|
MY
major complaint about Brilliante Mendoza’s Serbis is not
the failure of its oral service but its aural disservice
to the human ears. Halfway through the film I was
half-cupping my ears to save whatever dialogue I could
salvage from this elegy to stand-alone moviehouses and
the industry they spawn in their ruins: prostitution and
perversion, if we may believe the ideology of this film.
The
filmmaker can quote principles and practices linked to
cinema verite or direct cinema but, at the end of a
film-viewing day, these statements are intentions. Like
the moviehouse it portrays, Serbis must be appraised,
appreciated or admonished (as some readers are doing)
separately, alone. One cannot premise the acceptance of
a film by declaring that its portrayal of hard-core
reality can turn off consumers. There are films that
succeed because it is able to fuse form and content, i.e,
they portray the grossness of life by showing the filth.
The
case at hand says that the end-product will have to face
the sunset in all its glory as a product and not as a
commodity that seeks shelter—if we are to take the press
releases and news reports—behind concepts and art
theories.
Such
is the fate of the much-ballyhooed Serbis that its place
in film history must be placed in the context of its
predecessors and/or all those who have joined this
entrepreneurial activity called film festivals.
As of
this writing, words are being ascribed to Dante Mendoza,
the director of the film, that inform us he is himself
surprised that Cannes was shocked with his film. I do
not want to dispute the shock value of the film, but I
doubt if the varied audiences in that film festival were
really shocked at the sex scenes or the filth in the
film. Gratuitous is the word, which means that people
were shocked because the film was blatantly trying to
shock.
I
wasn’t.
I was
shocked, however, that a film with all those underground
elements cannot touch me. I am surprised that a story
about a family living in what has been described as an
Art Deco movie house (a retro Art Deco) does not at all
intrigue me. I feel debased that a film depicting all
kinds of debasement is not debasing at all.
Is it
perhaps the fact that all those scenes “discovered” for
the big screen by the writers and filmmakers behind
Serbis are regularly appropriated as bits of tabloid
news by our newscast that is more cinema verite than all
the potential contestants in film festivals abroad?
Think Imbestigador and XXX.
When
at last the silver screen pays tribute to that
phenomenon, there is a demand for more acute portrayal.
We expect to be seared, to be more than shocked by the
power of the film, to be reminded once more that
filmmaking, to paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola, is to
summon magic.
We do
not expect magic in the reporting of Mike Enriquez when
he stumbles upon a private house that stages sex shows
for gay clients. Depending on your politics and taste,
you can squirm or be angry but you do not bring into the
discussion the dynamics of art or the problems of
aesthetics. When a filmmaker, however, enters that house
of assignation or ventures into moviehouses where sex is
the commodity for the lonely and dispossessed and the
creatures in the margins, we look to a perspective, an
articulation of worldview.
If we
may bring in that exposé as an example, more than the
judgmental, we anticipate the visual and the aural to
complete our education as human beings. We look to the
filmmaker to make sense of that phenomenon dirty and
perverted to some. If, as with some auteur like
Pasolini, the filmmaker holds our hand and asks us do
descend into hell, then that film will allow us to
engage in that act. And also disengage.
Sex is
not the bane of Serbis. It is in the use and misuse of
sex that negates the possible boon it could have brought
upon the film. Sex is all over that moviehouse but its
images are all flattened out, like the unidimensional
figures announcing the film being shown. The film is
also confused as to what gaze or gazes will be employed.
Is it going to play the voyeur or the voyager? The
social worker or the avid tour guide?
The
opening scene of the young girl naked in front of the
mirror is a confused one. She remains naked for a long
time. Who is looking at her? The film seems to answer
that: a young child is looking at her. In the moviehouse
while all those couplings and uncouplings are taking
place, the child is seen again looking at the happening.
What does the film want us to think, that we must squirm
because a child is exposed to these lurid acts?
Why a
moral gaze in a film that is supposedly doing an
in-your-face portrayal of the gritty and the real? But
then the boy disappears again and we are back to the
documentary feel of the film, the camera bobbing up and
down, the music grating and the sound of cars and the
external world imploding in our ears even as on the
screen the world remains quiet.
The
film is glaringly conflicted in its psychology. It does
not wish to condemn the sins of commission in the
moviehouse but it does not wish also to acknowledge the
sins of omissions we can attribute to the family that
owns the moviehouse. In Serbis, the family has nothing
to do really with the cinema. The daughter looks out of
the window and enjoys and cries a bit over the daily
activities there. The other son comes back to explain to
his mother why he sided with his father in the court
case. The father of the young child is merely bothered
with the running of the small eatery. The young girl
wants to grow up and the girlfriend wants to be married
because she is pregnant. The matriarch spends her time
fighting her own battle and reciting lines about laundry
as metaphor of life. A major problem about the film
Serbis is that it does not have any emotional or
political or sociological handle that can aid us in
navigating its terrain. Who feels for the matriarch, the
nanay of Gina Pareño, when we do not see her as part of
the scenario?
As for
the moviehouse, it is there. A mere site. A setting.
The
film is not all bad service. For one, it has written for
the big screen some of the most colorful and oddest
characters—Felliniesque almost. These characters,
however, suffer from lines that are declarative in a
landscape that is consciously labeled. Note: the
moviehouse is named Family. Note: a young hustler is
picked up by a policeman who shows to the camera his
gun.
This
is not super-reality, this is didactic cinema at its
worst. Still, we can commend Jaclyn Jose and, to a
certain degree, Gina Pareño for making the film worth
the ticket. Ignoring the makeup that makes Jose and
Pareño look like Ladino Indians, the two can teach other
actors how to act before a camera. I like to say that we
must stop giving Pareño these dismal roles that call for
her to tap her hysteria. In Ploning, she was made to
rant like a one-woman Greek Chorus transplanted in the
tropics. In the absence of Nora Aunor, Pareño has become
a favorite. Like Aunor, Pareño is one actor with a gift
for black and edgy comedy.
Cannes
has always been an elusive festival for Filipino films.
When the announcement came that a film from our country
was competing, the conclusion I gave was: this must be
an exceptional film. It was not a stray comment. I liked
Mendoza’s Masahista and described it in my review as
“intriguingly touching.” Serbis, however, appears to be
tactile, but its touch is neither here nor there. We
remember the boil on one character’s buttock because it
is sadly more breathtaking than those oral jobs in the
dark. |
Reeling