Written by Shugo Praico
Directed by Ato Bautista
Cast: Alex Vincent Medina, Mara Lopez, Mon Confiado
What’s very disgusting about Palitan is the cycle of abuse it creates, that after taking advantage of Mara Lopez’s body through a series of prolonged sex scenes that borders on the indecent and lascivious (in short, pointless and offensive) and making her believe (as an actor and a person) that she is carrying out the role for the sake of the film and not of the filmmakers (which is utter bullshit) it forces the viewers to partake in its obscenity and lets them feel as though the desecration committed to her were happening for a good reason, that the movie, in its insistence on overplaying the tension between the two men, uncovers the rottenness of its purpose systematically, and instead of paying homage to Scorpio Nights (a masterwork of heavy political insight) it actually embarrasses Peque Gallaga and his film to the core. Ideally, one shouldn’t waste time trying to discuss an obviously bad movie (oftentimes talking and writing about it could lead to more upsetting discoveries, like how the female character, even in her final shot, is treated like a piece of meat, void of sincere humanity) but Palitan is working under the pretense of artistic worth (how else can its acceptance into a festival be explained?) and that fact alone poses serious danger, since it has been made with the help of institutions that believe in its ideologies, and there exists a league of minds that will respond to it with a hard-on and a folly of tolerance, rationalizing the film by virtue of subjectivity, to the point of defending its prurience. As expected, Ato Bautista and Shugo Praico top everything off by concluding the narrative the way men who use their balls more often than their minds do: give the woman a gun to kill the perverts who violated her. And that act only confirms how her character is made of cardboard (or of something flimsier) and defiles her even more because it reduces her existence to an entity as insignificant as a grain of sand, and her creators (smiling as they write her in paper) are pleased with that: they subsist and thrive in smut, and their egos (and cocks) are always in need of stroking. D
Filed under: Asian Films, Cinema One, Indie Sine, Noypi
