QCinema starts off with Sigrid Andrea Bernardo's Untrue, a stark departure from her body of work. It's best to watch this movie blind without any preconceptions, so I recommend to skip this review until you've seen this film. TL;DR: whether you like it or not, this film was a rollercoaster from start to finish.
The film starts off almost like a dark parody of Bernardo's Mr. and Mrs. Cruz (2018), a talky romcom that seeks to deconstruct the idea of romantic things. and how they are perceived. But something is immediately off from the start. Xian Lim's character is off kilter, and he doesn't act like a normal person. Is he really this way, or is the narrator unreliable? The second act turns this all on its head, its perspective now changed. The film makes us question reality in the same way Xian Lim tried to in films like Tabon (2019), though here the effort is far more successful. The direction in the second half is tight and calculated, the shots mirror images of scenes we've seen before. Lim and his screen partner Cristine Reyes are excellent here, basically playing at least two different characters.
The third act effectively plays on our preconceptions as we learn what really happened. It hinges on the absurd, but by this time we are either invested or we aren't. In this case, the filmmaking manages to pull it off somehow, though not all will be pleased with how cleanly it all wraps itself up.
I was unable to watch all of Glenn Barit's Cleaners, but I really loved what I saw. It's a seriously affecting treatise on youth and memory that's much more than a visual gimmick.
Barit's experimentations with form have been present ever since he started making films: in Aliens Ata (2017) the 'alien's eye' POV effectively creates distance from us and his subjects, much like its subjects are separated from their OFW parents; in Nangungupahan (2018) his peculiar cut-out style helps establish an apartment as a place full of history and memories now gone. In Cleaners, all of the images are created from photocopied images, sometimes colored with highlighters. It's a fitting visual motif: this film, after all, is a collection of memories; what are memories but hazy facsimiles of our experiences?
Cleaners is divided into several segments, each depicting a story about young people living their teenage lives the best they can. The stories are mostly things we've seen before, but the visuals give them an extra layer of depth. The standout segment (out of the four I managed to watch) is probably the second to the last one, where a political scion learns the ins and outs of small town politics firsthand. It's an interesting intersection of youth and the larger, adult world that I don't often see in teen oriented films such as this.
The last chapter of Cleaners is a collective cry out into the world - perhaps one last expression of youthful defiance or expression, one last chance to make a mess of things, before adulthood sets in and the classroom is cleaned for the next class to come.
Jean Luc-Godard is reported to have said, "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." Indeed, there are many films out there with girls and guns aplenty, but in the case of Rae Red's Babae at Baril, the film poses the question, "why does the girl need a gun in the first place?" In retrospect, I think it manages to find a satisfying answer to that question.
The film begins with depictions of violence, both subtle and overt. TV screens show gunfights by macho men. Crime infests the streets at every turn. But there are moments of personal violence as well, directed towards our protagonist (Janine Gutierrez). Her appearance is scrutinized. She is catcalled regularly. Her commute is nightmarish. These are all subtle instances of the violence society inflicts upon her.
When she comes across a gun, her whole demeanor changes. The gun is a symbol of power. There is, of course, something else about it that is hard to place at first. In the middle of what would have been the film's climactic moment, the story shifts. Upon first watch, I had difficulty placing this shift, but then everything clicks into place. The gun does not merely symbolize power, it also symbolizes violence, whether personal or systematic. Through this narrative segue, the film creates the stage on which the girl holds her gun.
Thus the ending may not feel cathartic, but it actually is: it is a rejection of the system that holds everyone down, instead of giving in to the system that breeds violence whether for violence's sake or for something else. Though not perfect, Babae at Baril is a carefully crafted exercise about the systems that chain us every day.
An NPA member (Dionne Monsanto) is imprisoned after an operation that goes terribly wrong. She meets a soldier (Dionne Monsanto) who was part of the unit she was about to ambush. Both realize that they look exactly the same. Why is this so? What connects these two people? And can they find a common ground?
Kaaway sa Sulod's premise is interesting to say the least, but any brilliance behind the film is bogged down by an awkward edit and an overreliance on didactics. There's a subplot about possibly having the soldier infiltrate the NPA to assassinate a high ranking officer. This development would have opened up a lot of plotlines, but the movie doesn't really take this anywhere.
There is the intent to teach, perhaps, but all the talkiness makes the proceedings a little bit tedious. It's good that the film depicts the abuses committed towards leaders of progressive workers' organizations and the like (the film even has a scarily convincing stand in for a certain murderous general), but little is seen of the day to day struggle itself, which the aborted infiltration subplot could have addressed.
It's a good idea, boosted by an earnest performance from Monsanto, but the film's thesis wasn't communicated all too well.
We Want Short Shorts QCinema 2019 Short Shorts Reviews Edition
Let me just preface this by saying this is a wonderfully weird batch of shorts.
Spid is a fantastic exercise in form, from its sound design to its fuzzy analog images. It's a typical covert assassination story, but it made up for that with all its inventiveness and weirdness.
Here, Here is sort of a slow burn, but its depiction of the degradation of a small town reflected in personal scales is pretty compelling. It's slow and probably not everyone's cup of tea, but it kind of works.
Judy Free also plays with form (appropriately, Glenn Barit also helped with the making of this film) in depicting the OFW(?) father of a young girl as a pink amorphous blob. It's carried by an exceptional performance from Miel Espinosa, it's heartfelt and it manages to say a lot in such a short time.
Excuse Me, Miss, Miss, Miss hinges its plot on an absurd premise, but the absurdity is justified: contractual work as it is now is an absurdity, so why not resort to absurd solutions? It's also quite hilarious, and I think audiences will like it.
Isang Daa't Isang Mariposa is about an elderly trans woman who yearns for love lost. It's an impressive idea, though I kinda wish they fleshed out the story a bit more.
and finally we have Tokwifi, whose pronounciation is actually closer to Tok-wee-fee. I was honestly expecting extrajudicial killings through the internet but what I got instead was pretty awesome nevertheless: an examination of colonialism, indigenous tribes and the patently wrong Western notion of what "civilized" and "uncivilized" is. Everyone loves; some people just love differently than others.
*
Finally, we have Christophe Honore's On a Magical Night (French title: Chambre 212), an examination of a long term relationship viewed through a magical realism-tinged, slightly metafictional way. Maria (Chiara Mastroianni) has had many affairs in the course of her 25 years of marriage - the film even starts with the end of one of those affairs. When her husband Richard (Benjamin Biolay, who also happens to be Mastroianni's ex husband) finally finds out, she leaves their shared house and sleeps at the hotel next door.
The magic begins when various people show up at her apartment, trying to dissect the nature of Maria's relationship with her husband. This includes her former lovers, her husband's one great love, her deceased mother, and even a younger version of Richard himself. It's introspective, the proceedings playing out like an expanded, 90 minute long train of thought.
It reads like a play on film, and it's quite self-aware, funny and engaging, even though it can get quite confusing at times. The film examines the choices people make when they make a long term relationship, and why some people are meant to be with each other, even though it isn't that evident outwardly.
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