Been a minute since I’ve sent out a dispatch, and it’s been even longer since I did a straight-up review, let alone three. Hoping the rust isn’t too obvious. I’ll be doing these for the next three days as I attend this year’s Cinemalaya, with the next batch featuring two of the festival’s most talked-about titles in Samantha Lee’s (Billie and Emma) Rookie and Carl Papa’s (Paglisan) Iti Mapukpukaw (The Missing).
Ang Duyan Ng Magiting (The Cradle of the Brave)
Dir: Dustin Celestino
From its very first scene, Dustin Celestino’s Ang Duyan Ng Magiting announces exactly what kind of film it is. In it, frustrated history teacher Victor (Jojit Lorenzo) berates his college class for their alleged ignorance in the aftermath of the 2022 election, accusing them of being remiss in their duty as Filipinos for allowing this to happen. In effect, he is throwing a bombastic (and needlessly cruel) tantrum, slamming tables and tossing papers off desks. A video taken of this outburst goes viral, which in the next vignette—the film is composed of 12 in all, following one of Victor’s students as he is branded a terrorist for being in the wrong place at the wrong time while leaving home to “immerse” with farmers—gets him put on (paid) sabbatical, in a scene where he and his friend in the administration debate principles and practicality in an unjust society.
Their conversation goes exactly as you’d think, which is to say it’s less conversation and more Debate Club. Most of the film is much of the same: People talking/yelling at each other in rooms, exchanging lectures that sound like they were cribbed from Facebook essays by both sides of the aisle. No one in this film sounds like a person; everyone is an Ideology-For-Dummies book cosplaying as a human being. None of the points they make are any more insightful than the thoughts you’d find in a freshman Poli Sci class, but they’re dressed up just enough that they could feasibly pass for profound. Aaron Sorkin is frantically taking notes.
There are a few mildly interesting set pieces that interrupt the gabfest—A bedroom scene between a vindictive police chief (Paolo O’Hara) and his equally vengeful wife (Frances Makil-Ignacio) that juxtaposes police brutality with sadomasochism is a standout both for its performances and for actually using the medium, and Bituin Escalante almost steals the show in her vignette as a slimy government lawyer later in the film—but even they are hampered by uninventive cinematography and lighting more oppressive than a late-era Game of Thrones episode. One gets the impression that Celestino might have been attempting to simulate the stage through his nigh-exclusive use of master shots for several segments, but all it does is make for unwieldy and exhaustingly cluttered images throughout.
However, even the film’s few forays into incorporating actual visual language come off as misguided, particularly in a last scene that asks the audience—through composition unmistakably meant to evoke a mirror shot—to consider an equivalence so infuriatingly inane that the rest of the film seems incisive and trenchant by comparison. For all its ham-fisted hand-wringing over bloviating leftists who do nothing, Ang Duyan Ng Magiting is guilty of the same sin in closing the way it does. It talks (and talks and talks) up a big game without having the nerve to stand for anything, borrowing hot-button topics to disguise skin-deep psychology and tedious, artless filmmaking.
(Seriously, we need gaffers out here.)
Grade: 2/5 monologues
Maria
Dir: Sheryl Rose M. Andes
Both ex-President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and the grassroots campaign that formed around ex-VP Leni Robredo in its wake are expansive enough to each warrant a handful of seasons of their own dedicated Netflix docuseries, so a 75-minute guerilla documentary had no hope of doing justice to both. Still, Sheryl Andes’s Maria is a well-intentioned and often affecting effort that ultimately has painfully little new to say about its subject matter beyond simply replaying the hits.
Perhaps the most glaring stumble of the film is the titular conceit itself. The three Marias the narrative centers around share little beyond their first names, and the first is mostly discarded from the narrative a third of the way through. Had this been a fiction film, we could just leave it as a clumsily handled plot device, but there’s something discomfiting about seeing it in a documentary that focuses on her up until it makes its point, especially as the other two Marias (Robredo and Domingo) are more integrated and are even shown having a conversation together. The shared-name conceit, then, doesn’t enrich the film’s exploration of its thematic preoccupation and perhaps even created awkward narrative choices.
The latter two-thirds focus on Robredo’s inspiring but ultimately unsuccessful 2022 presidential bid, which never scratches beyond surface-level hagiography despite being able to get sit-down interviews with the woman herself. The resulting material doesn’t delve deep enough to convert anyone, nor does it illuminate anything about Robredo or her campaign. Everything is discussed at a bird’s-eye view, which feels like a counterintuitive choice when talking about a campaign that was famously driven by on-the-ground manpower and a person-to-person approach. Again, 75 minutes is hardly enough to do any of this justice, but this is the film we have.
While Maria is far from perfect, it remains an affecting portrait of national loss as seen through the lens of the marginalized communities that bore the brunt of Duterte’s drug war. A particularly harrowing scene has the third Maria (Mary Ann) recount her husband and son’s killings to the documentarians, her voice audibly breaking as memories of that night flood back. In those moments, the film proves its value as a reminder of a period of great suffering for the oft-forgotten members of Philippine society. Even if it feels closer to a first draft than a complete work, it won’t be the last film made about this period by a long shot.
Grade: 2.5/5 pink roses
Huling Palabas (Fin)
Dir: Ryan Espinosa Machado
Lovingly shot even as it’s more than a little cluttered as a narrative, Ryan Machado’s Huling Palabas is the quintessential Cinemalaya film: A delicate and intimate story about a rarely-represented region told with a vigor and a unique voice. Even with its imperfections, it is a breath of fresh air.
Set in Machado’s native Romblon and focused on promising but confused high school senior Andoy (Shun Mark Gomez) as he navigates academics, strained family relations, and a budding queer awakening, Huling Palabas is told through several loosely connected threads in the boy’s life: His love for film being nurtured by the town VHS rental place, his interactions with the town’s queer hairdresser and a mysterious newcomer with a VCD player, the mystery around his father’s disappearance, his efforts to graduate with honors and go to college in Manila and escape his abusive uncle, and—most importantly—his relationship with his childhood best friend, for whom he harbors ambiguous feelings.
There’s a lot in there, and the script doesn’t always make it clear which of these threads ought to be considered the through-line. Maybe it’s because Andoy himself isn’t meant to know what his happy ending looks like (the film itself has at least three endings), but in practice, it makes the film seem like it wants to have its cake and eat it too. The old saying goes that if you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both; Huling Palabas chases at least six.
The closest to a grounding thread it has is Andoy’s relationship with his best friend, although even that feels slightly contrived in its development. Their dynamic is established early on by their taste in movie stars—Andoy prefers the sensitive Sharon Cuneta, his friend the macho Robin Padilla—and is complicated by his friend’s budding romance with a girl from out of town. The whole thread is practically a (very potent) queer movie trope at this point, but its confusing execution as something the film sporadically returns to without rhythm or reason makes even that difficult to follow from a story perspective.
However, Machado definitely has an eye for cinematic detail. A repeated shot of slippers left outside a doormat is a lovely motif, as is a summery balcony shot that seems to deliberately evoke Call Me By Your Name. Even as the plot seems to swing wildly from one kind of movie to another, the aesthetic retains a cohesive wholeness without sacrificing being eclectic or interesting.
Huling Palabas is a promising debut feature from a fresh voice of regional cinema, and hopefully a harbinger of more of the same. We should all be excited for his next feature.