The old year and the new: Cinematic
LAST year, a month before December, the question was: Will there be Christmas? And when 2021 was coming to a close, we all asked: Will we be able to celebrate the New Year? We are almost out of the woods. Even as there are warnings every now and then of numbers rising at an alarming rate, we are convinced that the pandemic has now become an endemic—a scary phenomenon reduced by language to a controllable anxiety.
We are alright and the signs are all around us. In the previous year, the practice of cocooning the film production was part of the social and health protocol in the industry. This meant a lowering of the chance for any person who is part of the shoot to contaminate the team. The practice also implied any actor or film person had limited chances of having more works—and more moolah—than usual.
A defining moment, not necessarily in the positive sense of the word, was the May 2022 presidential election. This divided the showbiz world and, for now, I dread categorizing who went with what presidential candidate, who was the most vociferous and vocal, the literate and the unthinking. Let us just say that the industry was polarized to a degree that one side was brains and the other was amoral. Both were political. Both played to the hilt the newly discovered virtue that unabashed popularity could be a social capital indeed.
And yet, locked down or locked in, the industry burst forth with vigor toward the latter half of the year.
Thinking of the cinematic outputs for 2022, two films became major not because of gravitas but because of the gravity with which they pulled down whatever gains cinema as a pedagogical tool has made. These films are Katips and Maid in Malacañang. Suffice it to say that both films will forever haunt us— those who supported them and viewed them and even those who turned away their gaze from them. Let us leave them at that. Let us leave them to film historians to either turn them into small footnotes or aberrant chapters in the next big book on Filipino cinema.
It was in 2022 when Viva Films rose to become Vivamax. Maybe the production outfit had always been there but it was this year when its name became a modifier, a brand, a feel.
Island of Desire, Kaliwaan, Pa-thirsty, Biyak, Bula, The Escort Wife... major and minor film directors became part of this wave, just wave. Be very cautious not to add any modifier to that wave lest the Father of the French New Wave—jean-luc Godard—rise from his grave. The man who gave us films, like Breathless and
Contempt reportedly died by way of assisted suicide. This was confirmed by his lawyer.
Speaking of transitions, we lost this year actors like Angela Lansbury and Sidney Poitier. The list includes William Hurt, Peter Bogdanovich, Ray Liotta, Paul Sorvino, and Louise Fletcher (who can forget her Academy Award-winning turn as Nurse Ratched in Milŏs Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?).
One morning, we all woke up to Olivia Newtonjohn singing “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” The British-Australian singer-actress who fleshed out the All-American girl in Grease was dead.
Queen Elizabeth II was not nominally part of the film industry but her reign defined a continent, politics and cultures. She passed on this year in grand ceremonies as only England could put up. But it was also as the year was coming to a close that Netflix released Harry and Meghan. I wonder what Pauline Kael, were she alive, would have said about this documentary. There is a review circulating which is almost Kaelish, as it describes the show as “vomitinducing.” (Replete with pity parties from two supremely entitled individuals esconced in a sprawling luxurious home in a pictureque part of California, the show is indeed vomitinducing.—ed.)
The Philippine film industry became more alive also when Dolly de Leon received nominations for her scene-stealing performance in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness. The film had won the Palme D’or in the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and with that fame, the presence of De Leon became the next big thing. There are talks of a nomination for nothing less than an Oscar. The announcement is yet to come out but in many columns, she is being bruited as one of the frontrunners. Even before the film academy, De Leon has already been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in the Golden Globe.
Talking of significant international breaks, two other Filipino actors are at the cusp of international screen success. They are Chai Fonacier, who stars in Nocebo, and Soliman Cruz in To the North. Nocebo, described as a thriller, is a Filipino-irish co-venture and was the first recipient of the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP)’S International Coproduction Fund (ICOF) in 2020.
By the middle of the year, moviehouses were reopened. At first, snacks were not allowed but soon normalcy prevailed. I, too, became part once more of the moviegoing public. My first attempt to watch a film in a moviehouse happened only this December. The film was Plan 75, another Filipino co-production venture. I reviewed it and was blown away by the narrative and the performances of the actors led by Chieko Baisho. The Japanese actress is winning awards left and right for her performance as an old lady who is thinking of joining a government-backed euthanizing program targeting senior citizens. There is another quiet presence in the film and that is Stefanie Arianne, a Filipina actress. Plan 75 is Japan’s entry to the Best International Feature Film category in the 95th Academy Awards.
Even as I write this, the Metro Manila Film Festival was finishing its awarding ceremonies. Cinema is back—as a festival.