Aftercare

Christian Jil R. Benitez

At the heart of existent populism is its plain irreverence to the body, especially of those who are excluded from what is commonly projected as “ordinary.” As such, surveillance has then become the predominant grammar of our times (nothing new, really, but definitely magnified today because enabled by facist structures in place): to be a brown trans woman in the “great American” landscape, to be a grimy young man in tattered clothes in streets of Manila—these often mean being seen right away, the body being subjected to forms of violent scrutiny. Vision has always been a question of power, and yet frequently left uninterrogated: in the contemporary Philippine cinema, to represent the ordinarily excluded often means simply turning the lens toward them, subjecting them to the same gaze. Attempts to render the “real” (another term generally overlooked) recurrently ends up idealized: a woman who finally confronts her perpetrator regresses to romanticized docility, throwing away the gun; the suffering of a child amid the war-torn Mindanao is skirted around and through melodrama. 

If contemporary Philippine cinema is to insist itself as relevant these days, for us, the Filipino audience, in the middle of the current regime, such similar gesture of “representation” does not certainly suffice. Perhaps all the more crucial now is an attempt to articulate what often cannot-be, which is to say, to render visually what cannot appear, because always elusive to our current surveilled vocabularies.

 

The Body of Justice

Patrick Flores

The dogged and peripatetic camera of Raymundo Ribay Gutierrez signifies, anticipates, and sustains a pursuit. It is a pursuit of a locale: dense, thicket-like, nearly a mangrove of social tides and unruly species in a quarter in the sprawling metropolis of Manila. But while the frenzy of cinematic work pervades the atmosphere, the lens also incipiently dwells on a domestic sphere: a man, a woman, and their daughter. It is a tight study of a situation of intense emotional and physical violence. Dante (Kristoffer King) has time and again beaten his partner Joy (Max Eigenmann). When in one of these hostile episodes, their daughter Angel (Jordhen Suan) is hurt, Joy goes public. At this existential instance, what do we make of the woman? Avenger, feminist, sufferer? The pursuit shifts from locale to procedure.

 

Shades of Youth: A Review of Cleaners

Tito Quiling, Jr.

Hearing the soft scratches of the eraser gliding over the chalkboard, wooden chairs scraping against the concrete floor polished by years with a bunót (coconut husk), leather and rubber soles squeaking as people cross the classroom, out the door, and into the hallway. The school bell rings throughout the campus, marking the beginning and end of a school day. With these sounds and images, Cleaners (2019) by Glenn Barit and his team opens a series of recollections that center on distinct stories before easing into a larger, collective narrative detailing moments that have gone by. 

 

School of Life

Skilty Labastilla

A Is for Agustin, the debut feature of Grace Simbulan, follows Agustin Amado, an Aeta man in his early 40s whose hollow cheeks and sun-drenched, wrinkled skin provide quite a contrast to his child-like grin and gentle disposition. He and his wife make charcoal for a living: the middleman pays them P150 for each sack and sells the same sack for P250. This exploitation of the poor and uneducated is a fairly common scenario anywhere in the world, and it’s one of the reasons why Agustin decided to enroll himself in a public elementary school in his remote Zambales barrio. 

 

Echo Chamber of Horrors

Jaime Oscar M. Salazar

Screencap from John Denver Trending (2019) screener.

In late 2017, a 15-year-old boy in Bago City, Negros Occidental died by suicide. His mother, a farmer, sought aid from an anti-crime civil society organization in shedding light on the circumstances of his death. It emerged that the boy, unbeknown to his family, had been blamed for stealing a classmate’s iPad.

 

Adrift

Tessa Maria Guazon

The final scene in Eduardo Roy, Jr.’s Fuccbois (2019) perturbingly captured ill-fated Mico Reyes (Kokoy de Santos) and Ace Policarpio (Royce Cabrera) in a thicket; faces bloodied and bodies exhausted by a grueling escape from a local politician’s bodyguard. A call punctured their mounting terror and dread: it was from their agent Mother Dan asking whether they were on their way home. She confirmed Mico’s forthcoming shoot for a television series. The buzz and hum of forest life shrouded the nervous staccato of their breathing. The vastness surrounding them was a trap, as were the borders of their phone screens, the edges of a gay bar stage, the doors to the rooms of a vacation house, and the island that can only be reached or escaped from by boat. They were ensnared by various spaces where they gambled on their youth and risked their lives.

 

Sour Times: A Review of Sila-Sila

John Bengan

What do breakup stories usually reveal? The tipping point when enough has been had, the tedium that erodes the bond, the gradual avalanche of small acts? Written by Daniel Saniana and directed by Giancarlo Abrahan, Sila-Sila (2019) tiptoes around these familiar routes and draws our attention to a character who is sometimes hard to root for, let alone pare down to easily explicable urges.    

 

Motion through sight: On No Data Plan

Emerald Flaviano Manlapaz

In No Data Plan (2019), Miko Revereza enfolds us in an experience. This experience, a three-day train ride from Los Angeles to New York, is marked by Revereza’s subjectivity, revealed piece by piece in spare camerawork and the peculiar use of subtitles and voice-overs. The trip takes on, in the process, a life of its own as a document of disappointed dreams, a family’s slow breakdown, and a young artist’s defiance against the crushing weight of inertia imposed by an indifferent state. As a body in itself, No Data Plan tackles movement as the necessary condition of the undocumented immigrant, even as it moves and marks its difference from the human—the filmmaker’s own and its audience’s—body.

 

Para sa For My Alien Friend

Aristotle Atienza

Paano maaaring tanggapin ang pelikulang For My Alien Friend (2019) ni Jet Leyco, ang isa sa mga itinatanging pelikula ngayon ng nakaraang taon? Kakahunin ito bilang dokumentaryo at eksperimental, at itatabi sa iba pang kakatwang pelikula. Paano kung ilapit sa karaniwan, at ituring ang pelikula bilang liham? Maaari ding alay at handog. Anu’t anuman, ito ay bigay kahit paano, isang pagbabahagi at pamamahagi ng sarili sa iba. Pelikula ang laman pero hindi lamang ang nilalaman dahil kabilang na rito ang mismong pelikula bilang isang kalamnan ng mga pinirasong karanasan na isinasakasaysayan sa iskrin. Matutukoy man ang pinagmulan at patutunguhan sadyang tila nakalutang pa rin ang katiyakan ng mga sangkot na nilalang dahil nakikitang pangangailangan ang kilalanin ang mga relasyong pumapagitan. Maaaring nariyan ang pagtawid sa pelikula ni Leyco.  

 

Love and Liberal Democracy: Alone/Together, Ulan, and Isa Pa, With Feelings

Janus Isaac Nolasco

What does a genre—which trades on kilig, hugot heartaches—have to do with inequality, poverty, human rights, and authoritarianism? If Filipino romance movies barely register on the political scale, one would be hard-pressed to see the genre—generally at least—as anything but politically progressive. But this is misleading. They do not have to literally depict, say, patronage politics, to engage it productively. 

There is little explicit political content in Alone/Together, Ulan, and Isa Pa, With Feelings, three films longlisted by the Young Critics Circle for 2019. But they critique hierarchical, patron-client relations; espouse equality; and embrace the liberal democratic values of individualism and self-determination.