"Kinatay” won the best director award for Dante Mendoza at the Cannes Filmfest in May. It’s the highest international honor ever achieved by a local filmmaker. The movie is the story of a young man’s descent into hell and it’s definitely not for the squeamish. The graphic violence will surely turn off a lot of viewers and, just like in his past other films (“Masahista,” “Tirador,” “Serbis”) Mendoza wants to make a meaningful statement about society and not just amuse the viewer with a feel-good flick.

The film starts brightly, showing a succession of shots of people selling all sorts of things in a busy marketplace. We then meet Peping (Coco Martin, Dante’s signature actor who’s also co-producer using his real name in the credits, Rodel Nacenciano) who lives in the city’s teeming slums with common law wife Cecille (Mercedes Cabral). They’re about to leave their squalid home and the camera follows them as they walk through the busy streets, leaving their baby boy to a sitter. People who see them congratulate them. It turns out they are on their way to the city hall for their civil wedding. Only close family members and friends are invited and they all hie off later to a restaurant for a buffet meal.

Peping is taking up criminology. He wants to be a cop. He works with a friend, Abyong (Jhong Hilario), as “tong” collector for some crooked cops. He gives the money he has collected to Abyong, who then tells him their chief wants him to join their operation that night. Peping has no idea what they’re going to do. They board the van of the chief (Julio Diaz) with Sarge (John Regala) and the driver (Lauren Novero.) They pick up an aging prostitute in a club, Madonna (Maria Isabel Lopez), and as soon as she gets into the van, Sarge starts beating her up savagely then tying her up. Peping is horrified but he cannot react. The van drives out of the city to a safehouse in Bulacan.

The long ride evokes anxiety and fright in the viewer as we take the point of view of the scared Peping. Twice, he thought of escaping, but his fear gets the better of him. He’s appointed as the group’s errand boy who buys, beer, cigarettes, and balut for them. When he asked Abyong what’s Madonna’s sin, he’s told she’s a drug addict who owed chief some P100,000.

Madonna is beaten up and tortured repeatedly, gets brutally raped by the driver, and then finally killed and hacked into pieces. This is all shown graphically and all the sadism will no doubt revile viewers who’ll get the feeling they’re also being assaulted. This is really a horror film where the killers are not ghosts or vampires but rogue law enforcers who are supposed to protect us. The film is based on a true story and we know it’s true because we always get to read about such summary killings and dismembered or burned bodies being found in public places and reported in the papers.

The whole incident happens in Peping’s long day’s journey into night and, as dawn appears, they all board the van again and start throwing away the pieces of Madonna’s dismembered body one by one, on the street, on a garbage dump, into a river. They then all go to a restaurant and the cops order food nonchalantly, like they’re already so jade and used to doing the grisly thing they just did. Peping heads to the toilet and vomits. What’s even more revolting is that you know Peping, basically a decent guy, has crossed the line to evil and becomes one of them, even if he starts as an unwilling accomplice. The ending shows him going home to normal family life, with his wife preparing breakfast for him.

Some people complain that the night scenes involving the slaughter of Madonna are so dark, but it’s apparent that Odyssey Flores’ cinematography is deliberately made murky in keeping with the dark theme and material. What the film lacks is subtlety in handling irony, like the sign saying “Jesus the way, the truth and the life” that’s even emphasized in the subtitles, or cutting away to a picture of Jesus on the wall at the scene where Madonna is murdered. It’s not really that different to the ruthless scenes of violence in hammering home its intended message. But the acting is uniformly fine, from Maria Isabel Lopez as the hapless victim to the evil cops and their ruthless cohorts. Coco Martin holds the film together and we won’t be surprised if he’d get an acting nomination for his portrayal of the lead character here who weakly wrestles at the crossroads of his moral dilemma.
 
A meaningful film about human condition

“Lola” is Dante’s entry in the recent Venice Filmfest. It’s great movie-making but it left us feeling sad about the plight of poor people in our country, living such a marginalized existence. Dante’s works are not feel-good flicks that just aim to entertain. This film is definitely not commercial as you get quite depressed after watching it. Dante obviously has foreign audiences in mind when he made this (also “Kinatay,” more about this in a later column) as his films will cater mainly to limited arthouse audiences.

“Lola” is the story of two lolas (grandmas). It opens with Lola Sepa (Anita Linda) fighting strong winds to light a candle at the foot of Quiapo bridge where her grandson was killed by a cellphone snatcher. We then see her going to a funeral parlor looking for a cheap coffin for the dead teen. That scene where the hand-held camera (a distinctive style of Dante) follows her through a dark and narrow corridor until she chances upon the cadaver of the dead boy in the morgue is so asphyxiatingly heartrending.

Lola Puring (Rustica Carpio) is the grandma of the young snatcher, Mateo (Ketchup Eusebio), who stabbed the boy dead. A sidewalk vendor who lives with her other grandson, Bebong (Jhong Hilario), and an invalid son, she tries her best to have Mateo released from jail. She cheats on her customers, pawns their property, goes to a relative in the province and ends up selling at the train station all the goods she got as a present. Rustica has played supporting roles before, especially at Seiko Films when she was still with the MTRCB. She gets the role of her career here in “Lola” and delivers a solid, touching performance that should merit a best actress nomination.

Dante’s camera chronicles the sordid urban life of the downtrodden in Manila. It’s always raining in the film and Anita Linda is shown living in a place called Sitio Ilog that’s perpetually flooded. The funeral scene leaves haunting images of the mourners in several bancas with the white casket travelling along with them in the flooded streets. Dante’s style is more like that of an observer. He doesn’t give too many details about the characters (for instance, we don’t know much about the family history of both grandmas) but what is established is that in our society, it’s clearly the women who try their best to solve their family’s problems and keep all its members together.

You may or may not agree with the ending (which is also a comment on our justice system, just like the comedy “Last Supper No. 3”) but it will leave you disturbed. Viewers who go only for generic romantic films with their usual happy ending will surely be alienated. But if you go for meaningful films about the human condition, “Lola” is something you will appreciate.