Cinema One Originals 2010: DAGIM Review
There is no denying that
Joaquin Valdes' Dagim (Raincloud) is a visually exceptional
film. Despite the film's preoccupation with grime and gore, the film manages to
sustain an aesthetic style that is hardly obnoxious but is more often than not quite
alluring. The film's visualizations of desolation that we can only surmise from
what Valdes hints at as a product of the heavy military presence in the area attempt
to complement the angst-ridden mood of the story of two brothers (Martin del
Rosario and Samuel Quintana) who discover a suspicious band of individuals
whose anarchist ideology is more than telling of their peculiar lifestyle. Stylized
almost to the point of confusion, the film can be best described as a collage
of striking images stitched together to service a story that could have worked
better with more restraint, more meaningful simplicity.
Dagim feels
superficial. It's unfortunate, really. What the film is trying to say or at
least from what could be gathered from the several snippets of beautified
ugliness is intriguing. Its revisionist interpretation of the aswang, relating monstrosity to a
philosophy of abandoning the false trappings of civilization and order to
reveal humans as true monsters, has potential for something more enduring and
more troubling than the posturing that the film has heavily invested on. Other
than its curiously sympathetic leader (Marc Abaya) and maybe the band's
mysteriously captivating belle (Rita Iringan), the band is composed of members
who are nothing more than loud and attention-grabbing eccentrics and punks.
They are hardly individuals whose belief in a skewed philosophy has forced them
to abandon the comforts of normal existence for a monstrous lifestyle. Their
anachronistic fashion sense and tacked-on attitude add more to the
superficiality of the entire exercise than to the merits of the film's attempts
at horror.
Of course, Dagim's horror is of course more
conceptual than functional. Although there are overt attempts at utilizing gore
and atmospheric mood-setting to scare or at least unsettle, Valdes relies
mostly on his concept to ground his horror, depending on the idea that the
terrorizing monsters of myth and folklore are as real and palpable as any
ordinary person who has completely lost hope on social institutions. Sadly, the
film's fictional setting, a nowhereland whose geography and history is sorely
unexplained, filters any inkling of connection between viewer and film. Thus,
the film, unlike Richard Somes' Yanggaw (Affliction, 2008), another revisionist
tale of the aswang mythos whose use
of the Ilonggo language and whose careful depictions of local culture enhance
the horror by grounding it on some semblance of reality, locates itself in an
under-realized approximation of any existing Filipino setting.
Valdes peppers his film with
little details, that of the little brother and his habit of lighting his
flashlight in the middle of the night, or the eccentricities of the mysterious
girl during the siblings' initial encounter with her, or the madwoman wildly
mourning outside the siblings' humble hut one morning. These details are
supposed to logically create the apt atmosphere for the intended horror, just
enough of the quirk and the strangeness to skew the seemingly normal to produce
unease. These details unfortunately fail to cohere with everything else.
Despite all these
reservations, the promise of the talent involved in the film cannot be ignored.
Perhaps it is that promise that preempted the film's incoherence. Dagim certainly feels like a work of a
director that is trying too hard, trying too much. While Valdes cannot seem to
unify style with substance, creating a product that is grossly uneven, he
persists as a very efficient orchestrator of the capabilities and proficiencies
of the several talented craftsmen and artists under his control. Maybe, given
time, given experience, given focus, Valdes can make the film where his lofty
technical ambitions add to instead of deviate from his loftier intentions.
(Cross-published in Lessons from the School of Inattention.)