Cinemalaya 2023: Day 3 Round-Up
Closing out the fest with a quadruple-feature of dubious quality
For Part I (Ang Duyan Ng Magiting, Maria, and Huling Palabas), click here. For Part II (Rookie, Iti Mapukpukaw, and As If It’s True), click here.
All images from the Cinemalaya website.
Gitling (Hyphen)
Dir: Jopy Arnaldo
Every generation gets the Ang Nawawala they deserve.
An intimate and eminently quotable quasi-love story between two artfully sad loners that reflect their own artfully sad target audience, Gitling is very much cut from the cloth of those 2010s Pinoy indie semi-romances. Depicting the nebulous relationship between Japanese film director Makoto (Ken Yamamura) and his interpreter Jamie (Gabby Padilla) as they escape their respective relationship troubles through the filmmaking process and each other’s company, it is a film told in meandering conversations and longing glances, backdropped by beautiful and lonely cityscapes that only underline the dull aches the pair carry with them.
For the film-literate patrons out there, there’s plenty to enjoy here. The plot evokes and sometimes outright quotes shots from other two-lonely-people films like Columbus and Lost in Translation, while the themes around language and translation as a metaphor for the trickiness of one-to-one human communication is reminiscent of Drive My Car and Call Me By Your Name. There is an extended conversation between the leads that name-drops Before Sunset and In the Mood for Love, two films this one plunders from with abandon. The whole thing even ends with the Cary Grant movie Charade playing in the background.
There is nothing wrong with stealing from masterpieces—and Gitling wears its influences well for the most part—but these references never quite gel into a whole film, its screenplay too often pulling back to over-explain through overly lucid monologues from its two leads. Despite looking and sounding more assured than your typical indie debut, there is an uncertainty to its screenplay making sure that audiences Get It, which only serves to demystify proceedings. It feels like the first film of a confident filmmaker who just needs to get all their favorite films out of their system. Nonetheless, it is one of the highlights of this year’s fest.
Grade: 4/5 isaw sticks
Tether
Dir: Gian Arre
The central metaphor of Tether holds a ton of promise: Two polar opposites—self-assured serial playboy Eric (Mikoy Morales) and socially anxious loner Kate (Jorrybell Agoto)—find themselves mysteriously bound to each other after a one-night stand, each of them able to physically feel anything that the other experiences. When one of them is hungry or wounded or in the middle of sex, the other feels it as well, wherever they might be. There’s a lot here about the multifaceted toxicity of interdependent couples who lose their individuality at the altar of a doomed relationship, and how it doesn’t always have to look like abuse for it to be corrosive.
Or at least, there’s a lot that could’ve been there.
Ultimately, the film fails to move beyond the most obvious use of its conceit as a metaphor for how people can hurt themselves in their desire to control others. It goes back to this well again and again, even after its point is soundly made. Despite the best efforts of Morales and Agoto, the relationship itself isn’t given enough depth to be compelling, and after a while, watching it begins to feel like just as much of a hostage situation as the scenario it depicts. The oppressive runtime (by Cinemalaya standards) and generic production design—everything is beige in this version of Manila—only exacerbate matters.
Tether is brutally and unimaginatively cynical, the sort of lazy artistic exercise that plays for people who mistake bleakness for depth. The bad taste that sort of ordeal tends to leave in one’s mouth is one thing, but the fact that it squanders such a promising premise makes it doubly disappointing.
Grade: 2/5 roller coasters
When This Is All Over
Dir: Kevin Mayuga
Aside from featuring the comedic highlight of the festival in Jico Umali channeling his finest Billie Lourd from Booksmart as a deceptively introspective weed enthusiast, there isn’t too much novelty to When This is All Over, the latest entry in Cinemalaya’s rich history of poor-little-rich-kid dramas. Like most of those films, it likewise suffers from misjudging the severity of its protagonist’s sins, as well as a flippancy with the relevant power dynamics in service of a redemption arc that never feels as earned as the narrative wants it to be. However, memorable performances and a distinct visual style courtesy of DP Martika Ramirez Escobar (director of last year’s Leonor Will Never Die) go a long way in making it an entertaining watch that just might make you queasy with its conclusion.
When a misfit drug dealer known as “The Guy” (juan karlos) is presented with the opportunity to get an American visa and reunite with his estranged mother if he helps four spoiled brats throw an illegal party at his building rooftop in the middle of the pandemic, it forces him to reckon with his desperation to leave, as well as jeopardizes his budding friendship with working-class building staff member Rosemarie (Jorrybell Agoto), whose job would be lost if they were found out.
As it often goes with these sort of movies, it never quite goes hard enough in the paint, pulling its punches even as it serves up some fairly damning portrayals of the idle rich. Any bite it does have feels mostly borrowed from adapting lines from Parasite, and it’s all reserved for the cartoonishly inconsiderate quartet of rich kids when its protagonist—however understandable his own motivations might be—is just as complicit in disregarding the health and safety of others and directly causing several people to lose their livelihoods (as well as a fair number of more minor offenses). It would be one thing for a protagonist to do all this, but it’s quite another to expect him to come away from it redeemable somehow.
During the height of the pandemic, a line would often get trotted out about how we—rich, poor, and everyone in the middle—were all on the same boat. The truth was that we were all in the same storm, but some of us had better boats than others. Many didn’t have boats at all. In likening the struggles of The Guy and Rosemarie, the film makes the same mistake. What When This Is All Over seems to lose track of with its conclusion is that for many of us, it never ends.
Grade: 3.5/5 edibles
Bulawan Nga Usa (The Golden Deer)
Dir: Kenneth de la Cruz
There isn’t a ton to Bulawan Nga Usa. Following disaffected twentysomething Makoy (Ron Matthews Espinosa) as he searches for a fabled golden deer as a way of coping with his beloved grandfather’s death as well as his own life’s aimlessness to this point, the film never really takes steps toward resolving or fleshing out his internal journeys, engaging itself in the same avoidance strategies employed by its protagonist. The lack of any concrete narrative thrust—the film asks a lot of Espinosa meaningfully gazing at the countryside to fill in blanks—is too meandering by half, never arriving anywhere and making 90 minutes feel almost twice as long.
This isn’t to say the film is without its joys. The mountains and forests of Visayas are captured beautifully, as are the small moments of rural living that Makoy glimpses in his travels. The brief animated interludes that accompany the various Filipino folk tales he tells over the course of the movie are very well done and evocative of the classic fairy-tale comics many Filipino children grew up reading. The performances feel lived-in and genuine, despite being in service of a gossamer-thin narrative with a good heart.
If only a good heart were enough.
Grade: 2.5/5 fireflies
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