Film review: Manila

Directed by Adolf Alix Jr. and Raya Martin Written by Ramon Sarmiento and Adolf Alix Jr. Two film classics, a two-episode movie, two reviews. SOUL OF THE CITY ALEXANDER T. MAGNO, GMANews.TV The audience that almost filled up the Main Theater of the Cultural Center of the Philippines burst into warm applause at the end of Manila, the launching feature of the 5th Cinemalaya Film Festival and Competition, which opened last Friday. Diretors Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal were probably clapping along in their graves, because the indie film proved to be a worthy tribute to their own works - Brocka's Manila By Night and Bernal's Jaguar. Those were the works, also honored here and abroad, whose themes directors Adolf Alix Jr. and Raya Martin and co-writer Rene Sarmiento saw fit to reanimate. After all, the social context that Manila lent those themes has not changed much in the past three decades, as Alix explained before the screening at the full packed CCP Main Theater. Manila was shown at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival last May and at the 31st Moscow International Film Festival last June - in both cases as part of special, noncompetition screenings. Two in one The film is actually two short ones, split at the center with an unrelated, dialogue-free montage of Lav Diaz directing a scene with Iza Calzado, Jodi Sta. Maria, and Jon Avila. This is where, surprisingly, the opening credits roll, a welcome upbeat interlude between the two downbeat, but still engrossing episodes. Each one covers a period of less than 24 hours, condensed into less than 90 minutes of unadorned story-telling. The first features drug addict William, played by Piolo Pascual, who's one of the producers of the film. It's a simple story tracing his long day's journey to his next drug fix. The second features bodyguard Phillip, again played by Pascual. It's another simple story tracing the short almost happy life of a loyal sidekick to a politician's son named Barry, played by Jay Manalo. But he finds himself kicked aside, as it were, and worse, for simply doing his job, beyond the call of duty, as Barry makes it clear to him. I make the allusions to Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber because Manila's two stories feel like literary pieces translated into the more popular medium of cinema. Not that these stories have anything to do directly with those works by Eugene O'Neill and Ernest Hemingway, except that they're treated in the same stark, naturalistic style. The film itself makes allusions to the works of Brocka and Bernal - naming its protagonists William, after William Martinez, who starred in Manila By Night, and Phillip, after Phillip Salvador, who starred in Jaguar. Martinez makes a cameo appearance as cab driver in the first story. Unfortunately, no Salvador appears to complete the tribute. Focus on the characters, not the actors The opening sequence quickly bares the soul of the city, laying out its mood and rhythm with night scenes that should be familiar to anyone who has dared to walk through the capital's littered streets in the wee hours. All of these are captured in stark black and white, in which the entire film was shot, or at least rendered, with background music by the Radioactive Sago Project, the group that scored the whole film. Empty market stalls. Sidewalk vendors asleep in folding cots or on newspapers on the pavement. People waiting for a jeepney or a taxi ride home. The story picks up with cops raiding the Sensation Health Spa, a name that should tickle guys who have visited massage parlors, also known as sauna baths. You may have heard of these places, where customers expect to enjoy neither a massage nor a sauna. The Sensation Health Spa is one such establishment. We see William running away from the raiding cops and evading them in a short chase through some dark alleys. His drug supplier has been collared, however, and that's the problem he grapples with till the end. Along the way we see him playing out his fractured relationships -- with his girlfriend (Angelica Panganiban) and his mother (Rosanna Roces), former prostitute -- as an old friend (Marissa Delgado) would mention later. The second story begins with Phillip getting roused from sleep with a phone call from his boss Barry (Jay Manalo), who needs him to come over because they're going out. As he gets dressed, he gets a gentle reminder from his grandmother (Anita Linda) about being wary of the company he keeps. True enough, he gets into trouble that night as he accompanies the boss and his girlfriend (Alessandra da Rossi) out of a bar. They run into the girl's ex (Baron Geisler) and his gang. A rumble follows, during which Phillip gets so enraged by the taunts of Geisler that he shoots him. That's how his troubles begin, so that he's forced to hide in a garbage dump community. Continuity glitch The second story has a glitch in continuity. Barry and his entourage enter Firehouse, a real bar on that stretch of EDSA in Pasay, on a sports car, only to come out - in the same costumes - from another bar and, after the rumble, speed off in an SUV. Other than that, I found this a good film, entertaining in a low-key way. I was engrossed with the characters, not the actors playing them. But then Piolo Pascual found it hard to tone down his matinee idol image, which almost upstages the characters he plays. Right before the screening, as he walked on stage, several girls screamed "PIOLO!" One of them kept screaming "PIOLO" every few seconds or so before the film began. Showbiz. see next page HOMAGE TO THE MASTERS By DARWIN CHIONG When new directors take on movie projects that are meant to pay homage to old masters, there’s no escaping comparison. To walk on the same path the masters have taken is to succumb to such an inevitable outcome. Eyebrows will be raised, doubts will flutter on the lips of the most avid cineastes, and social networking sites such as Facebook will swell with a flurry of shout outs or status messages that take a swipe on the film. Such is the plight of Manila, the opening film of this year’s Cinemalaya, the Philippine Independent Film Festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. A two-part movie shot in black and white, Manila was created as a tribute to two masterpieces of Philippine cinema. But I want to approach the film without the weight of having seen the films that inspired the making of this movie, namely Mr. Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (City After Dark) (1980) and Mr. Lino Brocka’s Jaguar (1979). After all, around two thirds of the audience (myself included) at the CCP last July 17 belong to a generation that was not yet around when those two classic Filipino movies were originally shown. The first part of the film opens with a man who has just escaped a police raid and is being chased by the authorities. He is William, a young man trapped in the horrors of his drug addiction. This role, of a man on the path to his own ruin, is unconvincingly portrayed by the buffed and hunky Piolo Pascual. His William is not believably drug-addicted both in the physical and internal sense. The absence of gravitas in Mr. Pascual’s portrayal hinders the ending of the first part of the movie. That scene where he is deep in the quagmire of crystal meth hell, and where an internal struggle is slightly glimpsed in his eyes as he sheds a tear, the frame fading to black as though he is being swallowed entirely by the darkness, did not have enough heft. Both the actor and the director, Raya Martin for this part of the movie, failed to take me to that place of the character’s fall into the depths of ruin. The narrative of the second part of the movie progresses more organically with the direction of Adolf Alix Jr. It flows from one scene to the next, and I felt that the story was being told as it should be. In this part, the main character is Phillip, the bodyguard of a politician’s son who mistakenly believes that he is treated like family by his boss. He holds on to this belief until an incident happens that shatters it. Phillip is played (again) by Mr. Pascual, this time with a tan and darker make-up to make him look less like a matinee idol and more of a bodyguard. There is a well-executed scene in this part that tugs at the heart. After telling his grandmother he’ll be in hiding after committing a crime, Phillip’s grandmother (wonderfully played by Anita Linda), hands him a jacket and says, in a voice laden with love: “Here’s your jacket, it’s cold outside." When Phillip looks at her, his eyes meet with his grandmother’s and the scene triumphs because of its simplicity and the power of unspoken silence. The directors’ attempt at experimentation appears in the middle of the movie. Sandwiched between the two parts is a transition device shot in color, which also serves as the “opening credits" of the film that appears in the middle. The transition scenes feature the director Lav Diaz working on the set of a movie. My companions theorized that the technique was a stab at the ‘80s movie tradition of annoyingly lengthy opening credits that spill into a movie’s early scenes. But I think it’s an unnecessary device, in the sense that it doesn’t help in the telling of the story. What does it mean when your transition device is that of another director making a different film? If the transition created by Mr. Alix and Mr. Martin is supposed to articulate a metaphor, then I think it is a misplaced one that is left unarticulated in the movie. After watching the movie, and after recovering from the powerful after-effect of the ‘jacket’ scene and the second part of the movie’s tragic ending, I wanted to do something. I was possessed by a compulsion to watch the two movies that inspired the making of Manila. I wanted to see for myself the power of Mr. Bernal and Mr. Brocka’s original works. If only for that, I feel that the two directors, Mr. Alix and Mr. Martin, have somehow achieved the ultimate homage to the old masters. It is not to be like them, or to outshine them, for those are nearly impossible tasks, but instead to pave the way for a new audience to discover the old masters’ brilliant works. - GMANews.TV (Catch Cinemalaya at the Cultural Center of the Philippines until July 26. Admission price is 50 pesos for students/movie, and 100 pesos for the regular screening price/movie. Visit www.cinemalaya.org for more details.)