Kinatay

Roger Ebert gave Kinatay (Butchered) his damning judgment as the "worst film ever" screened in the annual film festival at Cannes. Yet the Philippine entry won its 2009 Best Director prize for Brillante Mendoza. The Palme D'Or that year was awarded to The White Ribbon, the jury having the usual mission impossible of deliberately honouring two different films for the top prizes (and a third for its screenplay, etc). Mendoza was lucky.

For the first third of his movie, the focus of the excellent hand-held cinematography is on daylit Manila's happy-go-lucky environment. Twenty-year-old police cadet Peping (Coco Martin) is getting married to the mother of their child, in a registrar's office followed by a small family meal in a fast-food cafe.

A wealthy friend pays for the meal, and Peping filches the tip left on the table to give it to another guest who'd asked for a loan. That sudden note of amorality is intensified when night falls and Peping is seen as a small link in a long chain of small pay-offs made by street hawkers to a local gang. Promised further financial gain, the cash-strapped rookie joins another petty gangster in a van of enforcers with police connections. After a lengthy, mostly non-speaking, ride through the ugly urban nightscapes, the anxious rookie ends up realising their target is a drug-addicted go-go bar girl.

It's true cinema noir for the next hour, in naturally-lit semi-darkness in the van, beside a dirt road for the five men's group urination, and in a rural house with a basement. The woman is known to the gang leaders, who rape, abuse and chop her to pieces, which they wrap in plastic bags and throw away bit by bit on their drive back to the city. All the time, the weepy-eyed rookie looks aghast and does nothing.

Back in daylight, in a noodle cafe, he vomits, asks permission to leave, gets his cash, keeps the gun the gang boss gave him and hails a taxi. It bursts a tyre, and the rookie cannot get a bus or another cab in the rush hour. The movie waits a long time beside the highway with him, while the tax-driver changes the tyre. Very symbolically, he hesitates before re-boarding the taxi, but he does. In the final symbolic shot, his wife is in the kitchen with their baby, cooking. Clearly, the audience is told, the rookie's fate is cooked too. He's going to be another corrupt cop.

There are perhaps a few too many such symbols, on the soundtrack (dotted with chicken cries and spooky music), in the scenery (fighting cockerel, butcheries, an abattoir sign and Catholic images) as well as the storyboard and dialogue. The very anti-heroic and almost incredibly naive youngster does not provide a character the audience can identify with or pity. Instead, it is expected to observe the inhumanity of a society without adequate morals, rules or decency.

Presented not as a horror show but a docudrama, this depressing film is a damning depiction of Manila, more so than any of Lino Brocka's anti-capitalist exposes. It is a striking movie, in the mode of the deliberately repulsive extreme reality of French and other quasi-intellectual slasher movies. Its direction, especially the editing and pacing, warranted the Cannes award, and Ebert's outburst is not contradictory - if he meant the "nastiest" film ever invited to Cannes.

The writer, Armando Lao, has more than a score of movie credits since the mid-1980s, most recently making many with Jeffrey Jeturian. He worked with Mendoza the previous year, on Serbis (Service), and is helping to ensure the overseas reputation of the Philippine cinema industry as a source of excellent negative PR for its sorry capital city.