Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

DARK horse or not, Brillante Mendoza has arrived. In the skirmish of last year’s auteur-studded Cannes Film Festival, Kinatay—Mendoza’s main competition entry and his second consecutive film at the Croisette after Serbis—was butchered by the critics with relish. Roger Ebert called it "the worst film ever in Cannes’ history," a dubious honor he had previously bestowed on Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, with its indulgent prurience and navel-gazing. Recognition from the jury seemed less and less a possibility, especially when you’re up against an Ang Lee or a Tarantino or an Almodovar. And yet, on awards night, much to the critics’ chagrin, it was Mendoza who emerged as Best Director for his bold, unforgiving opus of a criminology student who, in the course of a seemingly interminable night, finds his sense of morality compromised.

Mendoza’s Cannes win is a signal triumph in Philippine cinema. It is, in some respects, an indirect homage to the memory and social realist aesthetics of Lino Brocka, one giant whose shoulders he stands on. But look closer and you’ll see that the slum dwellers and corrupt politicians in Mendoza’s tableaux are lensed with an offhand, dispassionate eye. That some of his best work was shot documentary-style, including Berlin Film Festival winner Slingshot, Foster Child and the Venice Film Festival entry Lola, makes his nightmarish visions even more damning. In Kinatay, where most directors would have flinched or retreated, Mendoza zooms in. While Brocka wore his politics on his sleeve, Mendoza is fundamentally a chronicler, a brutally sharp one at that. As a result, those slum dwellers and corrupt politicians pulsate with life—in all its pathos, humor and grotesquerie.

The devil in Mendoza’s films is in the details. Literally. The production design (which he does himself ) is meticulous, organically adding to the film’s verisimilitude, particularly in the crowd scenes of both Slingshot and Serbis. Production design was Mendoza’s field before stumbling into directing with his debut feature, The Masseur (2005). ("The director backed out and the producer asked if I was maybe interested in stepping in to direct it," was his recollection of how he made the transition.) In it, a young man supports his family by working as a masseur when his father dies. On paper, The Masseur looked exactly like what foreign festivals would be salivating over; a lot of independent Filipino features that play the fest circuit at that time were gay-themed romps posturing as social critiques. While it’s not without basis that Third World Cinema is sometimes branded as "poverty porn" in its unabashed depiction of the abject living conditions in underdeveloped nations (Slumdog Millionaire, for one, was not spared this accusation), the Filipino gay indies were quite a different animal: not quite poverty porn, but poverty AND porn. Politicized orgasms, let’s call them. The big surprise is the sensitivity and deep feeling Mendoza invests in The Masseur’s protagonist, played superbly by Coco Martin, the DiCaprio to his Scorsese. One scene that cuts between Martin kneading a client’s lusty body and him assisting a mortician with embalming his father’s corpse is quietly heartbreaking. The film went on to win the Best Picture award at the 58th Locarno International Film Festival. Fast forward to 2009, when Mendoza returned to Locarno (which he credits as having given him his big break as a director) this time as a jury member.

This weekend, Mendoza’s new film Lola (Tagalog for "grandmother"), which debuted in last year’s Venice International Film Festival, will have its US premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s about two elderly women who bear the consequences of a crime involving their respective grandsons—one is the victim, the other is the suspect. The unassuming director is here in New York to attend the screenings and gamely answered a few questions about the film.

The film was based on a real events like one grandson killing the other grandson. I situated this story during the rainy season not only to show how hard it is to live in that flooded part of Manila, but also because I wanted to have a more gloomy mood and atmosphere to complement the feelings of the struggling lead characters. Filipinos are basically survivors. They look at hardships as a part of life, but they remain hopeful. They tend to find solace and peace through prayer.