Five Flavours 2015 Review: CROCODILE Drifts Through Arresting Yet Ponderous Poverty

Fable and reality mingle in Francis Xavier Pasion's Crocodile, a film riddled with beautiful imagery and terrible poverty. Based on real events and bookended by documentary footage of the story's real protagonists, the unique, swampy landscape of the Agusan Marsh in the southern Philippines offers an arresting and foreboding backdrop to a tale of loss, community, and, to some extent, communion with nature.

A mother, living in a shack in the swamp, struggles to feed her young children as her distant husband spends his days casting nets for the fish that provides them a meagre income. Her eldest daughter attends a local school and is on the cusp of graduating, but her family can ill afford the 800 peso fee ($17) to do so. One day, she travels by boat to school with her friend, and as she practices their graduation song, a crocodile suddenly overwhelms their small vessel and swiftly drags her below the water. Racked with grief, the small community search for her body, to no avail, and the parents try to cope with the sudden loss.

Much like the towering piles of garbage on the outskirts of Manila that offer the dank color of gritty Filipino dramas such as Adolfo Alix Jr.'s Fable of the Fish (2013), a subgenre referred to by some as 'poverty porn', Crocodile frames its story through the interlaced waterways of the region's swampy terrain. Pasion's camera often lurks overhead, following thin wooden banana boats that slowly drift through sinuous swamps. These characters have no solid ground to walk on, they are mired in this dangerous marsh, and no clearer is this emblamatized when a young girl full of promise, eager to learn and escape, is committed to a much too early watery grave.

A raw performance from Angeli Bayani as the mother and a stoic turn from Karl Medina as the father lend the film strong dramatic counterpoints, yet nestled among a cast of local extras, their dramatic presence almost upsets the film's earthy, vérité tone. Pasion sets a simple story against a backdrop teeming with symbolism with Crocodile. Yet, on an emotional level, the film never quite matches the strength of its sumptuous visuals. The poverty on display is potent, but Pasion is also too content to wallow in it and demonstrate its depth, rather than use it to dig at something deeper. Though intimately realized, the film falters in its thin symbolism, which is at times awkwardly juxtaposed with the narrative's quiet, unembellished tone.