PPP 2020: He Who Is Without Sin

 

Movies about the plasticity of truth have been around for a while now, perhaps most notably Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece Rashomon, which presented one story in four conflicting accounts. There are similarities in the structure of Rashomon with Jason Paul Laxamana's latest film, He Who Is Without Sin, but such similarities are superficial at best, and while Rashomon works well to confront the complexities of truth and truth-telling, He Who Is Without Sin fails in that same respect.

He Who is Without Sin tells the story of Martin (Elijah Canlas) a broadcast journalism student who gets to meet his idol Lawrence (Enzo Pineda), a popular TV broadcast reporter. The story of their meeting gets told thrice, with each iteration filled with even more lurid details. Additionally, we see that, for some reason, Canlas' character isn't exactly a reliable narrator of events.

The film then seems to follow the structure of Kurosawa's film, but adds a number of complications into the mix that don't exactly help the proceedings. Martin's characterization is erratic, the script giving him random insane outbursts that are inconsistent with his character. If one were to read He Who is Without Sin as a work talking about sexual assault and the reaction of survivors to said assault, the implications are unfortunate. It seems to give the impression that victims rationalize their abuse by telling themselves that they wanted it in the first place. Whether that subtext is intentional or not, we can't say for sure.

In terms of the story's perspective (i.e. from where the story is told), most of the perspectives seemingly come from Martin only; and even that is in doubt. The sources of all three stories feel like they are presented from nowhere in particular, though with a perceived bias towards Martin. The film's stories and truths are incommensurable, and while that in itself is not a bad thing, it's what happens in the ending that damns He Who is Without Sin.

In Rashomon, while the film fails to reconcile all four stories, there is a note of hope in the end. That film shows that while humans may believe in certain things to benefit their own self interest, that's not always true. He Who is Without Sin just ends abruptly and cynically, and that's a mistake that Laxamana has made before with films like Instalado (2017). He seems to be more interested in describing a problem, layering it with all sorts of complications, building a milieu around that and abandoning it all just before anything interesting really happens. The filmmaking to support the story just isn't there. It honestly feels like a first draft, which is a shame.

And there is, of course, the elephant in the room: Lawrence and Martin are both mediamen, both unlikeable, both presented as products of a systemic, all-consuming rot within media itself. Why would we trust the truth of these truth tellers if they are horrible people? While one can reason away such subtext as the actions of isolated individuals, unrepresentative of the whole, and as an appeal towards critical thinking, the timing is very suspect, considering that both actual fascists and fascist wannabes have been fostering distrust of media for a long time. Laxamana could have used the film as an appeal for responsible journalism, but he cowers from his own questions at the last minute.