The thin line between genius and sanity

Noel Vera

It's easy to call Mike de Leon one of the greatest if not the
greatest Filipino filmmaker who ever lived; he's done only a handful
(nine features and three shorts), but every one displays an amazingly
high level of technical proficiency. In terms of sound design,
cinematography, and editing, his films sound and look and flow better
than almost any other Filipino filmmakers'; it may be argued that De
Leon has never made a bad film--that his batting average runs a near-
perfect 95 or even 100%.

That said, De Leon does seem to have his blind spots. He's never
done a big-budget picture before (the only one he's ever attempted,
GMA Studio's "Jose Rizal," he walked away from after spending so many
months and so many millions of pesos preparing). He never does
explicit sex scenes, and almost never shows human sensuality in any
form. He also seems to have trouble portraying women--they are
either passive or impotent or almost totally absent from his films.
For all of De Leon's supposed range and versatility, you could almost
chart his career on what he will or will not do, as if some complex
formula secretly ruled his life.

And perhaps there is. De Leon's reputation for technical perfection
is both boon and bane for anyone trying to assess his films; most
critics only see the surface perfection--bow to it, hang garlands
upon it, burn incense and chant hosannas to its holy presence. They
don't seem in any way aware of the turmoil beneath that perfect
surface, a hidden turmoil the dynamic of which mars as often as
strengthens his films, and is the true source of their power.

De Leon's first directed feature, "Itim" (Black, 1976) tells the
story of a young woman (Charo Santos) haunted by the spirit of her
dead sister. The film is full of memorable visual sequences--the
séance, for example, where Santos is channeling her sister's spirit,
the room spinning about as if the camera itself were possessed. Or
the antiseptically white clinic where a photographer (Tommy Abuel)
investigates the photographs hidden away by his father, a scene that
evokes the otherworldly eerieness of Nicholas Roeg's "Don't Look
Now." "Itim" is such a stylish exercise in atmosphere that you don't
really notice that the story itself is actually thin, a mere
investigation into a long-past mystery--the bells and whistles of a
supernatural thriller (well-made they may be) taking the place of
real dramatic conflict. When the final secret is discovered
(involving Abuel's paralytic father, played by Mario Montenegro),
retribution is swift, almost anticlimactic; we never really
understand Montenegro's reasons for doing what he did, nor do we
learn what Santos' and Abuel's ultimate reactions might be to the
revelations.

The true interest of "Itim" is its position at the forefront of De
Leon's career, representing as it does his first, faltering steps
towards true mastery. He has introduced a few of the characters he
will repeatedly include in his films--the malevolent father, the
passive young man, the victim/prize of a heroine--but has not yet
fleshed them out. He has struck a note of Gothic foreboding, but has
not yet articulated the story he truly wants to tell--that comes
later.

De Leon's second feature, "Kung Mangarap Ka't Magising" (Should You
Dream, then Awaken, 1977) is more of a character-driven piece
than "Itim," delineating a love affair between a young man
(Christopher De Leon) and an older married woman (Hilda Koronel). De
Leon himself disparaged the picture, calling it "the proto-Viva Film"
years before Viva Studios (known for its glossy middle-class love
stories) was established.

What sets the film apart is its introduction of the first true De
Leon protagonist--the strangely subdued young man who has difficulty
bridging the gap between people, much less the woman he desires.
It's a delicate, fully formed character, as conceived by De Leon the
director and played by De Leon the actor (the two are not related).
Where in "Itim" De Leon seems to be showing us what he's learned
about atmosphere and style, in "Kung Mangarap" he seems to be showing
us what he has learned about creating rounded, complex characters and
making them interact in a non-melodramatic manner.

From 1980 to 1982, De Leon did a trilogy of films. "Kakabakaba Ka
Ba?" (Worried? 1980) is a comedy about a band of friends (led by,
again, Christopher de Leon) chasing an audiocassette tape made out of
heroin fashioned by the Japanese Yakuza; later the Chinese Mafia and
ultimately the Catholic Church join the chase. The film is a
mishmash of absurdist non-sequiturs and subtle in-jokes--subtitled
Japanese and subtitled Chinese vie for screen space, ultimately
finding themselves jumbled together; periscopes pop out of swimming
pools to monitor plot developments; a nun belts out a glitzy Broadway
number, lifting her habit to reveal a sexily pantyhosed thigh.

De Leon reveals a different side of himself here--the dry wit and
satirist, the skeptical observer of human folly; what's missing is
the emotional intensity hinted at in his two earlier
works. "Kakabakaba" is a comedy, tinted slightly dark, but urbane
and ultimately tasteful--not the kind of qualities you expect from De
Leon. The original story was reportedly much darker, with vicious
jabs at the Catholic Church; we may never learn what happened to
transform that possibly more interesting project into this
lighthearted, somehow insincere romp.

With "Kisapmata" (Blink of an Eye, 1981) De Leon created his
masterwork. The plot bears striking similarities to "Itim"--the
latter might have been an important first draft--but with a crucial
difference: De Leon has freed the father figure stalking the margins
of the previous film from his crippling paralysis, and allowed him to
take center stage. As incarnated by Vic Silayan, he is a retired
police sergeant with an unnatural stranglehold over wife (Charito
Solis) and daughter (Charo Santos). His claustrophobically enclosed
world is threatened when Santos finds herself pregnant, and forced to
marry a young man (Jay Ilagan). Silayan attempts to extend his
influence over his son-in-law, who resists; there is a
confrontation...

De Leon tells what is essentially a horror story, at the heart of
which is a creature all the more terrifying because he's so familiar--
a garrulous, unshaven old man with a huge belly and hidden .45
caliber handgun. He could be someone you know; he could be your next-
door neighbor. Along with that "neighborly" feel is the sense of
utter conviction that De Leon brings to the material, to the conflict
between domineering father and (yet again) passive son-in-law. It's
as if De Leon knew these characters well--identifies with them
intensely. The film is unsettling in the way it seems so close
(because of the intensity) to the filmmaker, the same time it's so
close (because of the realism) to you. As if the gap between our
world and De Leon's more forbidding one is as little as, well, the
blink of an eye...

"Batch '81" (1982) sublimates the tyrant father into an all-
encompassing organization, the college fraternity; for the mental
torment of "Kisapmata" it substitutes the largely physical torment of
fraternity pledges. This is possibly De Leon's way raising the
stakes, by moving from closed family to closed fraternity, the
fraternity standing in for the fascism of then-president Ferdinand
Marcos' administration. De Leon does achieve scenes of intense
claustrophobia, though not as intense or claustrophobic as
in "Kisapmata"--it's difficult, if not impossible, to improve on an
essentially perfect work. An interesting note: De Leon's now-familiar
tyrannical patriarch--in the guise of one pledge's father--makes a
cameo appearance, in a horrific sequence involving electrocution.

"Sister Stella L.," one of De Leon's most highly regarded works (the
film came out in 1984, when Marcos' dictatorial powers were still
largely intact), is also, ironically, his least characteristic. De
Leon must have been trying to break new ground by focusing on a
strong female lead character (Vilma Santos--as a nun, at that) and
her emerging political consciousness. The end result is a film of
excellent craftsmanship (taut editing, intelligent camerawork) in the
service of a Pete Lacaba script, Labaa being one of the strongest
voices in Philippine political cinema. It's his milieu and
sensibility that shines forth, not De Leon's; the director seems to
be subjugating his inimitable style here, presumably in the service
of liberation theology. Interestingly, the one sequence that feels
most characteristically De Leon--and for me, the moment when the film
truly comes to life--is in the torture of the strike leader, played
by Tony Santos Sr.

"Hindi Nahahati ang Langit" (The Heavens Indivisible, 1985) was De
Leon's one bid for commercial success, an adaptation from a
popular "komiks" serial; when the film was released, De Leon insisted
on removing his name. It's one of the few films in Philippine cinema
not to display a director's credit; it's also De Leon's one and only
boxoffice hit.

Even stranger than De Leon's curious rejection of the film is the
fact that the film isn't bad at all--it's actually a smart, tersely
told version of a convoluted melodrama, with layers of startlingly
complex emotional undertones. What makes the film truly interesting,
however, is the relationship at the heart of the film, between the
wealthy young man (Christopher De Leon) and his stepsister (Lorna
Tolentino). They start out as childhood antagonists; when De Leon's
father dies, De Leon becomes Tolentino's legal guardian. He attempts
to remold Tolentino according to his image of how a young woman
should behave--attempts that Tolentino resists violently. Tolentino
escapes to lives her own life, but their paths eventually cross
again, the tension and growing attraction between them no longer to
be denied...

If De Leon sleepwalked through "Sister Stella L.," he's wide-awake
here, giving the relationship between De Leon and Tolentino his
characteristic touches--the shifting roles between dominator and
dominated, the unnaturally close family ties, the claustrophobic
intimacy between the two lead characters. That De Leon denies
auteurship of the film is a real puzzle, as the film looks and feels
so much like a De Leon film...

In the years since, De Leon has worked three more times--on a video
feature, a comedy short set in the future, and a black-and-white
feature on Philippine national hero Jose Rizal. The darkly obsessed
artist glimpsed in "Itim," "Batch '81" and "Hindi Nahahati ang
Langit," that stepped out fully into the light in "Kisapmata," does
so one more time for "Bilanggo ng Dilm" (Prisoner of Darkness, 1987)--
an adaptation of John Fowles' "The Collector," about a man who
abducts women and keeps them in his isolated mansion, trying to
subject them to his will. I've seen the William Wyler version
starring Terence Stamp, which is a complete and far more faithful
adaptation of the Fowles story. For Wyler, however, it was a job--to
be fair, one that likely interested him; for De Leon, the story
apparently holds deeper, more personal significance...

In the meantime..."Aliwan Paradise" (Pleasure Paradise, 1993) takes
its characters from Lino Brocka's "Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag"
(Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975), for which De Leon had acted as
producer and cameraman. The short, a segment from "Southern Winds,"
an omnibus collection of Asian shorts, takes the Brocka classic and
projects it into the future, where he stands the premise (that people
suffer from hunger and poverty) on its head (that people can live off
the entertainment value of hunger and poverty). De Leon's camerawork
in "Maynila" made his name as a brilliant cinematographer, perhaps
one of the best in the country, and it put Brocka on the highest
pedestal, as the patron saint of Philippine cinema--De Leon's
merciless lampooning of film and director is a startling, and rather
courageous, act of effrontery. "Bayaning Third World" (Third World
Hero, 2000) explores one by one the various means of filming the life
of Philippine national hero Jose Rizal, and concludes that not one of
them are feasible. It's a Rizal film about the impossibility of
making a Rizal film, as neat a feat of intellectual prestidigitation
as anything I've seen in recent Philippine cinema, and a splendid
practical joke on the Filipino people.

Judging from his recent work, De Leon seems to have exorcised his
demons and is content to do clever, even brilliant, comedies; the
anguished artist has given way to the urbane, sophisticated
satirist. Which is fine and good, unless you happen to catch a
screening of "Kisapmata," either in a retrospective or on cable, and
notice how ten years later it still hasn't lost any of its power to
disturb or shock--that, in fact, it's one of the greatest Filipino
films ever made. Then you want to ask: "When is De Leon going to do
something worth obsessing over again? When is he going to do films
that matter again?"

(Longer version of article done for the Mike de Leon retrospective at
Cinemanila 2002 (www.cinemanila.com.ph), August 1 to 15 at Greenbelt
2, Makati, and at the CCP).

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)