Digital Films

There's The Rub : Time out

Conrado de Quiros dequiros@info.com.ph
Inquirer News Service

TIME out to talk about more serious things. There's a bit of good news amid the squalor of bad news in this country, and that is the lease on life digital and independent ("indie") films are giving the local movie industry.

In case you still haven't heard, the local movie industry is virtually dead. You can hear its dying gasps from here to Aparri. That industry, which used to produce close to 300 movies a year, is now producing only 70 or so. And the survivors aren't doing all that well. Reputable directors and actors have turned to TV instead, where work may not be vastly lucrative but it is at least steady. Their talents though are being frittered away in productions -- "fantaseryes" [TV fantasy series], "telenovelas" [TV soap], and so on -- that cater to the least common denominator. These are hard times.

The obvious way out seems to be for the industry to explore new avenues-new stories, new faces, new ways of filmmaking-to lure back audiences. But exploration or experimentation is the last thing producers want to do, given the high cost of making movies, particularly star fees, and given the not-so-sterling showing of movies that have done exactly that over the years. Their instinct has been to rely on formula, which demonstrably no longer works. It's been a chicken-and-egg situation for some time, one seemingly without resolution.

Digital and Indie films, which are often one and the same, may just have found the answer to it. They are relatively cheaper to make. And their makers can afford to experiment the way the producers of commercial movies cannot, or do not. They have lower costs-cheaper equipment, lower fees (the better-known faces are going to them for the psychic income more than the financial one)-and are in a better position to recover them even with smaller audiences.

Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil, the director of "Mga Pusang Gala" [Stray Cats], tells me she used digital cameras that cost P3,000 a day. Their analog counterparts range from P15,000 to P20,000 a day. Of course, the high-end digital cameras would have cost P40,000 a day, but only George Lucas' cousins in the Philippines would contemplate renting that.

Nap Jamir, the cinematographer of "Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros," agrees and says the trick is using the P3,000-a-day digital cameras creatively to overcome their limitations. Lighting in particular can do wonders to hide the blemishes. Which he shows in "Pagdadalaga": the graininess shows only in the daytime street scenes, which look a bit overexposed.

If those two movies, "Mga Pusa" and "Pagdadalaga," are anything to go by, Filipino movies are more likely to recover faster than Filipino politics. Both represent the wave of the future in terms of infusing local filmmaking with new sensibilities. "Mga Pusa" makes the bigger gamble by aiming at a middle-class audience, with its middle-class themes, middle-class language (the dialogue is in English in many parts) and middle-class attitudes. It adopts a self-conscious or self-mocking stance toward this: One of its main characters is a romance novelist for a company whose editor cannot appreciate writing stories for the middle class because their audience is "masa" [masses]. In one scene, his editor tells him no masa woman lives alone, his premise for a story is implausible. His editor tries to corroborate this with his secretary who promptly answers, "I do."

I can only hope the movie itself meets with a long queue in movie houses defying "wise-money" expectations.

"Mga Pusa" tells of a gay man, Boyet (Ricky Davao), and his neighbor, a single woman, Marta (Irma Adlawan), who are at the mercy of their itinerant lovers. Its theme is (almost inevitably) that literal stray cats are more worth caring for than their human counterparts. It goes on to explore the relationships between Boyet and Irma and their lovers with impressive richness and complexity. One may quibble about the tone being a little uneven at times (it strives to maintain a tragicomic one throughout, though not always successfully) and with some parts being a little predictable, but those are nothing. They are more than offset by the movie's humongous virtues, not the least of them the acting and directing. Ellen essays one very mature and confident directorial job for a first outing, and the lead players are fantastic, Adlawan in particular.

The movie's many allures start off with its title, which of course is richly ironic, the coming-of-age, or into maidenhood, of a boy named Maximo. The curious title refers to a gay boy living in the slums with his family of petty crooks who falls in love with a cop, which divides his loyalties. That premise, while being dramatic, also risks being contrived, and the movie teeters on the edge of the latter in some parts. But it manages on the whole to walk the tightrope, and ferociously gracefully. The movie is at its best in exploring the relationships between the family members. It does a magnificent job not just giving a face to people who proverbially live on the knife's edge but in demolishing the stereotypes about them, which are really just two ways of saying the same thing. It gets a trifle shaky in the dynamics between (the quite literal) cops and robbers.

Michiko Yamamoto, the scriptwriter who also wrote "Magnifico," gets to be a better storyteller by the day. The performances are uniformly riveting, Ping Medina (Pen's son) is a revelation. But the plaudits easily go to Nathan Lopez (Maximo) who was given a special citation by the Cinemalaya Awards. It is totally deserved. That boy is going places, very far places.

What can I say? It's nice to know that art at least is flourishing in this country even if morals are not. Never mind the local movie industry. Do yourself a favor. Go watch these movies.