In 1982 when I made I Am No God, the documentary about their healers, in the Philippines, that country had the number six film industry in the world - remarkable for a population of that size. There were blankets under the cutting room benches, where the editors would stretch out and catch a nap rather than leave the premises before their film was finished and the entire national production went through the one Eastmancolor processor at LVN. Their best directors - Lino Brocka, Eddie Romero and Gerry de Leon made polished programmers, sometimes in collaboration with Hollywood operators like Roger Corman and American International, while the rest managed a consistent standard of competence.
I've tried to keep tabs on the country's production since but very little has made it through the Ethnic/Festival filter - oddities like Olivia M. Lamasan's 2004 Milan - so I was charged up at the prospect of the well-received Metro Manila, offered by SBS Online. Well, tough luck. They took it down before I had the chance. However all was not lost. A slightly washed-out copy can be retrieved from YouTube. I can't say that this really counts as a 2012 update on Filipino cinema. The driving force (instigator-director-camera man) was celebrity British documentary maker Sean Ellis, who wrote a script in English, which his native-speaker actors translated into Tagalog for the performances, recorded in their lightweight video process which allowed inconspicuous location filming and freed them from stock ratio limitations.I'm not sure that Filipino authorities would be all that anxious to claim this one either. It shows an irredeemably corrupt and merciless environment. Banuaue province rice farmer Jake Macapagal's family don't even get enough for their crop to buy seed for the next year and resolve that their only hope is to try Manila in the claws of Neon (Ellis acknowledges the impact of Brocka) They set out in a Jeepney bus which always survives its breakdowns ariving to be awed by the urban traffic and construction - seeing a girl dragged off the street into a passing car on their first night. A meeting at the Quezon City labor exchange gets the offer of an empty flat cut price but that proves a scam and the cops throw them out as squatters. Casual work only earns a bag of cooked rice and a soda. Desperate, Macapagal applies for the most dangerous job in Manila, driving an armoured cash van. Spotting his military unit tattoo, driver John Arcilla (particularly good) pulls him out of the applicant line, where fake tattoos are commonplace. He loans Macapagal a clean shirt and prompts him to tell a joke the way that boss Moises Magisa will expect. Metro Manila - Macapagal & Vega
Arcilla takes the raw newcomer in hand for the month of training. He puts music in the "coffin" red van's casette player and introduces his new partner to the ritual of the keys they never see for the transported, ink-bombed cash boxes, along with foil wrapped take away, nights boozing with the drivers and the ritual of (oh, oh!) being the "Postman" who takes a dead partner's possessions to the widow after a robbery. Learning he is living in a Tonda squat, Arcilla slips Macapagal the key to a secret love nest he uses, where the family can now experience the thrill of running water (cf. Brocka's Bona). A kitten joins the family. Planes fly overhead. An ominous black Honda is trailing the van - kids trying to spook the drivers?
Metro Manila - Macapagal & Vega
Macapagal's pregnant wife Althea Vega has taken a hostess spot in Angalina Kanapi's tourist girly bar. The manager is eyeing the pre-teen daughter who sleeps in the back room, waiting for Mum Vega. Metro Manila is one of the most unremittingly cynical films ever made. Even the veneer of worker solidarity proves a trap. The film is sustained by a realist detail which will only crumble in the ingenious but not so plausible finale. This one made its way to Sundance.Even if Metro Manila is a suspect progress report on Pino film-making, it makes a notable extension to the international heist movie line. Think Richard Fleischer's 1951 The Armored Car Robbery, Antonio Isasi Isamendi's 1968 They Came to Rob Los Vegas, Nic Boukhief's 2004 Le Convoyeur and the rest.
However, while checking out S.B.S. On Demand, I did score another nostalgia blast - taking me back to those endless discussions of the difference between eroticism and porn - not unlike dividing religion and superstition. The service was offering the late Jean-Claude Brisseau's last movie, the 2018 Que le diable nous emporte/Tempting Devils. I wasn't even aware that one existed, though I'd followed Brisseau's career with some interest after meeting him in 1989 on the already controversial release of his remarkable Noce blanche with Bruno Cremer and Vanessa Paradis.
Brisseau had been a schoolteacher making conspicuous amateur movies. These got the attention of Éric Rohmer, who backed Brisseau's l988 feature success De bruit et de fureur, launching Cremer & establishing the director's mix of urban realism and raunch. Aproving critics singled out its pioneering depiction of the housing project kids' gangs, anticipating Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 La Haine and Romain Gavras' 2022 Athena.However, as with Walerian Borowczyk (La Bête, Contes immoraux), no matter how welcoming the art movie community had been, Jean-Claude Brisseau's interests lay more with exploitation film.Popular sensitivities moved on and Brisseau was dragged into court by a couple of women he auditioned naked for parts in an upcoming movie and didn't give them. He was found guilty, fined and handed a suspended sentence, which didn't stop him using the incident in his 2007 Les anges exterminateurs. Made closer to the present, Tempting Devils opens with a now mature Fabienne Babe, who played a teacher in De Bruit & de fureur, ringing the owner of a cell phone she has found. Offering to drop it off at a police station, she is told that is the last thing owner Isabelle Prim would want and they arrange a meeting. Babe checks the messages and finds naked selfies - we are already in a Jean Claude Brisseau film. The meeting of Babe and trim young Prim takes place in the apartment of Anna Sigalevitch and, sure enough, we don't take all that long to get into a bare assed threesome. The condition these women maintain is impressive. It's not the grotesque surgical sculpture we see with porn stars. The plot is amplified by the arrival of pistol-waving rejected lover Fabrice Deville and yoga master uncle Jean-Christophe Bouvet, who is into apporting himself round the flat (actually Briseau's own home - spot a They Drive By Night Poster, the Bruno Cremer Maigret box set and Night of the Hunter disk. Brisseau himself does a walk-on.For better or for worse, the pornographic aspects of this one are its best. The dramatic content is just functional, the photomontage artworks we are supposed to admire are unremarkable and the climax floating vision is equally trite. Brisseau's work is near the definition of a guilty pleasure - part of a notably French tradition with Christian Jacques' jokey Adorables créatures, Roger Vadim's polished Sait on Jamais? and Liasons dangereuses, David Hamilton's Bilitis, eventually to degenerate into the work of the seedy José Berazareff, the isolated Jean Rollin, the talentless Radley Metzger and the dreaded Bernard Manduco.It takes a certain amount of courage to declare yourself a fan of Jean Claude Brisseau. I'm trying to picture the negotiations that led to the purchase and playing of this one on Australia's national ethnic broadcaster. Not meaning to dismiss Brisseau's film itself, but that could be something a whole lot more interesting.
Barrie Pattison 2026
In 1982 when I made I Am No God, the documentary about their healers, in the Philippines, that country had the number six film industry in the world - remarkable for a population of that size. There were blankets under the cutting room benches, where the editors would stretch out and catch a nap rather than leave the premises before their film was finished and the entire national production went through the one Eastmancolor processor at LVN. Their best directors - Lino Brocka, Eddie Romero and Gerry de Leon made polished programmers, sometimes in collaboration with Hollywood operators like Roger Corman and American International, while the rest managed a consistent standard of competence.
I've tried to keep tabs on the country's production since but very little has made it through the Ethnic/Festival filter - oddities like Olivia M. Lamasan's 2004 Milan - so I was charged up at the prospect of the well-received Metro Manila, offered by SBS Online. Well, tough luck. They took it down before I had the chance. However all was not lost. A slightly washed-out copy can be retrieved from YouTube. I can't say that this really counts as a 2012 update on Filipino cinema. The driving force (instigator-director-camera man) was celebrity British documentary maker Sean Ellis, who wrote a script in English, which his native-speaker actors translated into Tagalog for the performances, recorded in their lightweight video process which allowed inconspicuous location filming and freed them from stock ratio limitations.
I'm not sure that Filipino authorities would be all that anxious to claim this one either. It shows an irredeemably corrupt and merciless environment.
Banuaue province rice farmer Jake Macapagal's family don't even get enough for their crop to buy seed for the next year and resolve that their only hope is to try Manila in the claws of Neon (Ellis acknowledges the impact of Brocka) They set out in a Jeepney bus which always survives its breakdowns ariving to be awed by the urban traffic and construction - seeing a girl dragged off the street into a passing car on their first night. A meeting at the Quezon City labor exchange gets the offer of an empty flat cut price but that proves a scam and the cops throw them out as squatters. Casual work only earns a bag of cooked rice and a soda. Desperate, Macapagal applies for the most dangerous job in Manila, driving an armoured cash van. Spotting his military unit tattoo, driver John Arcilla (particularly good) pulls him out of the applicant line, where fake tattoos are commonplace. He loans Macapagal a clean shirt and prompts him to tell a joke the way that boss Moises Magisa will expect.
Metro Manila - Macapagal & Vega |
Arcilla takes the raw newcomer in hand for the month of training. He puts music in the "coffin" red van's casette player and introduces his new partner to the ritual of the keys they never see for the transported, ink-bombed cash boxes, along with foil wrapped take away, nights boozing with the drivers and the ritual of (oh, oh!) being the "Postman" who takes a dead partner's possessions to the widow after a robbery. Learning he is living in a Tonda squat, Arcilla slips Macapagal the key to a secret love nest he uses, where the family can now experience the thrill of running water (cf. Brocka's Bona). A kitten joins the family. Planes fly overhead. An ominous black Honda is trailing the van - kids trying to spook the drivers?
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Even if Metro Manila is a suspect progress report on Pino film-making, it makes a notable extension to the international heist movie line. Think Richard Fleischer's 1951 The Armored Car Robbery, Antonio Isasi Isamendi's 1968 They Came to Rob Los Vegas, Nic Boukhief's 2004 Le Convoyeur and the rest.
However, while checking out S.B.S. On Demand, I did score another nostalgia blast - taking me back to those endless discussions of the difference between eroticism and porn - not unlike dividing religion and superstition. The service was offering the late Jean-Claude Brisseau's last movie, the 2018 Que le diable nous emporte/Tempting Devils. I wasn't even aware that one existed, though I'd followed Brisseau's career with some interest after meeting him in 1989 on the already controversial release of his remarkable Noce blanche with Bruno Cremer and Vanessa Paradis.
Brisseau had been a schoolteacher making conspicuous amateur movies. These got the attention of Éric Rohmer, who backed Brisseau's l988 feature success De bruit et de fureur, launching Cremer & establishing the director's mix of urban realism and raunch. Aproving critics singled out its pioneering depiction of the housing project kids' gangs, anticipating Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 La Haine and Romain Gavras' 2022 Athena.
However, as with Walerian Borowczyk (La Bête, Contes immoraux), no matter how welcoming the art movie community had been, Jean-Claude Brisseau's interests lay more with exploitation film.
Popular sensitivities moved on and Brisseau was dragged into court by a couple of women he auditioned naked for parts in an upcoming movie and didn't give them. He was found guilty, fined and handed a suspended sentence, which didn't stop him using the incident in his 2007 Les anges exterminateurs.
Made closer to the present, Tempting Devils opens with a now mature Fabienne Babe, who played a teacher in De Bruit & de fureur, ringing the owner of a cell phone she has found. Offering to drop it off at a police station, she is told that is the last thing owner Isabelle Prim would want and they arrange a meeting. Babe checks the messages and finds naked selfies - we are already in a Jean Claude Brisseau film. The meeting of Babe and trim young Prim takes place in the apartment of Anna Sigalevitch and, sure enough, we don't take all that long to get into a bare assed threesome. The condition these women maintain is impressive. It's not the grotesque surgical sculpture we see with porn stars.
The plot is amplified by the arrival of pistol-waving rejected lover Fabrice Deville and yoga master uncle Jean-Christophe Bouvet, who is into apporting himself round the flat (actually Briseau's own home - spot a They Drive By Night Poster, the Bruno Cremer Maigret box set and Night of the Hunter disk. Brisseau himself does a walk-on.
For better or for worse, the pornographic aspects of this one are its best. The dramatic content is just functional, the photomontage artworks we are supposed to admire are unremarkable and the climax floating vision is equally trite. Brisseau's work is near the definition of a guilty pleasure - part of a notably French tradition with Christian Jacques' jokey Adorables créatures, Roger Vadim's polished Sait on Jamais? and Liasons dangereuses, David Hamilton's Bilitis, eventually to degenerate into the work of the seedy José Berazareff, the isolated Jean Rollin, the talentless Radley Metzger and the dreaded Bernard Manduco.
It takes a certain amount of courage to declare yourself a fan of Jean Claude Brisseau. I'm trying to picture the negotiations that led to the purchase and playing of this one on Australia's national ethnic broadcaster. Not meaning to dismiss Brisseau's film itself, but that could be something a whole lot more interesting.
Barrie Pattison 2026
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