Written and directed by Mes de Guzman
Cast: Jess Evardone, John Paul Escobedo, Abdul John Candelario
In the uneven terrain of Philippine cinema, dominated by films that require committee endorsements before getting made, Mes de Guzman’s movies provide directions to a highland, someplace where human relationships, placed in the artless backdrop of the countryside, are complex in their simplicity. De Guzman has the ability to pare down his stories without truncating the scale of his subjects, doing it without adding unnecessary theater or touches of exoticism intended to dress up the unpleasant. His films are set in rural neighborhoods where one sees the surroundings in a state of ruin, either due to abuses committed to nature or because of neglect by the state government.
The elements in his movies are quite predictable—poverty as an accepted norm, inherited by generations of family members; death as something inevitable, a natural termination of suffering; and children as players caught in forbidden games, their innocence lost and exploited—but de Guzman has a way of depicting small lives and showing the thorough implications of their fates.
The Earth Trilogy, comprised of Ang Mundo sa Panahon ng Yelo, Ang Mundo sa Panahon ng Bato, and Ang Mundo sa Panahon ng Bakal, whose tangents touch the curves of Diablo and Sa Kanto ng Ulap at Lupa, is distinguished more by breadth than by ambition, marked specifically by the girth of the world being presented: the way it measures around the milieu of destitution in the provinces. These films reek of anger and frustration, but de Guzman—a farmer, a short story writer, a novelist, and a longtime resident of these neighborhoods—is a pacifist, which shows in the mildness of his temper and in the authenticity of his characterizations. This disposition, however, does not prevent him from making statements against oppression and its extensive history, no matter how slight they may seem to the casual moviegoer. His body of work as a filmmaker, a distinctive rendering of the modest and the miniature, contains some of the sharpest observations on the Filipino condition, presenting sides of social dysfunctions often taken for granted.
Ang Mundo sa Panahon ng Bakal, for instance, does not go far from the boundaries of its predecessors. The hills and mountains are still there, surrounding the community; the fields are bare and untended; the view of the clear blue sky does not look complete without the trees; and the roads remain unpaved and unnoticed. There is a boy at the beginning who walks around telling neighbors about an upcoming wedding, asking them for help. The lead character, Carlito, works at a junk shop that manufactures illegal guns, which the owner sells to alleged gang members in the area. Middle-aged and living with his parents, Carlito has a girlfriend whom he wants to marry, but for some reason he is apprehensive about telling his mother and father. From there, stories are thinly scattered and their connections unfold leisurely. Until the end, the picture stays in de Guzman’s territory.
Similar to his previous movies, the pace of Bakal is slow and consuming, sometimes to the point of inducing sleep. It is not because of dullness but due to the insistence on capturing the sluggishness of provincial life. It is a treatment that de Guzman does naturally (or to some extent, deliberately), a language whose surface looks easy to polish but actually entails a certain sensibility. This sort of rhythm has come to define his movies, but as much as it highlights the understated horror of rural life, inclusive of the poetry and metaphysics that go with it, it also leaves the viewer in a disordered shape, the futility of the situation bearing the heaviest effect.
A legitimate concern is that watching de Guzman’s movies is hardly about learning something new: it is about witnessing how life sets up a dead-end and traps its defenseless characters. He can tell different stories but with similar resolutions, and the permutation is infinite unless the system changes and addresses the problem, which is unlikely to happen soon. In this regard, de Guzman can be seen as a darling of auteur theorists: his films are full of echoes, their themes and motifs bounce to each other, the dialogues are straightforward, the worldview is consistent, and the visual style is rich in symbolism. No one can dispute the authorship of his movies, and each film in his body of work reinforces the other.
But his weakness also comes from this persistence. Most of the time the closure of his narratives is not commensurate with the degree of emotional buildup that occupies them. His conclusions are often unrewarding because to some extent the viewer is no longer involved, mentally or emotionally. He or she is inclined to drift off, for the story no longer seems to be on the ground, losing its way and never reaching its destination. When the final moments come in, there is only a vague sense of recollection, and that profound effect can easily be mistaken for gravity. To some audience members, this shortcoming is pardonable, especially when it is considered in the grand scheme of things, in how de Guzman has managed to introduce discussions of issues in the regions; but such failing needs to be raised in order to understand his significance as a filmmaker much better. And indeed, more than anything, De Guzman (like Diaz, Jeturian, Mendoza, and Mardoquio) is an important filmmaker: his movies are flawed but mature, they test one’s patience but they need to be seen.
The Earth Trilogy presents a bleak look at the lives of struggling Filipinos in the countryside: young and old, deprived and impoverished, hopeful and hopeless. Survival and suffering are key subjects, de Guzman showing the nature of resilience with limits, whose terminus, for better or for worse, only means death for his characters. Its finest accomplishment is the genuine restraint despite the grand themes of poverty, child labor, capitalism, free trade, sorrow, resignation, birth, youth, and death, de Guzman being able to tell stories with an appropriate tone. No question: the power of these movies originates from his experience and wisdom. There is a lot to admire in the sparseness of Bakal, the delay of tragedies, the meager servings of happiness, the precision of details, and how the tokens of subsistence move from one person to another, as though in the neighborhood nothing was really lost because everything was passed around: possessions, words, news, relationships, crimes, souls, anecdotes, fears. In its long-winded journey in a tiny space, the bulk of one’s life is spent waiting for good fortune, which never comes at the right time.
Filed under: Asian Films, Noypi
