Ang Babae sa Septic
Tank (The Woman in the Septic Tank), directed
by Marlon Rivera from a screenplay written by Chris Martinez, earns most of its
laughs from the misadventures of director Rainer (Kean Cipriano), producer
Bingbong (JM de Guzman), and production assistant Jocelyn (Cai Cortez), an
overly ambitious troop of filmmakers who are out to make their dream film entitled
Walang Wala by exploiting the
picturesque poverty of Manila. As they brainstorm on the casting, the look, the
story, the poster design, and down to the English translation of the title of
their precious project, the film takes shape inside the mind of perennially
quiet Jocelyn (perhaps Rivera and Martinez's homage to the production crew
rendered voiceless by noisy auteurs and capitalists), showcasing what's depressingly
wrong in the current state of Philippine filmmaking in the most hilarious of
ways.
Ang
Babae sa Septic Tank delights in caricaturizing filmmakers, films, and the
business of making films. There are practically no real characters to speak of,
and no real story for the characters to navigate in. The filmmakers are just comical
representations of deplorable traits of filmmakers tend to have. The plot is
essentially what happens in a typical day in the pre-production of the film, where
meetings, pitches, and location checks are crammed within the few working hours
of the day in true independent film fashion.
Rivera
and Martinez thickens what essentially is a thinly plotted experience with wit
and exaggeration, creating both a chilling and charming indictment of Philippine
cinema for creating monsters that feed on fame and fortune at the expense of
the truly marginalized. Unfortunately, Ang
Babae sa Septic Tank trips on its own trap. In its quest for some sort of
comeuppance for its erring characters, it draws up a twist that makes use of
the most common stereotype of poverty, which is abject criminality.
Ang Babae sa Septic
Tank's
biggest commodity is reliable Eugene Domingo, who plays the various versions of
Walang Wala's Mila, the hapless
mother of too many children who is forced to sell one of her kids to a
pedophile to survive. She also plays an overly distorted version of herself.
Domingo hilariously hams up the role of the overly-pampered product of mainstream
projects and television shows.
Lately,
Philippine cinema has been represented internationally by the films of
Brillante Mendoza which are predominantly focused on lives persisting in
extreme cases of poverty. With the success of Mendoza and the demand of film
festival programmers for exoticized visions of third-world penury, other
filmmakers followed suit, filming various stories back-grounded by mountains of
trash, acres of slums, and never-ending violence.
The
Philippines, sadly, is proud of a cinema that most of its citizens have
not seen. It is proud of a cinema that is taken hostage by the international
film festivals that dictate upon it its inevitable direction. It is proud of a
cinema that is only part of a vicious cycle of international demands and
artists too willing to fill in these demands. Of course, that is only one
spectrum of the debate. The other spectrum belongs to what's right in
Philippine cinema, which is obviously not the focus of Martinez and Rivera and
would have made the film a less effective parody.
With
its brave and seamless sense of humor, Ang
Babae sa Septic Tank is a sure crowd-pleaser. However, let not its comedic
machinations be mistakenly considered as the summation of the bigger, more complex and
more beautiful thing that is Philippine cinema.
(Cross-published in Lessons from the School of Inattention.)