Yesterday I was able to attend a special screening of the restored version of Nagalit ang Buwan sa Haba ng Gabi. It's an immensely enjoyable film with a lot of memorable lines, even though it strays into melodrama in some parts.
Mistress movies aren't a new thing - they've been around at least since the Golden Age of Philippine Cinema, where moviegoers waited for the inevitable confrontation between wife and querida. Even back in 1983, Danny Zialcita was taking the genre to insane limits with this movie.
The film involves your seemingly standard love polygon - Delza (Laurice Guillen), the long suffering wife, Stella (Gloria Diaz), the mistress, and Miguel (Dindo Antonio), the adulterous husband. Put in a few more vertices in that love polygon, such as gay spouse Dimitri (Eddie Garcia) and Delza's former suitor (Tommy Abuel), and a couple of other characters that would constitute a major spoiler - and you have a major entertaining clusterfuck of epic proportions.
The film thrives because of its many moments of levity and wit - the film knows its audience, it knows what kind of film it is and it runs with it. It fills itself to the brim with twists and ideas that it almost reaches the territory of camp, but in my opinion avoids this pitfall thanks to the dialogue.
In many mistress movies, the man is often the source of all the film's problems. And in fact, most of the film's major male characters are terrible persons. They walk through the film without a shred of loyalty, and their affections are as capricious as a bee flitting from flower to flower. In its treatment, it's almost as if the film mocks this idea of machismo, where the men are automatically free from consequence. There's one exchange of dialogue forgiving men cheating and having bastards because they're men, while indicting women for the same crimes. I don't know how feminism stood in the Philippines in the early eighties, but the incredulity in the audience reaction (and the fact that it's still quite relevant in today's largely patriarchal society) is telling.
On the other hand, the females try to conform to societal norms and be dutiful wives and mothers, even though the circumstances dictated by the men grow even more insane. They try to keep the family together and place themselves above their men and their animalistic passions, insisting that they are civilized - they are above all that shit. But even then, they live in a gilded cage.
The film is technically sound, with some clever tracking shots and blocking. The acting is decent to good all around, and you can tell everyone enjoys playing their characters. The film does get bogged down in melodrama and it telegraphs its punches more often than not. But it does throw in a left hook from nowhere that forces you to rethink the context of the entire movie.
It's a pretty fun movie to watch, and I recommend you catch it when it comes out (again) on cinemas or DVD.
Time for one of the competition films. At first glance, 2 Cool 2 Be Forgotten seems like a simple expansion of Petersen Vargas' short film Lisyun qng Geografia. But the film takes us into far deeper places, creating a fully realized, visually impressive experience.
The film recontextualizes the allegories seen in Jason Laxamana's Mercury is Mine into what is basically a high school youth film with darker undertones. It parallels our complicated relationship with the United States and our fascination with American culture, even though the Americans have long abandoned their bases. Our main character, Felix (Khalil Ramos) is a schoolboy whose life is changed when two Fil-Am brothers enter the school. He is immediately fascinated by the older brother, Magnus, who seeks help with homework. On the other hand, the younger brother, Maxim, is more or less a psychopath, and he has much darker plans in store for his family.
It's important to remember the setting of the movie: it's the nineties, and the United States has just withdrawn its military presence in the aftermath of the Mount Pinatubo eruption. Magnus and Maxim represent two different possibilities of this withdrawal - the former, a peaceful, mutual coexistence, the latter, a violent severing of ties. Felix, on the other hand, writes in his journal with a bit of smug naivete - his fixation on the brothers proves to be his undoing. (He also has the worst timing ever.)
On the other side of the coin, many characters exploit the two brothers physically, even sexually, which only reflects how we exploited the Americans for our own needs, a strange kind of mutual parasitism where both parties harm each other for our own benefit. Even after the Americans have left (perhaps, as suggested in one of the scenes, due to divine providence), they took something away from us, leaving us nursing a phantom pain.
The filmmaking behind the film is actually nothing short of amazing, even more impressive considering this is Vargas' first feature length. Each frame is carefully crafted, each frame tells its own story behind the story. Vargas' visual style expands the visual ideas he established in Lisyun, making his characters only truly comfortable with each other, where otherwise they are desolate and incomplete.
2 Cool 2 Be Forgotten is an impressive first effort. I look forward to future projects from the burgeoning Kapampangan film movement, which is quickly proving itself to be a force to be reckoned with in regional cinema.
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