The biggest and most fatal problem of Dondon Santos' Noy is that it was never allowed to
grow its own set of balls. The film is basically a product of favors: from
then-presidential candidate and now-president apparent Noynoy Aquino, his
family, and his campaign team, who allowed Santos and his crew the opportunity to shoot
the presidential campaign from the inside. As such, it never fully acquires a
voice. It relays its message, or whatever sort of motherhood generality it
tries to impart, through minuscule peeps and squeaks. It is what it is, and no
matter how it musters every conceit in cinema like mixing documentary footage
with overt melodrama, it remains to be at most, a limp and flaccid political
statement if not an absolutely impotent failure.
Noy (Coco Martin) is an ambitious yet
unqualified young man who by submitting a fake diploma and a demo reel he
bribed one of his friends to make, got the assignment of documenting the
presidential campaign of Aquino. Fueled by the desire to make ends meet for his
family, composed of his mother (Cherry Pie Picache), a manicurist who caught
the fancy of a transient American, his elder brother (Joem Bascon), whose legs
have been rendered useless by a previous accident, and his younger sister, an
able student who is unknowingly going blind because of an undetected diabetes,
he at first does his job with the mechanicality of an unaffected employee,
before events at home start to compound for him to treat his subject with
the zeal that it suggestively deserves.
The trials of Noy's family, from the
younger sister's inevitable blindness to the older brother's entanglements with
drug dealers, are predictable consequences of narrative conceits. They are
hardly reflections of the social malaise that is troubling the nation. At most,
they are didactic inclusions whose only real value is to elementarily graze
upon issues that have existed and have been eternally discussed and debated in
other venues and forms of media. As for their dramatic value, it is perfunctory
at best, made effective more by the deft performances of the actors than their
supposed truthfulness. Noy endeavors
to mirror the plight of the poor, showcasing a household tormented by the
floods caused by a recent typhoon and the maladies that frequent the
downtrodden, yet all it really achieves is to shallowly tell a story made
ridiculous by the convoluted twists and turns, which are better suited in an
afternoon soap, that are forcibly squeezed into the feature.
The footage of Aquino's campaign,
integrated into the film via Noy's work-in-progress documentary, is nothing
more than ornamental. Shot using murky and jerk digital format as opposed to the
rest of the film's elegant film cinematography, most probably to emulate the
immersive quality of Brillante Mendoza's filmmaking, the footage is at its best, like when Aquino's discussion on the state of Cebu's power was
serendipitously interrupted by a short brown-out and he bounces back with a
witty retort, revelatory of some of Aquino's endearing traits. Mostly however, the
footage is no different from the thousands of footage that were aired in
each and every news channel during campaign season: crowds, motorcades,
politicians making promises, celebrities endorsing; with only one difference,
Martin, disguised as a journalist, is there. There could be something to say
about fact, in the form of Aquino's campaign, and fiction, in the form of the
character of Noy interacting with Aquino and his team, interacting seamlessly
in the documentary footage, but as it is, everything feels put-on and cosmetic
at best.
Thus, Noy
is nothing more than a disposable drama that disguises itself with the most
current of political flavors to achieve only a semblance of relevance. It tries
to walk the talk, juxtaposing a grandly operatic tragedy with the insistent
promises of change of Aquino's presidential campaign, but it only succeeds in
talking more talk, throwing around mere suggestions of the grey areas of Aquino's
campaign without actually creating any pertinent discourse about anything. Gone
were the days of Lino Brocka's Bayan Ko: Kapit
sa Patalim (Bayan Ko: My Own Country,
1985) or Orapronobis (Fight for Us, 1989), whose political
agendas are brandished with both the skill and directness that are required to
inflict a measure of change, even if it is just momentarily. In comparison, Noy feels like a buss in the cheek, given
only if the cheek's owner is courteous enough to give a buss back.
(Cross-published on Lessons From the School of Inattention)