Review of Kinatay by Brillante Mendoza
The exciting part in Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay is not the murder and the dispatch of body parts of the female drug trafficker-victim (played by Isabel López). It is the end of the puncture, a disconcerting moment for Peping, the main character played by Coco Martin.
The film begins with a wedding. Peping and his girlfriend, Cecille (played by Mercedes Cabral), happily run through the streets to the town hall for an appointment with the justice of the peace. They move between the hustle and bustle of the Barangka neighborhood in the city of Mandaluyong.
The film by Brillante Mendoza begins with a happy rhythm of great expectation. Peping and his fiancee have deposited their baby with a neighbor. She is about to legalize her status. There is no trace of guilt in Peping, of trying to right a wrong in his relationship with his girlfriend. Rather, it unfolds as a natural process: he can now marry Cecille, his sweetheart, in anticipation of becoming a full-fledged cop with a career ahead of him. He is at the dawn of a new life as a husband. He is on the threshold of his career as a future police officer, a childhood dream that he claims to have had ever since.
Much of the opening follows Peping through the ritual of marriage, stripped of all religious affiliation. It is the secular state, in the Justice of the Peace room (played by Lou Veloso) that is in charge of ensuring and legalizing the bond between Peping and his wife. As they head to town for their date, they witness a high-tension scene between a man perched as Humpty Dumpty on top of a steel structure near Edsa, and his distraught mother, who hysterically yells at her son to come down of the high beam. This image of precarious self-destruction is glimpsed amid the happy anticipation, if not euphoria, of Peping, Cecille and family on their way to the wedding and reception.
The next episode of the Brillante Mendoza story brings Peping back to school to attend a class of wannabe freshmen. The excitement of the wedding that just happened in the morning rubs off on everyone in the class. There are many jokes between her classmates and the teacher.
After class, Abiong (played by Jhong Hilario), his friend, informs Peping of an urgent assignment that same night: the boss wants them.
Here the film by Brillante Mendoza moves to the dark bowels of the city. A drug dealer (Isabel López) is picked up at a bar-club and taken away in a van. A trip through Roxas Boulevard and Edsa ends through the NLEX in some remote town in Bulacan or Pampanga.
The woman is questioned and beaten in the van. Much of these scenes were shot in pitch black with a constant barrage of incidental car and road noise.
At the safe house, the victim is dragged to a basement, revived with a bucket of water, and further interrogated about his flaws, betrayals, and failure to deliver promised money. Meanwhile, Peping watches helplessly in a corner. The chief’s assistant, Kap (played by Julio Díaz) orders him and Abiong to buy cigarettes and a lighter. They take the van into town. Abiong hands him a gun. He says that Kap told him it was a gift for Peping for his personal use. Agitated and confused, Peping contemplates abandoning his friend. He sneaks away, attempts to catch a bus, and flees the scene. His cell phone rings. Abiong wonders where he is. Reluctantly he meets his partner again.
As Brillante Mendoza returns the story to the safe house, Peping returns to the basement with the cigarettes. At this time, the victim is desperately trying to negotiate some deal with Kap. Instead, her friend Abiong rapes her. The horror is effectively increased due to the fact that the scene is staged completely naturally. No melodramatic effects are used. Screaming for her life, we hear her panic in the midst of the black shadows, “Huwag n’yo kong patayin, me anak ako!” (Please don’t kill me, I have a son!)
They kill her and then cut her off, limb by limb, body part by body part. Brillante Mendoza stages this episode in a detached style, showing the efficiency of the killers/executioners. She is careful not to choreograph a sensational beat of brutality, given the rising emotions of all involved. She maintains the absence of melodrama. We are far from Hollywood. For me, this is an atypical Pinoy cinema!
Brilliant Mendoza now brings us back to the city… it’s almost dawn. The body parts, wrapped in plastic, are scattered, one by one, or thrown into different dumpsters.
Back in town, somewhere in Grace Park, the team stops for breakfast along the way. Peping at this time is dumbfounded by the nightmare. He asks to be excused. He can not eat. The Boss allows him to go home. He gives her money to take a taxi.
In the taxi, Peping takes the gun out of her bag. And as we look at it, we hear an explosion. The taxi has had a puncture. Frightened, Peping gets out of the taxi and feebly tries to hail another taxi. Meanwhile, the driver changes the tire. Once fixed, the driver asks you to go back inside. Peping takes a long time to face himself. He then he goes back inside. At this juncture, Brillante Mendoza increases the tension and drama. He reminded me of Kafka’s story, “Metamorphosis.” Peping has become exactly like Gregor Samsa. In Kafka’s story, Gregor Samsa wakes up in bed to find that he has turned into an insect. The horror of that story is not that he has been transformed into an insect. The horror is that he and his family take it for granted. At the end of the story, Kafka describes Gregor’s room lying in bed with the bedroom window wide open. Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian novelist, analyzing the story was perplexed to ask, if Gregor was an insect in his bed, with a window wide open, why didn’t he use his wings to fly to freedom? ?
The brilliant Peping de Mendoza has become a reincarnation of Gregor Samsa. Totally disoriented and psychologically dislocated, Peping stares at his new gun given to him that night. The film began with hope and expectation. Images of self-destruction (Edsa’s possible suicide) disrupted their wedding ritual. The experience of brutality and violence interrupted his wedding party, destroying his sense of self. Peping has lost his wings. Is the trauma temporary or permanent?
Brilliant Mendoza has beautifully styled this nightmarish film in a bold palette of pale ash grays to dark black/charcoal with an occasional splash of scarlet (the victim’s dress) in between the greys. The entire film is carefully calibrated in terms of color to dampen the atmosphere. Choosing the roadside café Tapsilog with the imposing structure of the LRT in the background reminded me of Piranesi’s etchings of endless arches, disorienting perspectives. The scene is carefully shot to capture the gray of dawn with only a little blurry promise of morning dawn.
The brilliant Mendoza is rare among Pinoy directors. She is one of the few who consciously constructs metaphors in her films. This was already evident in his first film, Masahista, where he dramatically juxtaposes his protagonist giving pleasure to his male clients, and contrasts this with his duty to wash and clean his father’s corpse, thus equating pleasure with the state of the dead. . And this conscious craft is what she sustains and makes her work so poetic and exciting to me.
Brilliant Mendoza’s Kinatay isn’t just a horrific story of a butchered dog. It is rich in layers of meaning. And the art that hides the art is at the climax of the narrative. When the victim screams for mercy, for her life to be spared, that she has a family, a child, the whole scene takes on a whole new meaning in retrospect. Present at the scene is Peping, witnessing the violence. It is not only the physical woman who is being torn apart into a dissected membra, which in Greek drama is called sparagmos. Symbolically, Peping’s soul (and perhaps the viewer’s) is also being torn apart. The hymen of innocence is torn. Is the silent Peping screaming inside him: “Me anak rin ako!”? Do we share the crime? Brillante Mendoza’s film is not really an expose of police brutality and corruption. It is the drama of a moral dilemma of spiritual habituation: how insidiously and subtly we fall into evil when moral indicators disappear and moral ambiguities prevail.
When the police force embodied by the Chief (played by John Regala) decides to execute the victim in the name of business, they embrace efficiency and pragmatism. But by tearing it apart, we participate in a sacred ritual. By dumping her body parts all over town, we share the scandal and parody of the sacredness of life. Literally, binabasura ang buhay! We share the devaluation and desecration of the divine aspect of human life.
Peping’s wedding ritual ends in a bloodbath that tears him apart, perhaps wiping out his sense of identity altogether. Suddenly we are abandoned and hanging with him above the heights of isolation, an image given early in the film, which leads us to contemplate the precarious balance between self-destruction and the struggle to maintain sanity: to survive and transcend the horror. In a recent homily at the Don Bosco church, the parish priest commented on the gospel about the wedding party. He said that in Christian iconography, a banquet as the central image signifies the theme of the end of time. Peping is indeed on the metaphysical threshold of a new life. Let me now quote Edith Time: “(The) symbol, under due consideration, vibrates with the prophetic affirmation of the mistaken fate of human beings to live in the perpetual balance between self-destruction and the reach of the enduring.”
Brilliant Mendoza ends with a sunrise image of his girlfriend making him a breakfast of egg fried rice. The wedding banquet is over and a new life begins, or rather, the agony begins. In Greek dramaturgy, after the sparagmos comes the agony. The ambiguous image of hope, of family values, is vaguely reaffirmed.
August 21, 2009
