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.

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.

No way out

B

"I was emotionally upset/charged/angry: although there's nothing good to say about the direction, cinematography and acting, the gripping story deserves a Golden Coconut." [Ex-Manila Man]

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Manila is home base for one of the world's livelier gay movie industries. Most of the time, the feature movies' lead character is a pretty straight young man trapped by circumstances in a melodramatic gay scenario. Occasionally, he's a handsome bisexual, as in No Way Out (Walang Kawala).

The 2008 thriller follows an unhappily married fisherman (Joaquin) whose lustful wife has returned from a labour contract in Dubai, eager to become pregnant. Although her outstanding breasts are thrust full-frontally frequently, or because they are, he rejects her and travels to Manila to look for his runaway orphaned neighbour and secret lover (Waldo). He'd headed, as Filipino country lads usually do in all circumstances, to the gay striptease bar where a village friend worked. Cue the usual handsome blank-faced go-go lads in bikinis undulating around a tiny stage, working under the captaincy of grossly over-made-up transvestite floor managers.

Flashbacks show us that Waldo was befriended by a loving, handsome, slightly older gay customer, but wouldn't play ball with him, preferring to be naively seduced by a sadistic, satanically handsome policeman. The bisexual ("macho gay") cop beats up his wife and imprisons young folk, to be sold in batches of ten males and ten females to a Sino-Filipino trafficker who ships them off by picturesque outrigger to sexual slavery in foreign lands.

Can Joaquin find Waldo? Easily, because the cop arrests him. Can Waldo be saved? Yes, but as we're in the Philippines, his rescue will cost the life of his lover. It will also involve the cop's illogically-faithful, brutally-battered wife being an illogically-treacherous kind heart. However, the envelope of gay Filipino melodramas is pushed notably in this movie, by a couple of long-drawn-out homosexual rapes of the country lads by the cop and his stage management of their sexual embraces.

Joel Lamangan, one of three credited story originators, is a prolific director; the latest count listed 76 titles, including TV series. He's had cameo acting roles in such gay film festival favourites as Lino Brocka's Macho Dancer (1988) and Mel Chionglo's Twilight Dancers (2006). They too exploited the bar scene, whereas Brillante Mendoza's The Masseur (Masahista) used massage parlours as its rationale for photographing handsome young men in minimal attire.

Lead actor Polo Ravales (born Paul Gruenberg, in Manila) has been a TV regular for a decade; his missing lover is played by Joseph Bitangcol, a younger TV actor. They cope well with strained dialogue, a lot of passionate wet kissing and very little nudity; Ravales' standard expression of pained blankness is understandable. Emilio Garcia, as the devilish psychologically disturbed cop, deservedly won two awards as best supporting actor.

Theses could be written about the socio-political ramifications and pretensions of gay Filipino movies, and they surely have been. This movie's cinematic fig leaf of worthiness is the screenplay's repeated reference, via TV and radio, to "disappeared" activists, in an apparent attempt to relate them to sexually trafficked youngsters. It's as good a reason as any for showing objects of gay movie-watchers' desire in melodramatic circumstances.