BE MOVIES is Khavn de la Cruz’s stab at automatic filming. It is a collection that says you can get up anytime, and, like any other gluttonous craving, fulfill the longing to film at even the narrowest opportunities. It is also ego—it is the spitting confidence of a youngish filmmaker about an idea…any idea. If Marcel Proust argued in literature that there is no trivial subject matter, and that art is treatment—he described the act of dozing off to sleep in thirty pages or so in In Search of Lost Time—de la Cruz dares to attack the trivial with a dour straight face and with comicsincerity in this series of shorts.

BE MOVIES, in short, is a collection that raises a middle finger to the usual forms of film narrative. It is a collection that refuses, like a spoiled brat, to be traditionally agreeable. Here is a joker/auteur’s wasteland, where incidental noise is always present, where the music is always as exciting as the idea, where camera angles are unpredictable—on occasion you doubt that someone’s operating the camera at all—where taken-for-granted realities take center-stage.

AMEN

(Elvis incarnate Elbis takes his mother’s advise too far. His love is tender but his mano is a hound dog.) Elbis’s Momma, whom he loves dearly, posed a courtesy dogma: mano must be performed on anyone who is vaguely his senior. (Mano is a Filipino affectation that is done by bowing, taking the elder’s hand, and pressing it lightly against your forehead.) Watch this tragicomic tale unfold, with Elbis mano-ing around and displaying no other manner of social contact. Amen is a courageous statement on blind faith, where ritual reigns supreme over practicality. In a major Catholic country like the Philippines, where the elders scare you about hell all the time, an obsolete courtesy like mano will run as old as time. And, as Elbis performs this not too rock-and-roll-y task of good breeding around the city—on a geriatric boy scout, on a heavy metal guitarist,on a vertically-challenged ramp model, on inanimate objects like a car- door—hell happens. He loses his forehead. An anti-narrative, Amen is shot as “variations on a theme,” adapting the mock-play format (prologue, acts, scenes, epilogue).

5 SHORTS (Voices in the head. Fish philosophy. The after-life. Kafka. Baby-talk.)

1. AYAW KITANG MAKITA/I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOU Several shots of someone sounding off his firm stand of not wanting to see someone else (“Ayaw kitang makita!”), Ayaw Kitang Makita is a straight-faced acting gig. Again, relevance or high-octane topicality are the expectations de la Cruz tried, with gusto, not to deliver. The confessional nature of the monologue, and its pedestrian connection, are enough for the moment.

2. MGA ISDA/SCHOOL OF FISH Mga Isda is a sort of first cousin to the Aquarium Channel, with one unlikely quirk—a pseudo-philosophical annotation. The drunken-sounding voice-over, often bemused with the solace of the fish, sounds at times even envious. Personifying the fish with a fantastic ear for what-if, the annotator rattles off his fish tales—fish shopping, fish hearing Mass on Sundays, fish dying. The fish-view does not try hard to be clever; moreover, it is as unadorned as daylight—like the view everyone gets at any fish tank anywhere. It is the narrator’s invitation, through poetry, that makes a scenery out of the plainness.

3. ANG KAMBAL/THE TWINS Shot in the similar manner as Ayaw Kitang Makita, Ang Kambal is a deadpan piece—a dialogue between a murdered twin and his survivor. The dead speak first, puckering and appealing for sympathy, saying his twin is everything that he was. The dead, by the way, was killed in a race/wager for “the last ice-candy.” His twin pushed him and threw the frozen sweet, which he didn’t even want in the first place. Twins, it appears, are wont to either prove themselves different—or revel in the sameness. Probably the most emotionally affecting in Five Shorts, Ang Kambal is a testament to that tired maxim “The more you hate the more you love.” Betrayal really is a high crime between close relations.

4. HINDI AKO MAKAGALAW/I CAN’T MOVE Khavn de la Cruz’s unlikely Hindi Ako Makagalaw steers close to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphoses, or Philip Roth’s The Breast, if only for one slight difference—the human narrator does not turn into a beetle or a hundred-pound breast, he turns into a voice. The delusion of the protagonist (the voice) is that a body is still attached to it. Drunken stupor? Drug-induced haze? Recollection is futile—girls picking him up in a street-corner, getting abducted, waking up in his own room—and will do nothing to shake him awake…or alive.

5. ANG LALAKING HINDI AKO MAPATAWA/THE MAN WHO COULDN’T MAKE ME LAUGH Using the same rhetoric as the Hollywood flick Baby’s Day Out, that infants do have thoughts—mean, clever, pissy at times—Ang Lalaking Hindi Ako Mapatawa is a let-down for rubber-faces everywhere. Shot from the perspective of a baby, the film shows a man desperately trying to make a baby laugh. A voice-over fleshes out the moans of the frustrated infant, who wishes his father would just leave him alone; or that he would at least try less conventional humor. The short flick turns the table on adults—whose sense of what is funny seems to be more suspect than that of the toddler.

MR. DUCK-EGG TRILOGY

(Which came first, the egg-duck or the duck-egg? Balut mania comes over the metropolis.)

This very short silent trilogy is an absurdist’s take on the Philippine balut (duck egg) phenomenon. Local color abounds in this series, touching on the offbeat vendor-customer connection (“The Customer Is Always Right”), the curiosity that is the otherwise inedible egg (“The Duck Egg”), and the incongruous idea of abortion in fowls (“The Abortion”). It is, given the silent film treatment, oftentimes bordering on fast-paced histrionic vaudeville.

DEAF WISH

(A Do Not Disturb sign comes alive— figuratively speaking, of course.) A young man’s perpetual stance of “tuning off” is the meat of the short film Deaf Wish. It is tongue-in-cheek to a great degree, but also extremely practical. I mean, what could be more banal than the sight of a youth with no cares—and with no ears to boot? Stubborn and often silly, Deaf Wish is also a great marriage of form and content—the ones disturbing the tuned-off teen come with a bombardment of noise; the detached one, whenever he is on focus, comes with a vacuum of audio—nada, zilch, zero.

MAY ISANG SUNDALO/THERE IS A SOLDIER

(Has sex become mechanical? A soldier and a prostitute come face to face, fully clothed.) A retelling of playwright Rene Villanueva’s similarly titled piece, May Isang Sundalo is a courageous snuff film of sorts. The hired strumpet hardly knows it—but she’s being filmed, and an actor playing the homecoming soldier tries to press unusual buttons. In the same breath as the New York hotel scene in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, or the apartment scene in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite, both featuring male protagonists who hire prostitutes just to talk to them, May Isang Sundalo is an unlikely Peeping Tom of a flick. The hired woman, who as mentioned was not in on the joke, displays a strong business ethic: an acumen for getting things over and done with A.S.A.P. The soldier, on the other hand, is almost robotic in his grand design to strike up real talk. May Isang…is alternative filmmaking—dangerous, inventive, eager.

KAMATAYAN NG PRESIDENTE/ DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT

(Men on the street, on couches, in barbershops—talk about a mini-Apocalypse.) A mockumentary capturing the apolitical Filipino upbringing, Kamatayan Ng Presidente approaches—again with a straight face—the curt honesty and frankness of the Filipino lay opinion. The variety of people surveyed is amusing: some are cooperative but extremely naïve, some earnest but stuttering, some frank (“Okey lang din siguro ‘pag nangyari ‘yun.”/“I think it would be fine if he dies.”) The filmmaker, who also acts as host/reporter in this short feature, exploits the ambiguity of language in general. The respondents struggle with the unclear query—What can you say about the death of the president?—with a head-scratch or a chuckle. Which president died? This president? What would I do? Did he really die? The replies, as well as the questions, are endless.

EPEKTO NG BEER SA ISANG AKTOR NA GUMAGANAP NA HAMLET/ THE EFFECT OF BEER ON AN ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET

(When an actor gets drunk, he stops acting. He starts seeing real ghosts. The sullied flesh melts.)

A single, real-time shot. A high chair. A genuine Shakespearean actor. The cheapest local beer. The amalgam is deadly engaging. Epekto Ng Beer Sa Isang Aktor Na Gumaganap Na Hamlet is a descent into humanity. Well, frankly, it’s also a descent into drunkenness and word-slurring. The actor playing Prince Hamlet recites the famous existential soliloquy (“Ang mabuhay ba o hindi?”/”To be or not to be?”) and, periodically, he swigs on a beer. This real-time exercise, more than being humorously scandalous, is also an attempt at truthfulness. The taken-for-granted reality here is that when a person swigs on several bottles of beer, he will get drunk; what is at stake in Epekto…, however, is showing how that happens.

PUGOT/HEADLESS

(Baby, let’s play house. Hide the sharp objects—away from the children’s, and my, reach.) Pugot, like Ang Kambal, is a thump to the heart. At the outset, it looks like an ordinary portrait of domesticity, until it escalates into a debate—where the couple is engaged in disputes over each other’s worth. It also touches on the usual objects of marital strife: jealousy, time spent at home, financial wrestling. Two main narratives are married in this film—one shows Taga, the husband, walking the streets with bloodstains on his pants; the other is a longish string of so-so domestic talk spiced up with nagging and quarreling. The spontaneity of the dialogue is so realistic it’s scary. Like the bulk of de la Cruz’s films in Be Movies, talk is utilized as a clever grounding tool. The film ceases to be an event with this filmmaker’s sublime use of the unpolished conversation; the film starts becoming life. Non-resolution, or at least the unexpected resolution, is also characteristic of reality. Pugot offers this kind of shock in its ending. The musical score for Pugot also adds to this philosophy of down-grading—legendary local guitarist Jun Lopito’s stabs at progressive metal defies structure as well.

GREASEMAN

(How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people? Try the shoes of your neighbors.) Not for even a second would anyone think of Greaseman as apologetic for society’s ills. Not for a while will anyone discern Christian goodwill as its point. Although Greaseman threatens to fall into these traps of cliché, with the split-screen narratives of The Yuppie and The Greaseman going through their respective routines, the film is saved by its hip approach. Earlier reviews have hailed it as a “spontaneous music video.” Others have called it “a long poem with film as accompaniment.” Undoubtedly the most exciting and most energetic piece in Be Movies, Greaseman not only tells the meeting of two worlds (or two social classes), but also encroaches on the human desire for escape, pretense, and the longing to be someone else. One of de la Cruz’s stronger armaments in this short feature is his stream-of-consciousness poetry—not so much an exact tangent to the main narrative as an aural treat, nonetheless a joy to the heart.

PATINTERO SA ILALIM NG BUWAN / PATINTERO UNDER THE MOON

(Shadows are sometimes clearer than bodies.) Also a potent venue for restless visual minds like de la Cruz is the music video. As an accompanying piece to the song of the same name (performed by local world music act Makiling Ensemble), Patintero, with its extensive use of shadow-play, is a powerful alternative for animation. The varying backdrops used are a union of the ethnic and the psychedelic—bright color schemes, intriguing alien shapes, ordinary movement.

TUNGKOL SA WALA/ABOUT NOTHING

(Revolution Nothing—the mark of this generation.) Another would-be music video is this accompanying piece to spoken word/jazz group Radioactive Sago Project’s song Tungkol Sa Wala/About Nothing. This relatively shorter piece employs vaguely the same visual and aural attack as Greaseman, with poetry lines scrolling at the bottom of the screen. A bottomless pit of Sartre-ian goo, this hushed recitation of getting doomed to nothingness is balanced by the otherwise homey footage of the band playing live.

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