-à-têtes with fag hags and other gay friends aside from the intermittent digs on the undying mental colony: he could have thought of that ad catchphrase, "walang ganyan sa States," only this time, a la Michael V in drag.

Joey Reyes cannot help but tell it like it is, how sex sells movies even as a critically acclaimed film–stamped "A" by the ratings board with trumpets blaring–would more likely than not bomb at the tills, almost as if the commercially viable had the automatic curse of artistic mediocrity, and vice versa.

So when Reyes writes about the death of Pinoy cinema–possibly with tongue half in cheek–we cannot but sympathize with those who have to work within the system yet try to keep one’s soul whole enough for one’s art to grow.

Always it seems there is a quid pro quo, especially in showbiz that has as much vested interests as politics and similarly shady machinations. Maybe the bottomline really is in asking, what’s in it for me?

But that Reyes continues to write is certainly a good sign, and if he is directing less these days (Ricky Lo said that his movie after Live Show was a wholesome affair), it is a loss for Philippine movies but literature’s gain.

Porn Again, then, belongs on the same shelf as those other volumes on middle age, like Jose F. Lacaba’s Edad Medya (poems) and Virgilio Almario‘s Kalahating Siglo sa Ibabaw ng Mundo (essays).

If life begins at 40 then all that comes before that is mere dress rehearsal. What we can look forward to or are in fact seeing now is that things become real, love and youth and their inimitable follies will have their day but time passes, and we end up none the worse for wear but wiser.