News:
After a 3-week successful run at Robinsons Galleria and due to public
demand, Will Fredo's Sa Pagdapo ng Mariposa returns to the theaters.
Find out why film enthusiats are talking about it. Experience a
spine-chilling love story you will never forget.
In Praise of Grotesquerie and of things that, it seems, Do Not Make Sense
Reeling
Tito Valiente
Business Mirror
17 June 2008
THERE is something so overtly lyrical in the title of Will Fredo's
second feature film that you suspect a trick is waiting in ambush
somewhere. Indeed, there is a trick at the end, a surprise ending
reminding us of the filmmaker's incursion into the workings of a
chemical-laced mind in his film Compound.
How does one read this film? How does one read the mind of the
filmmaker, the only consistent mind steering the narrative that ends
in a form identified with the horror genre than with drama? You know
that style when the monster refuses to disappear? We can start,
perhaps, by going back to the story of Carlito Mariposa, the child of
a woman who gave birth to her son while being chased by a husband
destined to batter and maul her for eternity. This description,
however, is not fair to the film. We are, in fact, introduced to the
mother of Carlito at the beginning, in a scene that does not make
sense at all if we are to think of how a mother and a father love each
other.
The frame shows a woman, her hair all stray and the face all sweaty. A
man has mounted her. To call the action "rape" will be to simplify the
scene that is animal in all aspect. There is no lust in the scene but
there is pain all over the face of the woman, and pain all over the
face of the man. If libido is raging at all, it comes in the form that
is recognizable as lechery and conquest.
The whole action is brief. The man zips up, the woman slumps. The man
leers and the woman is insulted. The woman as a mother apologizes to
the fetus inside her. The man does not like this and hurts once more
the woman. The woman runs away, and the man, this time with a bolo,
runs after her. The woman runs for her life and "Sa Ugoy ng Duyan"
rises at the background. MTVd and reinterpreted, Lucio San Pedro's
haunting lullaby becomes the backdrop to savagery. Love and hate are
now interchangeable. Visually, the lines between hurting and caring
are blurred.
Welcome to the twisted world of Will Fredo. Welcome to the universe of
caregiving, a world of unbridled sensuality, where the flesh is the
only route to healing.
In this tactile domain, Carlito is the caregiver. His touch is
magical. He can make people walk again. He can give them hope. He can
make them desire to be alive again. In return, Carlito is
well-received by the family of his clients. He is so into his practice
that he ceases to be the caregiver ready to be an OFW. In fact, if
there is an external indicator that Carlito, as a caregiver, has the
option to leave the country, it comes from one of the patients.
This part of Carlito's personality, however, is much too prosaic for
the direction that Will Fredo's work is attempting to pursue. There is
something more to this film than a drab job description.
To continue with our fable, Carlito soon finds himself working for a
family whose son is a sepak takraw player who met an accident.
Strapped to bed, Agustin, the athlete, has to rely on the kindness of
this stranger who is, by his profession, allowed to clean his body,
assist him with all the bodily functions. Here, the film triumphs with
scenes so tender even if they are laced with the edge of desires not
conforming to the socially accepted norms. In one scene hinting of the
two men being drawn to each other, the camera (the director handles
the camera with his two cinematographers, Peter Sta. Maria and Gene
Gallardo) tilts to an angle where the faces of Agustin and Carlito are
almost touching. Then the camera moves back to show them quite far
apart. The intimacy is in the mind.
Mariposa has many of these visual tricks, which makes the film a
cautionary tale manipulated by the filmmaker and a puzzle out to be
solved by the audience. In between the viewer and the filmmaker is a
metaphor—the mariposa or butterfly—that is favored when one is
narrating life as a transformation. The regular use of this metaphor
is predictable: an entity, ordinary and rough, is released out of the
pupa and flies as the lovely winged insect. Nature is an excellent
mentor when it comes to the birth of a butterfly. We are taught that
from life comes death (the loss of the shell) and from death comes
life. It is comparison touching enough when utilized appropriately.
In the film Sa Pagdapo ng Mariposa, the filmmaker tears apart the
metaphor of the butterfly, wing after wing and leg after leg. From a
sordid childhood where caring is absent, Carlito grows up into someone
whose function is to care. In that territory where caring is prized
and rewarded, Carlito discovers that caring is not enough if one must
be loved. One must reveal further the inner self, and far from being
touchy-feely, this revelation, the shedding of an old self, has—for
Will Fredo—to be gross and bodily and violent. Even to the point of
subverting the gay theme that initially underscores the film.
In the end, the film both celebrates gay love (gender and desire is in
the eye of the beholder) and despises it. There is a didactic dialogue
at the beginning, one that is threatening to become part of a
collection of quotable quotes about "lalaki ang pinakamapalad na
nilalang sa balat ng lupa/…Kapag lalaki ang lumuha hindi ito kahinaan
[man is the luckiest being on this earth/When a man cries, it is not a
sign that he is weak]." In those lines, the unsaid is even more
terrible: woman is unlucky, and a woman in tears is a weak being. And
yet, when Carlito reveals his hidden self, all these acclamations
disappear and in its place blooms a condemnation of the duplicities of
gender.
Here, therefore, is a film that is both antiman and antiwoman, and, if
that is not enough, one that has the guts to throw in a message about
how gay love is not enough. I do not know if this is a battle cry of
the filmmaker, or a commentary about how society can push its people
to judge harshly each other.
As with Compound, we expect Sa Pagdapo ng Mariposa to engage us with
its unpredictability. It does, to a point. The film is engaging when
the scenes are spare and spared of bit players who look and act like
bit players. Some supporting performances remain well in one's mind:
Lynn Sherman and Jake Macapagal, as Agustin's parents, and Miguel
Castro have presence in this film. As for Leo Rialp, he strongly
answers the dearth of good "senior-looking" character actors in the
industry. Liza Diño reminds you of Tet Antiquiera, boldness and all.
The similarity ends there, for Diño has a recklessness that works well
in this film about men and women and men. One cannot separate the
performance of Marcus Madrigal from Josh Deocareza, for they are two
sides of the same secret. Deocareza, as Carlito, has the quiet menace
quivering behind a pout that, if we look back to it, may give us an
idea about how he has always labeled himself.
The film also surfaces a potential problem about the kind of
filmmaking Will Fredo seems to favor. He appears to encourage us to
embrace all kinds of people and to revel in their imperfection, and
yet he creates a plot that tells us he does not want us to like his
characters. Which is honest enough, for the celebration of things
grotesque is really a cultivated taste. Used well, this attitude can
keep this filmmaker from going commercial. The danger, though, lies
in a kind of viewing that demands a lot of bracketing and distancing.
I await the day when the filmmaker seduces us into a film where, warts
and all, he tells us to look, enter, try and like his world, the world
he has rediscovered for us.
****
Sa Pagdapo ng Mariposa is from Hubo Productions. Will Fredo directs
from his screenplay. As of this writing, there are plans to show the
film in other venues in Metro Manila and move it to Bacolod and Iloilo
on later dates. Please do not ignore this film.
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Sa Pagdapo ng Mariposa
Will Fredo |
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