Movie Review for Manila

City In A Bottle

by Philbert Ortiz Dy
posted on Thursday, July 23, 2009 in Movie Reviews

Manila is a daring little picture that takes two of our country’s most celebrated young independent filmmakers and has them pay tribute to two our country’s most beloved cinematic masters. But it has them condensing two Filipino masterpieces into a single ninety-minute feature. While the talent is definitely on show, this idea was flawed from the beginning. The city is made up of bigger stories than they’re able to tell.

The film is divided into two segments. The first one, directed by Raya Martin, tells the story of William (Piolo Pascual), a drug addict who finds himself wandering the streets of Manila, looking to reconnect with the people he’s abandoned because of his drug use. The second part, directed by Adolfo Alix Jr., follows Philip (also played by Piolo Pascual), a bodyguard for the son of a congressman. Philip believes that he’s like a brother to his boss, but he quickly finds that his loyalty may be misplaced when his boss leaves him abandoned after an incident gets deadly, and he’s forced into hiding until the heat dies down.

The two segments are based on two classic Filipino films: Ishmael Bernal’s Manila By Night and Lino Brocka’s Jaguar. Of the two, the second segment, directed by Adolfo Alix Jr., sticks to the source material more closely, largely following the same story while modernizing it somewhat. The first segment, directed by Raya Martin, barely uses the characters from Bernal’s classic. It’s an interesting experiment, but the final product isn’t all that great, really. It’s just a really strange project when you think about it, condensing two great classic Filipino films into a single ninety-minute feature. There’s too much lost in translation as these stories to be replicated in a fraction of their original runtime. Of the filmmakers, it appears to be Martin who realizes the futility of the venture. Instead of trying to tell the same story, Martin instead creates a subversive little piece of cinema that explores the atmosphere of the city more than anything else, resulting in a very loose but remarkably dense piece of art filmmaking. Alix’s more straightforward approach makes his segment more watchable, but ultimately less satisfying. The time he’s allotted just isn’t enough to give his story the layers that the original had or the richness that the characters deserve. Both segments look great, though, both lensed masterfully but Albert Banzon.

The movie is obviously meant to be a serious vehicle for Piolo Pascual, this film becoming his first real stab into the realm of art cinema. For the most part, he’s okay, but he’s still to shed some of the bad habits he’s picked from working in the studio system. He looks like he’s acting, his technique never far from his face. In many of the scenes, he doesn’t quite reach the truth that he’s aiming for, though he does get rather close sometimes. The cast is filled to the brim with great talents, from Alessandra de Rossi to Anita Linda, and they do as well as they always do.

Honestly, Manila is a little baffling. Just the very idea of compressing two great films into a single feature just seems like a misstep all in all, and though the people involved are undoubtedly talented, their vision can’t restore what was lost in the translation. With this approach, nothing really seems to work out for the best: the two original works aren’t properly given their due, the two directors are constrained by conceit, and the audience is left with a work that while interesting at times, feels mostly empty and incomplete.

My Rating:

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