Masahista

Brillante Mendoza has amassed dozens of awards, including many from festivals outside his native Philippines. An experienced production designer (using the name Dante Mendoza), he worked on ten features in 1985-9, and on three more of his own directions in that function since 2006. His debut as a director came in 2005 at the age of 45, with Masahista (The Masseur), after a long spell working as an art director on TV commercials. Since then he's won Best Director at Cannes for (Kinatay, 2009), which also earned him a second Palme D'Or nomination, following Serbis (Service) the previous year.

Masahista's emotionally powerful story (credited to frequent Mendoza collaborator Ferdinand Lapuz) and naturalistic screenplay (Mendoza and another frequent associate, Boots Agbayani Pastor) have a pronounced gay element. So do several of the Mendoza team's movies, but their homosexual action and characters are a secondary, albeit seemingly integral, aspect of working-class Filipino existence as seen by Mendoza.

Family love and/or duties is his dominant motif. The movie's central character, a young masseur in a seedy back-street Manila house of male prostitution, is summoned back to his reprobate father's death-bed in his scruffy home city (Pampanga). Calming helping an embalmer dress his father in formal clothes for the funeral rites, the masseur's actions are counterpointed with scenes from his previous day's work, undressing and oiling a new customer.

At little more than 70 minutes, the movie is a shocking slice of poor Philippine life. Shocks abound not so much in the full nudity (mostly non-frontal), simulated homosexual intercourse, street language or intimate details of gigolos' techniques and services. What's overwhelmingly shocking is the depiction of desperate poverty in a society where amorality and cheating is masked by facades of politeness and friendliness.

The writing team avoid many of the usual soap-operatics that can blight such docudramas. The masseur's younger brother is not shown following his sibling's lead, his girlfriend is a foul-mouthed sluttish customer, and his mother is as hard to love as his aunts and adulterous drunkard absentee father. The masseur's co-workers are portrayed credibly too, reserving only their oral kisses for their girlfriends, and the screenplay employs telling overhead shots to pan across the row of tiny curtained massage cubicles. If only all such operations in Manila (or the nation's movie versions of them) weren't managed by unctuous queens twittering camp Filipino-English.

Eventually, the masseur breaks down in regretful tears over the loss of his father, but he's not allowed to walk off into any sunrise of hope or happiness, or a loyal woman's arms. A challenging focal figure, a street-wise cherub, Iliac the masseur was the first major role for Coco Martin, who subsequently starred in other Mendoza movies and is now a TV star. He's credibly faux-naif, his emotions little explored, firmly repressed.

Alan Paule is credible too as the kindly massage customer, whose stilted chat-chat conversation and price negotiations with Iliac advance the movie's docudrama, providing details that explain the two men's outside lives and commercial relationship. Paule, also a frequent actor in Mendoza films, made his first movie back in 1988: it was a similar socio-political saga, Macho Dancer, directed by Lino Brocka, one of the country's leading anti-capitalist neo-realists.

Neo-realism is a small world in a small film industry: Mendoza's main female character this time (the masseur's matriarchal aunt) is played, sharply, by Jaclyn Jose; she also starred in Macho Dancer and several other Mendoza movies.