When the sleeping typhoon blows off its cocoon
The butterfly embraces the sun.
Such poecy from Perfumed Nightmare (Mababangong Bangungot) won the film wide acclaim.
With the running theme of the film alluding to the trap of the American Dream and the innate strength of Filipino values, in retrospect, it becomes the cocoon of a corporate Western-oriented career. With the fury of a typhoon, independent filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik (KT) tore off his Wharton diploma in 1972 and embraced the sun, turning his life around as an economist to become an artist.
Widely known as the father of Philippine indie cinema, KT debuted in the film world with his premiere work, Perfumed Nightmare, which is now regarded as a classic. The naivete in style is disarming for its honesty and profound reflections on Filipino values linger longer in the mind for its humor and fantasy renditions. Forty years after it won the International Film Critics Jury Prize at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival, the scent of its message still goes around in screenings across the globe.
On September 14 the University of the Philippines Film Institute featured the film to commemorate its 40th year during the celebration of 100 years of Philippine cinema in the conference Sandaan.
The film is highly personal, both in what appears to be the artist’s meditation in a search for a world meaningful to him and in the casting.
A trivia on the making of the film portrays his intimacy with his work and the characters chosen for the film—the story of the lady egg vendor played by Georgette Baudry.
Six eggs and twelve yolks
Baudry is a true-to-life character in the Paris sojourn of KT while working for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
He bought eggs from Baudry’s cart and was fascinated by her eggs that came with two yolks. Sharing a lot of small talk, she told him that they came from a stock with the same grandfather, a tale quite unusual and great for the telling. In the film, he comically flops the eggs into a frying pan and is in disbelief of the two egg yolks and keeps doing it fascinated by the quaintness.
But KT held a regard for Baudry as a sentimental part of his Paris life, and, when making Perfumed Nightmare, invited her to play a role in the film. To his surprise, Baudry replied with a tearful nostalgia of her time as a a theater actress and in silent films. “After 50 years, I can go back to cinema,” she replied.
Baudry plays her part as a friend to KT, but she stands as the only friend in the film where loneliness and disenchantment begins to creep in his consciousness. Baudry, together with a fruit vendor are described as the last merchants of the four seasons about to be gobbled up by a large supermarket, which actually happened in real life, their carts folding up after the huge Centre George Pompidou takes up the space.
Some four years after finishing Perfumed Nightmare, once in a visit to Paris he is invited to the first cinematic festival. Flipping through the brochure, he finds the classic silent film of Raymond Bernard, Le Miracle Des Loups (1924) and in the still picture is Baudry cozying up with the wolves as a double to actress Yvonne Sergyl. It is the story of a princess escaping from the castle and pursued by hunters. Just as they were about to catch up with her, 12 wolves come to protect her. It was Baudry at ease with the wolves that gave the title Miracle of the Wolves to the film. KT then went to pick her up from her home only to be told that she was already in an old folks’ home in Avignon, 800 km from Paris. Determined, he hired a car and rushed to her. “She really wanted to go, but, quite feeble then was not allowed to leave to watch herself in the festival’s opening film with the original sound track to be played by the Paris symphony orchestra,” KT narrates. It was nonetheless a sweet reunion of old friends.
The segment on Baudry is a major portrayal of KT’s dream to go to America and become an astronaut starting to become a nightmare. While the title Mababangong Bangungot was chosen for its allegorical melody that easily translates into any other language , it aptly captures the message that America or western culture, the big and wide West, is not as scintillatingly perfumed afterall, and KT yearns for the strength of his own culture.
KT also also strays from conventional ways of moviemaking in that his script is completed after the film is done. Real life footage and fantasy are trademarks in all of KT’s films, brilliantly collaged into a storyline that consistently tell of the old wisdom of forefathers, of lolos and lolas as he puts it, and of the unique strength of the Filipino culture, in the hope that the vanishing indigenous worldview fast being swallowed by colonial mindsets can be appreciated and restored.
KT himself plays the lead role in Perfumed Nightmare, as a jeepney driver in the small town of Balian, who dreams of one day reaching America and enjoying the wonders of Western modernity. An American lures him to Paris where he works filling up candy machines, again a real life job he once tried while in Paris. There he writes letters to his grandmother back home raving about “doors that open for you” and “floors that walk for you”, in the film he comically plays as a naive probinsyano stumbling around automatic technologies.
When given the chance to fly by Concorde to New York, he has seen enough, especially the corporate greed of supermarkets displacing merchants of the Four Seasons, to know that Amercia can be but a perfumed nightmare, and returns home where her heart is in a flying giant chimney powered by his breath.
The characters are played by his relatives, his grandmother, and local village friends playing themselves, but, given a context that lends to form a message of love for one’s own culture. The film is shot against a backdrop of local scenery and interludes of local traditions such as the practice of flagellation or penitensya, during Holy Week and circumsicion of boys in puberty (tuli) by the riverside chewing guava leaves that they spit onto their bleeding part to avoid infection.
KT says that the film becomes even more relevant today with the many woeful stories of OFWsthe scent of an overseas dream drawing more Filipinos turning more pungent and nightmarish with the passing years.
Perfumed Nightmare blazed a trail for Philippine indie films, and more worthy the cause of KT that every storyteller must move with his “sariling dwende” (inner fairy tale). Perfumed Nightmare was shot on a shoestring budget, about $10 thousand, and a lot of resourcefulness, with himself, family members and friends playing roles and his voice-over dominating the soundtrack and holding the pieces of footage together.
In a sense, KT himself was an accidental filmmaker. Even while as an economist (1969-1974), his own sariling dwende was stirring in him and in 1971, he pitched hay in Norway and started writing a play for 60 days. Returning to Paris, he gets restless and goes on a sabbatical to finish it. To make money and support his leave, he sells wind chimes of capiz shells and daschunds mascots at the Munich Olympics, but the hostage crisis left him broke and stuck in Germany. Meeting his wife, they stay in a commune where he meets film student Werner Penzel. “I watched very closely how he was filming,” he said.
His love affair with film begins and he returns to the Philippines with another film student Hartmut Lerch, who plays the American in the acclaimed film.
After 20 screenings in 20 festivals of Perfumed Nightmare, Ford Coppola, who was then finishing his shots in the Philippines of Apocalypse Now, was introduced to KT’s film and introduced it to America under his Amercian Zoetrope production company. Four decases after, it continues to delight and impress audiences and critics for its refreshing approach. “I entered the film world through the back door, not the usual schooled approach,”he said. In fact it is apparent in Perfumed Nightmare that he was learning filmmaking while shooting it.
To this day, many more accolades after, KT imparts the spirit and simplicity of telling your story with your sariling dwende to following breeds of filmmakers and artists, to blow off the cocoon of imposed formulas and embrace the sun with one’s own “indie-genius” style.