Caregiver (2008)

Caregiver (Chito Roño, 2008)

In an early scene in Chito Roño's Caregiver, we see Sarah (Sharon Cuneta) peek into the bathroom where her mother (Marita Zobel) is giving her Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother (Anita Linda) a bath. The mother sees Sarah peeking and gives her a warm comforting look. Sarah's younger sister (Mickey Ferriols) then enters the bathroom to help dry and dress up their grandmother. Sarah, out of familial sensitivity, closes the door, granting her grandmother the privacy any human being deserves. It's a lovely scene, made even more resounding with gestures that summarize exactly why the Philippines has ended up as the world's foremost supplier of domestic helpers, nannies, nurses, and caregivers. The Philippines is a nation of caregivers: of daughters and granddaughters who remain compassionate to those senior to them; of grandmothers and mothers who respond with genuine attention to their sons or daughters; of siblings taking care of siblings; of wives keeping up with their husbands.

Caregiver begins in the Philippines, where Sarah, a schoolteacher who spends her nights studying the intricacies of caregiving, gets ready to leave for London, where her husband Teddy (John Estrada) works as a nurse's aide. While most of the film happens in London where we see Sarah go through the joys and pains of a caregiver, suffer through a slowly deteriorating marriage with her husband who is wallowing in self-pity, win the respect of a wealthy yet extremely moody retiree Mr. Morgan (Saul Reichlin), and take care of a misdirected youth (Makisig Morales) she first encountered shoplifting in a grocery, it is during the moments in the Philippines that are most poignant.

Director Roño and scriptwriter Chris Martinez paint a very clear portrait as to what Sarah is willing to sacrifice for her job as a caregiver in a nursing home in London. Most moving of the sacrifices Sarah is willing to take is the possibility of leaving her lone son (John Manalo) without any parents. The film takes utmost pains to detail the waning relationship between mother and son, with the latter stoic and rebellion amid the threat of being left alone by his mother, and the former exercising her maternal instincts even up to her final days in the Philippines. Their reconciliation is handled deftly, with the two of them expressing their emotions in the middle of a playground where homeless orphaned kids sleep (a visual expression of how they are still lucky despite their circumstances). Sarah then shares her son's bottle of beer, a subtle expression that they both share the same fears, and it is thus pointless for them to separate with hardened and hurt hearts.

Sarah's experience in London is standard melodrama, with suffering wife overcoming the odds to come out strongest and admirable in the end. Touched deftly are the repercussions of displacement. In fact, the most significant character in the film's London scenes is Sarah's husband who has deteriorated into a pathetic alcoholic mess, more so because his masculinity is greatly disadvantaged by the fact that Sarah was able to find success when he cannot do so. Caregiver brings into the forefront the humiliation, the pride-swallowing, the ludicrousness of this forced migration due to the laws of economics; where successful professionals (doctors, nurses, teachers, etc.) are forced to downgrade their professions because of the indubitable economic gap between nations. The film expresses that caste systems exist not only within specific cultures but also in the family of nations, where citizens of third world economies are delegated lower status notwithstanding skill, expertise, or intellect.

But since Caregiver dwells more on human stories rather than lopsided world politics (although there's one scene where the ludicrousness of such politics is exemplified, where a Filipino ex-doctor (Jhong Hilario) is sacked from the hospital where he's working as a nurse for disobeying his superior although that act of disobedience saved a human life), its agenda is much more simpler: to venerate the Filipino overseas worker. It's an endeavor that has been done and redone in Philippine cinema ('Merika (Gil Portes, 1984), The Flor Contemplacion Story (Joel Lamangan, 1995), Milan (Olivia Lamasan, 2004), among others), with different levels of success. What Caregiver accomplishes is something deeper than trite veneration. That veneration is in fact an assertion of a mutated hierarchy of values inflicted by an age of financial necessity in a country that has been relying on exporting professionals to other nations to work for better pay but with menial tasks.

When in the end, Sarah chooses to stay put with her work in London, presumably following the lessons she learned from Mr. Morgan, it feels like Sarah has championed her individuality (or for feminists, her ability to make a decision on her own), besting the pathetic whims of her husband, and presumably realizing her dreams of financial freedom. In the larger arena of things however, her decision is one that champions complacency, one that can be regarded as a tacit acceptance of her role in the world no matter how unjustly such role is rendered, one that confirms such mutated hierarchy of values and in fact celebrates it as a virtue. What Caregiver affirms is that the Philippines has a sorry place in this world of ours, and all we can do about it is accept it and cry (the last action an inevitable result of Roño and Martinez's effective machinations).

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg, 2008)

Twenty years is a huge amount of time especially in this age of very rapid technological advancements and global warming. If we are to believe Al Gore, we might actually get to see the green in Greenland in tweny years time. While twenty years is enough time for the entire humankind to change continents, it took the creative team of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas a little bit less than twenty years (it has been around nineteen years since Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) rode into the sunset in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989)) to mount another adventure for Hollywood's most famous archeologist.

Plotwise, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull manages to bridge the two decade-gap, with Indiana Jones evidently carrying the physical burdens of old age (which we're constantly reminded of by several gags and jokes). Indy is forced to resume his adventuring ways when a group of Russian commies, headed by a very devious Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett, sporting a hammy Russian accent, to my heart's guilty delight), plucks him out of retirement to locate a relic he unearthed long ago from Roswell. His involvement with the commies gets him into trouble with the American government, which is also busy penetrating into the atomic age (the film's most enduring frame is when Indy stands against a mushroom cloud; forget the flimsy science behind his survival and just indulge in the moment where pop icon is pitted against historical icon). He is sacked from his professorial job; runs into punk-with-a-mission Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) who turns out to be the son of a former flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); and gets deeply involved in Irina's obsession for finding the mythical city of the crystal skulls.

The story starts out thick with promise and intrigue. The idea of having Indy traverse through the annals of history (getting victimized by McCarthy's paranoid government, surviving the atomic bomb) and of having a film icon suffer through the repercussions of old age (which is becoming a Hollywood trend with the re-introduction of several aging screen heroes in Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, 2006), Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, 2007) and Live Free or Die Hard (Len Wiseman, 2007)) is witty. It's just too bad that Spielberg and Lucas' team cannot extend that initial fascination with their hero's humanity and his place in human history to deeper lengths, or at least beyond the occasional jokes. As such, history is a mere backdrop for the film; with the Cold War-scenario as plausible precursor to the film's slight 50's sci-fi elements; the recognizable moments as reason for cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to compose frames worthy of the covers of cinematographers' journals and film magazines.

Spielberg and Lucas is clearly more interested in exploiting the franchise rather than deepening the lore behind the films. Thus, Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is more of the same. It's not exactly a bad thing, but it ain't good either. The movie's a lot of fun, with its relentless jungle chases and its tomb-raiding, puzzle-solving, twist-revealing excesses. While it's a novelty seeing a sixty plus year old Indiana Jones dodge punches and breeze through traps, it certainly wears off easily. The movie doesn't have the same vitality, the same that made the past three Indiana Jones flicks so watchable. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feels like the product of a long-retired franchise revived and kept alive by a pacemaker. In other words, the movie runs on a mechanical heart. Spielberg's attempts to thicken the father-son angle between Indy and his son, and the love-hate relationship between Indy and Raven, remain to be feeble attempts.

Two decades after The Last Crusade, Spielberg has gone to win two Oscars (and a couple more nominations) and a huge chunk of recognition. His days of directing popcorn entertainment seem to be over, concentrating on more serious fare, or if not, films that have more depth than a riproaring adventure down the Amazon river. Dumbed down to cater to the requirements of the franchise, Spielberg's work feels unwieldly if not utterly embarrassing. Of course, Lucas hasn't grown much in talent during the past twenty years, especially if we're to base it on the failure that was the Star Wars prequels. His business sense is indubitable though. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, although hardly the creative success the twenty years waiting time would merit, is another success story for Lucas, especially when he runs to the bank with the millions of dollars earned from the tickets, DVDs (and Blu-ray discs), and other kinds of merchandise sold out of this geriatric adventure.

Scorpio Nights (1985)

Scorpio Nights (Peque Gallaga, 1985)

Park Jae-ho's Summertime (2001) is an observation of a young man's descent into sexual adventurism. The man, an activist who is hiding from the authorities, lands in an apartment directly above that of a married couple. Through the several holes on his floor, he observes the man from downstairs having sex with his wife, who seems to be in a mechanical trance. One night, the activist proceeds downstairs, pretends to be the husband, and makes love to the wife, who is again in a mechanical trance. When the wife discovers that it is the activist and not her husband who is having sex with her, she consents, and the two engage in an extremely dangerous love affair. The erotic escapades happen amid a backdrop of Korean political unrest, blatantly in display during the non-sexual moments of the film. Sadly, Summertime is quite simply an unenticing piece of muddled erotica.

Scorpio Nights, the 1985 film that directly inspired Park's beautifully photographed but inert dud, is undoubtedly the better film. Scorpio Nights tackles one hot summer where a student (Daniel Fernando) is left alone in his dorm room, which is directly above the apartment of a security guard (Orestes Ojeda) and his wife (Anna Marie Gutierrez). The student peeks through one of the holes that separate their rooms, observes the couple having sex at night, assumes the identity of the husband to have sex with the sultry wife, gets addicted to the dangerous relationship, and finally meets a grisly end. Minus the very specific historic-political setting of Summertime, plot-wise, the two films are almost identical. However, Scorpio Nights achieved an unsurmountable atmosphere of fetishistic, fatalistic and erotic danger that Summertime can never do so with its period-piece, self-important yet soft core pornographic approximations.

What differentiates the two films is its setting. Scorpio Nights, unlike in Summertime with the antiseptic interiors of the secret lovers' love nest, gloats in excessive filth, palpable heat, and unbearable humidity. Director Peque Gallaga, who started as production designer for great Filipino directors like Eddie Romero (Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon (This Was How We Were, What Happens to You Now, 1976)) and Ishmael Bernal (Girlfriend (1980) and City After Dark (198o)), exemplifies a very keen eye for detail. Gallaga's Oro, Plata, Mata (Gold, Silver, Death, 1982), which many local critics regard as his masterpiece, is the paramount example of a work of a production designer-turned-director. The film is sumptuous to look at; the period details are pitch perfect; there is a fathomable attention to outward aesthetics (the famous exodus scene where rows of people and their carabaos pass by a backdrop of burning houses is one spectacular feat). That aesthetic sense common in most production designer-turned-directors, once translated in a story that inhabits a world of upstairs-downstairs sexual trysts and societal repression, results in one of the most thematically intriguing, visually arresting, and sweaty-and-kinky erotic films ever made.

Scorpio Nights is almost entirely shot inside a low-income compound that houses a boy's dormitory (the interiors are essentially masculine, with calendars and posters of scantily clad women adorning the walls; also representative of that repressed attitude towards sex (or anything that was abhorrent to Ferdinand Marcos' concept of new society) that is very particular during Marcos-era politics), several single-family dwellings, a welding shop, a basketball court, and a communal bathing area. The area is in itself a masterpiece of production design (by Don Escudero). The courtyard (if you can even call it that) is the perennial meeting place, a flea market of invaluable rumors and stories of macho conquests. Separating these areas are hole-infected partitions, glass windows, and flimsy plywood doors. Certainly, privacy is a luxury here thus, the entire compound is practically the breeding ground for future rapists and sexual deviants with its daytime banter of seedy type and its nighttime invitation for voyeurism and other acts.

The grime, rust, and mud that line that quintessential Manila compound only emphasize the lowlife morality that fuels the near-ridiculous storyline. During its non-erotic moments, the film takes a neo-realist stance at least up to the point wherein the student discovers the unlikely phenomenon of having his sexual fantasies turn into his present reality. Gallaga then revels in erotic camp, of pink mosquito nettings enveloping lustful lovers at the height of their sexual activity; or transparent raincoats hiding their naked bodies from the rain. During those moments of zany visual and sexual excesses, we get a glimpse of exactly why the allure of the downstairs wife is unbearable, even to the point of fucking in the midst of the threat of death. It's that unwavering boyhood fantasy that Gallaga so excellently wants us to believe in; and if we don't necessarily believe in that fantasy overcoming reality, at least it was one hell of a ride.

Some screenshots from the film:


The student fondles a feather (erotic poster in the background)


The entrance to the compound


Residents of the compound hanging their laundry


The student and the downstairs wife in ecstatic copulation


Lovemaking while covered in rain and a plastic raincoat

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This review is my contribution to the Production Design Blog-a-Thon at Too Many Projects Film Club.

EGG I

For this years visual arts festival I decided to use cracked eggs as my subject matter. The restrictions were a little more challenging this year, limiting its participants to a 5x5x5 inch surface area. Two out of three of my entries were accepted.The Visual Arts Small Works Juried Art Festival 2008: Fragments, opens May 22nd 6-8pm at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, hope to see you all there.