Cinelokal | Puti explores how we lose something vital when we compromise our art

The premise of Mike Alcazaren's film Puti is intriguing: a skilled counterfeit painter, Amir (Ian Veneracion) loses his color vision thanks to an accident. As he convalesces, he starts to see strange and weird things.

Amir's struggle reflects an age-old struggle between art and commercialism. He has created fantastic original works, but they have not sold very well. His skill at counterfeiting brings him loads of cash, but as a consequence +he doesn't care for the art itself, painting his forgeries upside down to focus on the technical details of the artwork instead of looking at the bigger picture.

This struggle is externalized when Amir loses his vision and starts to hallucinate. The loss of color vision is Amir compromising his art for the sake of money, seeing the world in the black-and-white terms of cold hard cash. He approaches his art with the cold detachment of a machine, yet the humanity of the art he is trying to produce (macabre or not) tries to creep back: tales of gruesome mutilation, or tales of tender lullabies.

Amir's relationships with the people in his life are also explored in the film. Some perhaps act as surrogates for his dead wife, and it's clear he is trying to fill the void that she left. This internal discussion really doesn't kick into gear until later into the story, almost as an afterthought, though little bits of it exist in the earlier parts of the film.

In the end, the film follows the general psychological thriller plot conventions. In the past 5 years there have been two local films that share the same structure (not to mention numerous foreign films), and after seeing Amir's accident I had a sense of how the movie would end. I had hoped I would be proven wrong, but I was proven right, and plot twists no longer feel like plot twists if one is ready for them. I have not seen the original Cinefilipino cut so I can't judge how the film has changed since then, but a nice scene at the end leaves things open ended and mysterious enough that it ultimately pays off.

Puti plays a precarious balancing act between being too abstract and being not abstract enough. While I think it mostly succeeds and delivers in the first half, the second half is a bit more clunky, the film trying to fit the pieces together when it doesn't have to.

Cinelokal screens at selected SM cinemas, with new films out every Friday. Visit the Cinelokal Facebook page for more details.