by Noel Vera

Philippine cinema in 2001 got off to an inauspicious start with Yam Llaranas’ Pussy Hairs (Balahibong pusa), the story of a boy, a girl, her mother, her mother’s lover, and his unnaturally adoring daughter. The film featured wall-to-wall rock music and visual gimmickry, along with characters who flash their perversions —rapist, adulterer, nymphomaniac — like ID cards. The plot was made almost entirely out of quotations from other, much better, movies. Pussy made money, of course, because there was plenty of breast exposure. Much of it was by Rica Peralejo, a bright young ingénue making her soft-core porn debut.

Llaranas’ follow-up Radyo, about a crazed psycho stalking a radio DJ, is an attempt to marry music-video storytelling and comedy to a serial-killer plot. The result should have been as enjoyable as the more outrageous excesses of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Jing (Naked Killer, etc). But Llaranas displays a plodding sense of pace, a tendency towards art-film pretentiousness, and little of the deft footwork needed to cross from one genre to another.

Llaranas does not produce excruciatingly bad films all by himself. He’s ably joined by his mentor-producer Erik Matti, who directed Scorpio Nights 2, a pallid sequel to Peque Gallaga’s great erotic original, and Crossed (Ekis), a failed-heist caper lifted from Reservoir Dogs. The were easily two of the worst Filipino films in recent years. This year Matti produced Double Crossed (Dos ekis), a sequel which was even more incoherent and overblown than the original. It was about a young man and stripper who take the the money, ignore all blatantly obvious parallels to Bonnie And Clyde and Theives Like Us, and run.

Llaranas and Matti are often touted as the bright new hopes of Philippine cinema, with their impressive hand-held camera moves and ginzu-knife cutting techniques. Impressive, that is, to audiences unfamiliar with the works of Quentin Tarantino, Tony Scott, and Guy Ritchie. Llaranas does admit to Pussy Hairs being partly inspired by Mike De Leon’s masterwork Blink Of An Eye (Kisapmata), though the former has none of the latter’s psychological realism. While Pussy Hairs was a hit, both Radyo and Double Crossed did indifferent business at the box office.
The film industry has always been closely tied to the economy. The golden ages of Philippine cinema in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the country’s periods of relative prosperity. In which case, filmmaking conditions in 2001 were even worse than 2000. Production costs went up, audience attendance went down (or went over to watch Hollywood films), and the only real hits were the pirated VCDs selling at the street corners for $2 a disc. Philippine production stayed below one hundred films for the second year in a row. The government promised tax cuts and a 50 million peso (US$1 million) fund to develop good film projects —something the powers-that-be in the industry are currently fighting over.

Sex always sells, though under the more conservative regime of Alejandro Roces as chairman of the Motion Picture and Television Rating and Classification Board (MTRCB), it’s sold more surreptitiously. One can see the difference: Pussy Hairs has any number of breasts bared, while Radyo and Double Crossed don’t. You could almost measure the box-office take from the amount of nudity featured in each picture.

In this more restrictive environment, a different kind of star emerged in Assunta De Rossi. Her long legs, full figure, and classic Italian beauty (with enough Filipino blood to make the mix intriguing) caused her to stand out from the rest. Producers didn’t hesitate to exploit the new actress in no less than three 2001 productions: Maryo De Los Reyes’ Red Diaries, Joey Reyes’ Dive (Sisid) and Joel Lamangan’s A Woman’s Curve (Hubog).
Red Diaries seems designed to showcase De Rossi’s acting talents, featuring three short segments told in three dramatically different tones. De Rossi does best in the first two segments. First, she plays the mistress of a dead rich man; she meets and falls in love with his surviving brother. Second, she’s an innocent parishioner —wearing the last word in provocative dresses — who turns the head of an aspiring seminarian. De Rossi works well as an erotic joke, a woman too beautiful to take seriously. She either has to be treated as a precious trinket to be passed from one man to another, or as a fantasy figure forever out of reach.

The third segment is the film’s bid for seriousness, with De Rossi playing a police officer’s battered wife. When she attempts to escape, the officer has her gang-raped. It’s the most relevant section, because of recent stories of police abuse. But it’s the least successful of the three. This is mainly down to De Los Reyes’ hysterical storytelling style — the rape is particularly hard to watch, not because of the violence, but because the staging is crude beyond belief. The controversy which erupted when the police tried to ban the film made Diaries the second-highest grossing domestic film of the year.

Joey Romero’s Dive, again a De Rossi showcase, features her playing two roles: an underwater stripper, and the daughter of a rich fishpond operator. Water images, both muddy and clear, figure prominently in the film; the underwater stripping sequences lend the picture some sordid entertainment value; and the dialogue (partly written by theatre actor/playwright Rody Vera) hits the occasional lyrical note. The film’s story outline may bear suspiciously close resemblance to Lou Ye’s Suzhou River— and the lyricism can get a bit much — but at least De Rossi’s appeal is amply represented.

Possibly De Rossi’s most successful film, however, is one where she isn’t put on public exhibition as a mermaid stripper or rape victim. In fact, her character has role to play in the director’s larger vision. In Joel Lamangan’s A Woman’s Curve she (yet again) plays a mistress, to bodyguard/hoodlum Jay Manalo. This time, however, her motivation for prostituting herself is made dramatically clear: she has a retarded sister (played by real-life sibling Alessandra), and she needs the security Manalo offers to protect her. Lamangan creates a convincingly gritty lower-class world for the two De Rossis to struggle in. He’s not as successful at introducing a sub-plot, about former supporters of Joseph Estrada who are exploited for their blind loyalty, but his passion and intensity carry him through the narrative rough spots.

No account of 2001 can be complete without some mention of the September 11 tragedy, and the effect it had on one’s respective culture. In the case of the Philippines, aside from making a bad economy worse (the exchange rate shot up to 55 pesos to the dollar) there was Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s New Moon (Bagong Buwan). The film, about a Muslim community struggling to reach a refugee camp in the middle of the Mindanao war, was two years and 30 million pesos (under $600,000) in the making — a response to the ongoing war, of course, but also (as the film’s marketing campaign and end titles make clear) to the 9/11 attacks.

New Moon makes the praiseworthy attempt to tell the Muslims’ side of the story. It’s a great, largely untold story, one so important you wish you could say the film was even halfway successful in its attempt. Unfortunately the treatment is both unsubtle (Muslim and Christian boys meet as enemies and part as friends) and confused (among many other details, Maguindanao soldiers are shown wearing Tuareg clothes). The film itself is a conventional piece of liberal uplift; it ignores the bitter complexity of issues and concentrates on images of peace and unity.

But despite all the cheap sex flicks (with carefully calibrated doses of nudity), spiritless actioners, pathetic comedies, and unintentionally comic dramas, despite the sincere misfires and music-video grotesques lurching across the multiplex screens, good filmmaking is still — impossibly, miraculously — being done.

Joyce Bernal, despite being a purely commercial filmmaker with no ambitions towards art or anything profound, is good simply because she is able to tell a concise and coherent story in that most difficult of genres — the romantic comedy. Her Promise There’s Only You (Pangako ... ikaw lang) and When The Moment Comes (Pagdating ng panahon) are well-crafted entertainments. They use their stars’ respective personas — Aga Muhlach’s puppy-dog good looks, Robin Padilla’s macho bravado, Regine Velasquez’s earthbound sweetness, Sharon Cuneta’s terminal cuteness — as a source of humour. Bernal, with her writer Mel Mendoza-del Rosario, takes advantage of people’s familiarity with these actors to fashion shared in-jokes between them and the audience. These in-jokes intensify the audience’s fondness for the actors, while at the the same time sharpening the comic outlines of the characters being played.

Other above-average productions include Tikoy Aguiluz’s adaptation of the Nick Joaquin play Summer Solstice (Tatarin), about the war between the sexes as played out during a pagan ritual performed on the Feast of St John the Baptist. The film is Aguiluz’s most lighthearted yet, partly because the material is thin (this is hardly Joaquin’s best work as playwright), and partly because Aguiluz has slyly turned up the humour. Set in the 1920s — the dawn of modern feminism — and taking full advantage of Viva Studio’s characteristically opulent production designs, Aguiluz gives us a wittily stylized comedy about our grandparents and great-grandparents. They turn out to have nothing else on their minds than the age-old (and still urgent) question of just who wears the pants in the family.

Then there’s Jeffrey Jeturian’s delayed 2000 production Larger Than Life (Tuhog), about a woman and her daughter who are raped twice: first by her father, and second by the filmmakers who buy the rights to her story and turn it into a cheap soft-core porno. The film, written by Armando Lao, alternates between grimness and a touching true story. The resulting movie-within-a-movie, called Lust for Flesh (Hayok sa laman), is a hilarious parody of every sex-flick cliche ever used (and abused) in Filipino cinema. Plus there are a few choice jabs at Filipino porn pictures pretending to be film festival-worthy art films.
Following on the heels of Life is Lao’s script for Chito Rono’s La Vida Rosa, about a con artist named Rosa who seeks the Big Score before she gives up and retires. Lao fashions a distinct point of view, a small-scale vision of Manila’s urban streetlife that manages to be both cynical and compassionate at the same time. Rono brings to this his considerable powers of visualization, capturing the grittier textures of the city streets as well as the headlong rush that is a con man’s life —always on the go, always trying to chisel yet one more peso out anothers’ grasp, in the hope of making some fast money.

Looking back, even the better films of 2001 seem to engage present-day reality only in an indirect manner. Either they condemn the act of filmmaking as a distortion of that reality (Larger Than Life), or present that reality in noirish terms (La Vida Rosa), or explore the roots of that reality in the recent past (Summer Solstice). Only one film dealt directly with the here-and-now in a comprehensive and uncompromising manner: Lav Diaz’s West Side Avenue (Batang West Side), a five-hour epic about the killing and subsequent murder investigation of a Filipino youth in Jersey City.