For its tenth year, the Cinema One Originals Festival has funded just ten films, but they’ve been given bigger grants than usual. The festival has expanded in other ways, introducing an international program that includes films from Asian luminaries such as Hong Sang-soo, Ann Hui, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. In our coverage, we will be covering the ten new Filipino features and the shorts film program. Here we go.
Esprit de Corps, directed by Kanakan-Balintagos (who most may know as Aureaus Solito), is largely made up of these technically impressive long takes set in a dark ROTC armory. There, an ROTC officer interrogates cadets aspiring to take his position next year. He tests them, questioning their resolve and putting them through severe physical exertion. But slowly, the interrogation starts to morph into something else entirely, the officer plying his position of power into a means of seduction.
The long, fluid shots are indeed impressive, but I'm not entirely convinced that the technique used here is the best way to tell this story. In doing these takes, the movie ends up squandering the full power of cinematic language. The fluidity and movement of the camera run counter to the power dynamics being depicted in these scenes. One cannot discount the sheer audacity of the film's methods; aside from being a dazzling display of camera control, the pure exertion brings out powerful performances from the actors. But as impressive as it all is, it mostly just builds to something that fails to transcend its theatrical roots.
Remton Siega Zuasola's Soap Opera juxtaposes the heightened drama of television shows with the more sober realities of everyday life. The film tells the story of Liza and Noel, a Cebuano couple trying to scam Ben, and American who's been chatting online with Liza. The two pretend to be brother and sister as they lead Ben and get him to pay for a new home and treatment for their ailing son Robert. But soon Ben becomes a bigger part of their life than they expected, and Noel begins to resent what his family is doing with the American.
The film will occasionally cut to a pair of television soaps: a superhero story starring Bugoy Cariño and a romance starring Lovi Poe and Rocco Nacino. It's terribly sophisticated stuff, the film depicting a society seeking respite from the complexity of their struggles in fictional worlds where the choices are clear, where heroes are heroes and villains are villains. In the less colorful world of Liza and Noel, their circumstances have brought them to a plot that offers none of the familiar structure of TV dramas, even as they find parallels between their lives and the lives of their idols. The film falters in its last few minutes, as it rushes through a contrived climax that desperately needs more time to develop. But as it is, Soap Opera is a tremendously smart film that deserves to be seen.
Director Dodo Dayao starts Violator with seemingly disconnected scenes that build a foundation of strangeness. Mundane conversations lead into scenes of terror, the sequences often ending with someone dying. The plot only really shifts into gear in the back half, telling the story of a group of people stranded in a police station during a typhoon. The action starts when a perp is put into lockup. The thing is, the perp might be possessed.
Violator works on the theory that horror is best expressed through the unknown. It constantly rejects the familiar, building an eerie atmosphere right from the start as it explores this world of strangeness, where death and violence are simply mundane realities that intrude into the most innocuous of moments. Conventional horror fans will likely have little patience for the film's experiment, but it pays off in spades in the end, as the film reveals itself to be an apocalyptic riff on John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. Rather than a gang of violent youths, the inhabitants of this particular precinct are besieged by the end of the world. A fantastic performance from Joel Lamangan gives the a film a solid center. It actually makes one wonder what Lamangan might have been able to accomplish in a more standard structure that gave more importance to traditional character arcs.
Jay Abello’s Red is brimming with ideas. The titular character, played by Jericho Rosales, is Bacolod’s most capable fixer. The film filters his tale through Milton (Nico Antonio), a radio voice actor who holds court in the central market, telling stories of Red’s exploits to a captive audience. Red is called in to fix a problem for a rich kid who got into trouble with some drug dealers. But the kid is a wildcard, and Red’s involvement with him just puts him into peril.
There’s a lot going on in there, and a lot of it is pretty interesting. The film delves into the nature of stories, crafting a framework that turns a story of lowlifes into a bit of modern mythologizing. And there’s an intriguing vein of class tension being explored in the movie. But the direction and the editing don’t keep up with the ideas. The film loses steam in its middle section as it struggles to balance all the competing threads. When the walls should be closing in on the main character, the film tends to cut away to something else, like an interlude that expounds on Red’s relationship with his childhood sweetheart. While the film provides plenty of style and flavor, it just keeps breaking up its own momentum.
The entire run of Cinema One Originals is from November 9 to 18 in four venues: Fairview Terraces, Glorietta, Trinoma, and Greenhills Dolby Atmos theaters. For more information and updates on the Cinema One Originals Festival, visit Cinema One's official Facebook page (www.facebook.com/Cinema1channel).
