QCinema 2021 | QCShorts Short Reviews

 

City of Flowers touches upon a historical event that, until now, has barely returned to the public consciousness - the 2013 Zamboanga Siege. With that as a backdrop, it focuses on the human cost of that conflict that extends to the bereaved, orphaned and displaced. In our talk about the film (and more), director Xeph Suarez mentioned the fact that even people in Zamboanga have forgotten about the event - this film, thus, is a way to bring it back into focus.

In Kaj Palanca's Henry, the frame is packed with meaning from start to finish: curious shots of hands and below the hips of two strangers, scaffolding acting as prison bars, help wanted posters as offers of servitude, curious views of the sky through unfinished windows. It's a film that visualizes struggle, a never-ending push against unfairness. Our characters negotiate their due compensation with invisible lords that treat their bodies and their labor as commodities, replaceable and disposable. People like Henry's brother are made to erect houses that they will never live in. But to those fighting the same fight, there is solidarity; humans treating each other as humans, deserving of compassion and even love.

I get so sad sometimes embodies the distillation of a very particular aesthetic - one that evokes feelings of loneliness and isolation. It's filled with images of what-ifs, fantasies of a different life, posters that imply not only a far-away place, but also a venue for escape. Trust factors into that too, as anonymity becomes a limiting factor for genuine intimacy.

Within the abstract images of It’s Raining Frogs Outside there is a sense of unease and simmering anger. In the past year and a half the world has gone mad but the outlet for processing these emotions has become harder to access, especially without the support of others. It is imaginative and layered in its abstractness, in what is perhaps the most interesting short of the year.

Mighty Robo V draws upon the tokusatsu and mighty robot genres and also from shows such as The Office, in its mockumentary style depiction of a giant robot defense agency that exists in severe dysfunction. The real world parallels are not unsubtle, which reflects, much like the previous film in this write-up, a growing sense of frustration and dissatisfaction with an inept bureaucracy, a kakistocracy in its truest sense. It's also uproariously funny and one of my personal favorites. Perhaps my only complaint would be that I wish there was more of it; the material is so rich that it could probably be expanded into a miniseries or movie, if the makers wish to do so.

Skylab feels like a film made in the past, in both good and bad ways. It's not as technically polished as the other films, but it does make a point about how history repeats and how threats to our way of life are not flashy like a space station falling from the sky, but insidious, silently running in the background.

***

The QCinema shorts are showing at Gateway Cineplex and at ktx.ph.

QCinema 2021 | Memoria

 

(the following review is an extended version of a review originally posted on Letterboxd.)

When I was in first or second grade, I got a hold of a tape recorder. Initially intended for use by my father for work purposes, he quickly forgot about it. My cousins and I used that recorder to make jokes and mess around, but looking back almost 30 years later, it now stands as an indelible record of that time. One of the things we did with that recorder was interview random people in the large ancestral home we spent our summers in. Most of the people we talked to in these tapes are already dead, and listening to their voices many years later feels disconnected from my own recollections of those people. Memory is plastic, molded and shaped by our own subjectivity, then slowly eroded through time.

In Memoria, the search for meaning behind strange noises in the night becomes a personal, metaphysical excavation of one's self, then transforms once again into an exploration of how memory, when shared, leads to completely different experiences, and lets us tap into something larger than ourselves: a sort of collective memory, blood, sweat and tears seeping into the earth.

Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is awakened by a mysterious sound. We are not told what the sound is, and it seems only she can hear it. It is an experience that seems exclusively hers. Her distress becomes curiosity, as she tries to recreate the sound - by recreating it, perhaps she can also share it. She tries to communicate this feeling, this experience, first with a sound engineer named Hernan (Juan Pablo Urrego) and she succeeds, although even then there is something slightly off. Nevertheless, a connection has been made between the two of them.

There was a time in college when I underwent a particularly traumatic experience. I was being harshly scolded one way or another, by myself or a group of us, directly or indirectly, by someone else - maybe a single person or a group of people. I do not remember the details, nor the words they spoke to me. But until now, I remember the cadence of their harsh words, and what I felt in response to it.

Sound can both be a vessel for memory and mode of transmission. When a memory, like sound, is shared or experienced, it passes through the recipient, resonating with their own life experiences, creating something different every time. The director and cast have mentioned how this is a film about trauma, and I get it. Those who have been traumatized are reliving a painful memory, and when they relate that to someone else, those people may empathize with that pain, but they may never perfectly understand it. However, what I just said is only Joe and Tilda's interpretation of the film, in other words, that's only how the film resonates with their own experiences.  

In that collective shared memory, whether preserved through sound, music, or the bone fragments of people long dead, we gain perspective, a sense of reality, and even empathy. We are not told of Jessica's pain, if she even has something like that. We are not told of her past experiences, or if her sister is involved with the creation of that sound, or if she is escaping or reliving her own trauma instead of someone else's. But still, we try to understand. The memory itself may not be as important as what it invokes in us. 

In a different, maybe broader sense, it says something about cinema itself - cinema as an externalization of memory resonates with our own life experiences, making us remember trauma, or grief, or profound happiness and contentment. In fact, look at any aggregation of discourse on the film and see how varied the responses are to the film - awe or indifference, depending on who you ask, all of them grasping for some truth or meaning that may only feel true and meaningful to them. But if memory (or cinema, for that matter, like in this case) does make a connection, somehow - then strange and wonderful things can happen.

Present Confusion Reviews | Dune (Villeneuve, 2021)

 

My first exposure to Dune was when I was a young boy. The Far East Network's Philippine arm (FEN-P), made to service American troops stationed abroad, was to screen David Lynch's 1984 adaptation. I was a fan of science fiction even at a young age and the strange images of Lynch's equally strange adaptation hooked me in. I prepared myself and watched the film on its scheduled Friday night showing while my mother was asleep, hoping that my father wouldn't come home - at least until the film was over.

What I ended up watching (my first Lynch film, as it turns out) was indeed strange, but was otherwise a rather conventional take on the hero's journey, or monomyth. In Lynch's interpretation Paul Atreides' words are the words of God Himself. Lynch's Paul is chosen by destiny and endowed with the power of miracles - powers strong enough that it can make it rain on a desert planet.

FEN-P went away with the Americans, leaving a country, long made complacent under the sway of colonial masters, to fend on its own. It hasn't been a smooth ride since, and we're just months away from an election that will affect the lives of millions. But the Americans' hold on our history, as allies and liberators that "gently" carried us to self-sufficiency, remains. Of course, real history paints a different, if a more nuanced, picture, but colonial mentalities tend to stick for a long time.

It was only during my college days that I read Frank Herbert's seminal 1965 science fiction novel Dune and found out that it actually deconstructs the idea of monomyths. Monomyths are deeply rooted in the creation of many religions, which is why they take root and spread so easily. In the midst of an impoverished, suffering population, the idea of a messiah that could solve all their problems is enticing. It has been used as the tool of many a conqueror in Earth's history, and it was used here to serve Paul's interests. While Herbert's "original" Paul has superhuman powers as well, he is but a speck in the larger machinations of the universe. In its omniscient third person point of view, the book is written as if it were told as a legend, by historians. Quotations from the writings of Irulan (who serves as Paul's personal historian) preface most of the chapters of the book. Myth and history are intertwined - mythmakers create history and mold it to serve their ideology or purpose, regardless of what the person at the center of that myth thinks about it. Truth is not necessarily a requirement in the creation of these myths. Like what happened in my country, history was molded into myth, turning conquerors into allies and saviors.

In that sense, I think that Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune (or at least, the first part of it) deeply understands this theme. Subliminally, it does so with its grandiose framing, juxtaposing its characters with large and imposing vistas - sometimes so grand that the scenery dwarfs its subjects. Villeneuve's Paul is much like Herbert's Paul - possessing all these powers yet reluctant to step into the role that mythmakers and history have laid out for him. He is deeply aware of what a leader like him can accomplish, and what a leader like him can leave behind - veneration leads to fanaticism, which leads to nothing good in the history of man, ever. In fact, Herbert's subsequent books deal exactly with the folly of charismatic leaders - specifically the consequence of their legacy, and the curse of omniscience.

This idea of the smallness of the individual in the grander scheme of things is also seen in how Villeneuve decides to portray the story's point of view. In the books we are privy to the schemes of the Emperor and his plan to eliminate a potential threat to his throne. Thus, in the books, one of the most compelling elements in the story is the constant double-guessing and subterfuge involved, perhaps embodied the most in the characters of Count Fenring and his wife, both characters that have been omitted in this adaptation and in Lynch's 1984 film. In Villeneuve's film, we see the goings on mainly through the eyes of Paul and his immediate family. There is a sense of something going on in the background, but Paul does not completely know, and by extension we also do not know what that looming threat is.

Paul moves through the story assailed by visions - not just of the future but of alternate realities, destinies where foes become friends and destinies where his rise to power fails. Part one thus ends on a thematic level - albeit not a very satisfying one for some - where Paul locks the course into one particular future with potentially horrifying consequences for humanity as a while.

With all that said, the narrative meat of the matter lies in the second half of the book - exactly the half that hasn't been adapted yet. I do not feel like I can completely assess Villeneuve's vision for Dune as a whole without seeing that part. For now, all I have is this "incomplete" film. And even in assessing this work by itself, the film has its share of problems. In trying to prune down the film into something that can be digested by mass audiences, the adaptation loses some of the cultural complexities and nuance that Herbert injected into his book. It's possible that Villeneuve will address these problems in future installments of the work, but as something that stands on its own, it's reasonable to come up with the assessment that this feels like half of a film.