Big house, small house

The spirit of independent cinema rings true in the 2002 release Balay Daku, billed as the first full-length digital film in Ilonggo, a three-hour epic by the young Jan Philippe Carpio. Lav Diaz, writing in the Balay Daku website, said that the film could well set the direction of Philippine cinema, and that he’s seen it twice already. For our part, we’ve seen it once, over a couple of weekends: the first hour or so on a Saturday, then winding up the concluding two hours maybe a couple of Saturdays later, while events on the video screen remained relatively fresh in the mind.

If one is keen on local indie cinema, especially coming from the regions in our age of decentralization and becoming as they say, less Manila-centric, then Balay Daku is a virtual must-see, it captures well the mechanics of anti-Hollywood, where the narrative is unraveled in real time, the lingering exposition less a product of self-indulgence than of thoughtful autobiography. Kidlat Tahimik, in the same Daku website, is quoted as saying he was surprised that the film in fact had a script, since he (Tahimik) saw some common songlines in the gentle and rather subtle art of improvisation. If the scene called for ad libs, it was written down so right in the script.

Perhaps Balay Daku’s strongest point is its focus on family, a sort of coming home of the local boy from the harsh city, who finds that though one can never really go home again, there are some things that remain constant: friendship; the ties that bind with the long widowed matriarch (a fantastically low-key and endearing performance by the senior citizen actress); certain sights and sounds of the old town, such as the buzz of tricycles and jeeps and the cemetery in the middle of the road. No travelogue in the outright sense even from the point of view of the citified common-law wife of the protagonist, the landscapes explored here are mostly internal and, thus, more foreboding.

Even that last shot of a group photo during the surprise birthday party for the matriarch is replete with possibility as seen in the vacant chair near the center, and leaves the viewer hanging in this open-ended wrap-up. JP Carpio’s use of available light is more than commendable because perhaps his signature, and the tableaux settings, are worthy of traditional portraits when family was still family though nothing is hardly ever resolved.

The singsong Ilonggo language script is inspired and hit the spot of fellow Ilonggos, as only a common language can hit familiar heartstrings, the handy subtitles accommodating the outsider. If there are nitpicks of how at times the film backslides into telenovela land, as in, say, conversations between the hometown girl and the homecoming boy, this can be attributed to rookie jitters, as if the director did not know what to do with his hands.

Balay Daku is disarming as first films go, and the Bacolod scenery pays tribute to a city as well to a family, however slightly dysfunctional. And because indie cinema itself is a lesson in survival, the presence of such art can only mean we are truly blessed.

More Pinoy indie futures were seen in the recent Cinemalaya film festival last July, during which we caught the screening of two full-length feature films, the best cinematography winner Donsol, and the post-feminist Mudracks.

Compared to the largely impressionist shorts, the full-length feature was long on discipline and coherent storyline, which is not to say that less stamina was required in making the shorts, of which the black and white Orasyon won the top award.

As far as Donsol was concerned, technical finesse was obvious and already leagues ahead of any of last year’s entries. Angel Aquino’s best actress winning performance was, to put it simply, luminous, indeed something we haven’t seen for while in mainstream cinema. Adolfo Alix’s work in the whale shark-watching town in Sorsogon very possibly exploits the best equipment that digital can provide, and the result is a small town cinematic romance that barely steers clear of the maudlin. It is a coming of age story, perhaps even an initiation tale, but the many undercurrents are too tricky and complex to label Donsol outright. The photography is breathtaking, and the underwater scenes reveal a world only previously imagined, buttressing further that not only is love an ocean of emotions – as the movie poster says – but a subterranean tide pulling us every which way till it rends us apart and we find something which as yet can’t be put down in words.

Not as successful but no less intriguing was the Rio Locsin starrer, Mudracks, an offbeat movie of a downtrodden housewife who is eventually alienated from her own family. The hypnotic voiceover narration of the teenage daughter highlights that this is a Pinoy feminist film, one of the first in the new millennium, no small feat in a country that remains largely patriarchal despite having for the past five years a woman president. That things would come to a head was inevitable, and the grocery store assistant played by that brooding everyman last seen in Topel Lee’s Dilim, provides a way out for the Locsin character. The gradual transition from user to used and back again seems incidental and maybe academic in such strange milieus, but here we realize that we should take what we can find and make the most of it, short of borrowing someone else’s body to make us last the night.

The big winners, apart from Donsol, were the Dawn testament Tulad ng Dati, the rubber shoes fable Batad, and the indie recognizable Rotonda, which won best director for Ron Bryant, who last year gave us Baryoke. One might say that there is a certain snob appeal in independent cinema because it totally throws out the window any formulas or two-minute attention spans. It also gives us an alternative way of viewing things and restores cinema as the art of the possible, the primal visual storyteller devoid of any special effects, gimmicks or shortcuts that had slowly made the mainstream murder.