Tag: Jun Robles Lana

Your Mother’s Son (Anak Ka Ng Ina Mo)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A candidate’s electoral vans belts out loud-hailer exhortations to secure votes in an upcoming election, but nobody in the poor rural locality through which they pass pays any attention. Everyone is struggling to make ends meet. Middle-aged Sarah (Sue Prado) puts all her efforts into both running a laundry business, providing ad hoc employment for much younger Amy (Elora Españo) who lives nearby, and teaching students online. Sarah’s son Emman (Kokoy De Santos) has just lost his job at a restaurant because it closed down. He doesn’t seem to share her work ethic, and would rather lounge around in bed all day than actually have to do anything of an employed nature.

Or, at least, that’s how things appear outwardly.

When his mother finally prises Emman from his bed so that he can go out looking for work – which might include a contact she has who may, possibly, be able to help him – he instead hangs out at the house of Amy who, like his mother, has a strong work ethic, to have sex with her at every opportunity, and do drugs. While Amy enjoys the physical side of things as much as Emman does, she is dissatisfied with the rest. “Am I just your fuck buddy?” she asks him, clearly wanting more of a relationship than just the carnal. She’d like to be able to go around with him and the two of them be seen as a couple in public, but he won’t have it.

And like a corrupt politician pretending to be squeaky clean, Emman has a strong reason as to why not. When he gets back home, he has sex with Sarah too, because they are not mother and son (despite pretending otherwise outside their house). They are in fact lovers, and the physical passion they share is just as strong as that he secretly shares with Amy. Throughout the film, he repeatedly describes their relationship as husband and wife when he talks to Sarah about it, something he doesn’t do with Amy. Both women appear to genuinely love him, without the knowledge that he’s cheating on both of them. By comparison, he appears duplicitous, deceptive and selfish, someone simply out to satisfy his own lust without having to give either of the women anything in return. Perhaps there are darker, misogynistic feelings lurking in there as well. As for going out and getting gainful employment to supplement the household income, even if viable work is offered to him on a plate, he doesn’t appear to be particularly interested in taking up any good opportunities if he can get away with it.

Into this potential powder keg of intense sexual and social relationships comes Oliver (Miggy Jimenez), a student of Sarah’s she has taken in to save him from his violent father. He is slightly younger than Emman and plays the guitar. He works his way into Amy’s affections in just as physical a way as Emman. Oliver isn’t averse to taking drugs at the same time. Emman starts to experience intense feelings of jealousy, but Amy doesn’t see it that way and is soon encouraging a threesome with the two of them. However, Emman’s darker inner emotions start to gnaw at him.

Something similar happens with Oliver and Sarah, when she too takes the younger man into sexual congress. Then the emotions of her ‘husband’ get the better of him, and he exposes to Sarah the fact of Oliver and Amy’s relationship and drug abuse without any mention of his own involvement. He now finds himself shut out of the relationship with his ‘wife’ in favour of Oliver, while Sarah cuts off the younger woman in terms of laundry work, placing her in a dire financial position. Before long, however, the older woman relents with regard to shutting out her husband so that she, too, is involved in a polyamorous relationship with the two younger men. Within Emman’s inner being, however, jealousy and hatred continue to swirl. Violence is not far away…

As the film closes, the electoral canvassing vans roll past the locality again, irrelevant as ever.

To those unfamiliar with the ins and outs of modern Filipino history, this plays out as a drama with a heavy erotic element, which eventually explodes into violence. The family itself is pretty odd – a mother and son who are not actually mother and son but lovers, a second son who via a similar relationship with the woman ends up in a polyamorous one. And if we’re talking about an incestuous family, it might not be too big a stretch to suggest that the second woman, who appears closer in age to the two young men, represents a sister figure.

At first glance, the piece casts its women in a much more favourable light than its men. And yet… a mother who has sex with her child? That’s clearly a form of abuse, and it might be said that the Filipino people elect governments that subsequently abuse them.

It’s all very engaging while you watch, bravely performed by the able cast, and seems to have been crafted with deep political intent – an attempt to understand how the Philippines has got to where it is now. Although technically a democracy, with a political system loosely modelled on the US (of which it was a colony between 1898 and 1946), the country’s elected leaders have been drawn from a small pool of the rich and powerful, with some dynastic families supplying more than one president over time. Perhaps the incestuous ‘family’ pictured is a proxy of the nation’s nepotistic politics.

A whole additional subplot concerns drug abuse, with the second youth a particularly enthusiastic user and the other woman ultimately getting shopped to the drug enforcement authorities. That may well relate to Filipino President Rodriguo Duterte’s unpopular War on Drugs in which over 5,000 people were killed according to official figures.

Director Jun Robles Lana makes his films for the domestic Filipino audience and the festival circuit. There is currently some question whether the film will ever get a release in the Philippines because of its political stance and censorship laws. Jun Robles Lana won last year’s Critics’ Picks Competition with his film About Us But Not About Us (2022).

Your Mother’s Son just played in the spirit of the Critics’ Picks Section of the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (out of competition).

About Us But Not About Us

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

[dropca[]A[/dropcap]n older man meets a younger man in a restaurant. Both are gay. The older man, Eric (Romnick Sarmenta), has recently lost his longtime partner Marcus (who we never see… well, not exactly) while the younger man Lance (Elijah Canlas) knew Marcus as his writing tutor, both elder men working as professors at the English language faculty of the university at which Lance is a student.

As the narrative plays out in real time, it moves through a number of difficult areas. Lance was having problems at home; specifically, being beaten by his stepfather, so Eric intervened by letting Lance stay at his place, bringing upon the pair rumours that they were lovers (although everything in the restaurant conversation suggests those rumours to be unfounded). It later transpires that Lance has written his first novel. When Lance presents the manuscript to Eric, Eric accuses Lance of plagiarism after reading the first few pages when Lance walks offscreen for a minute or two to take a toilet break.

Director Lana deploys a variety of theatrical and cinematic tricks in order to make the piece work. He has thought a lot about where to place the camera, and what each specific shot contributes to the whole. He deploys some bravura cinematic tricks. A clever combination of blocking, camera positioning and Lance cleaning his spectacles lenses allows Lance to temporarily transform into Marcus; a similar setup allows Eric talking to Lance to transform into Marcus talking to Lance, all acheived without lap dissolves, traditional flashback techniques, different actors or prosthetics makeup.

Whereas Hitchcock undertook Rope (1948) as a kind of stunt, which still delivered as a thriller, About Us But Not About Us doesn’t have any such genre trappings. It’s fundamentally a film about two people talking over a meal in a restaurant, something Hitch would have decried as “photographs of people talking”. To be fair, it does contain some bravura cinematic tricks, but somehow those look like trickery rather than enhancing the tale of the characters and making the audience feel for their plight. I, for one, didn’t really care about what the characters were going through. Unlike Rope, the film lacks Hitch’s understanding of the psychology of audiences.

Although no masks are worn, the pair are only allowed a 90 minutes because of the restaurant’s post-COVID policies and characters make references to the pandemic throughout. That’s not the subject of the film per se, but it’s good that it at least acknowledges the pandemic in passing when so many movies seem to want to pretend it never happened, that it’s business as usual. Whatever my other opinions of the film, this, at least, is something in its favour.

About Us But Not About Us premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Big Night

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Just two years ago, the now 49-year-old Filipino director Jun Robles Lana won the Best Director award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival for the disturbingly realistic and finely acted Kalel-15. The movie revealed the horrors to which young Filipinos infected with HIV are subjected. Lana is a highly prolific helmer, making on average two feature films a year. He now returns to the Festival with a movie delving with a similarly serious topic: mass executions of alleged drug criminals and addicts carried out by police forces. The filmmaker opened the screening via videoconference, emphasising the severity of the issue plus denouncing the tragic complacence by majority of the population.

Kalel-15 succeeded as a denunciation because it dealt with a tragedy with a very serious tone. Big Night, on the other hand, only partly succeeds because its comedic tone both dilutes and banalises the gravity of the widespread murders plaguing the Asian nation.

Dharna (Christian Bables) runs a small beauty parlour somewhere in the hustling and bustling narrow streets and alleyways of Manila. One of his former lovers Ronron has just been murdered after having his named added to the much-feared watch list of drug criminals. This watch list is in reality a hit list: nearly every person on it gets mysteriously killed. Now Dharna’s name too is added to the tally, sending him on a quest to find the authority who mistakenly identified him as a drug criminal, and clear his name.

All of the action takes place in one single day, the titular “big night” referring to both Dharna’s tragic predicament and his lover’s cabaret performance in a local gay bar. The people he encounters are deeply corrupt and opportunistic. They are entirely indifferent to his imminent execution, their willingness to help the hapless young man entirely contingent on their vested interests. The developments are extremely fast, in an energetic and wilfully preposterous script. Dharna visits a morgue, a sauna and even meets a famous film star as he scrambles to save his life.

The outcome is a fast-paced, engaging little film that will make you laugh. However it will do very little to raise awareness of Rodrigo Duterte’s ultra-violent war on drugs. According to Amnesty International UK, such operations killed more than 7,000 people in just six months, as the president continues to encourage the bloodshed. This is no laughing matter.

Big Night has just premiered in Competition at the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Kalel, 15

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

At the age of just 15, Kalel (Elijah Canlas) does not have it easy. He has to face a very premature adulthood. He drinks, he smokes, he takes heavy drugs, he has a girlfriend, he has to contend with violent thugs at school, plus a witchy mother and careless sister at home, in a busy lower middle-class neighbourhood somewhere in the Philippines. Plus, he has been diagnosed with HIV.

This is a harsh and cruel society almost entirely devoid of altruism. No one is supportive of Kalel. His tactless father – who happens to be the local priest – asks whether he has been “bum-fucked”. His mother is far more concerned about her well-endowed new lover, a married a man called Mon. His sister is also devoted to her new boyfriend. Screaming, slapping, punching and menacing body language are the main currency, even at home. Gestures of affection are few and far between.

The institutions are equally broken. The nun at his Catholic school endorses violence, while the local doctor does little more than offer ointment for treating the skin rashes that are quickly spreading all over Kalel’s body. Most Westerners will know that these are symptoms of full-blown Aids, yet both Kalel and his doctor seem unaware of the gravity of the disease. Antiretroviral therapy is nowhere to be seen. At the end of the movie, we learn that the number of people infected with HIV in the Philippines has grown by 170% between 2010 and 2017. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of people remain undiagnosed because they fear the widespread and overwhelming stigma associated with the disease. This is a society unprepared and downright unwilling to support the most vulnerable people.

The movie is never concerned whether Kalel is indeed gay and how he became infected. That’s entirely irrelevant to the narrative.

Jun Roble Lana’s 15th feature was clearly made on a shoestring budget. The images are black and white and the frame is a very unusual square (instead of the more conventional 16:9 and 5:4). This is not a handicap. In fact, the movie is teeming with spontaneity and frankness. It’s also profoundly disturbing, and there is no message of hope. It does, however, successfully raise awareness of a very disturbing phenomenon. While HIV infections are under control in most of Europe, there is a very fast-growing epidemic in this Asian nation.

Kalel, 15 is showing in Competition at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. A very audacious addition. DMovies are live at the event as special guests.