GRACELAND B
Philippines (84
mi) 2012
d: Ron Morales Official site
Good things come in small packages, which in this case is a
spare, modern day, Philippine take, perhaps an homage, to an uncredited
Japanese classic, Akira Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW (1963), which stars Toshirô
Mifune as a wealthy Yokohama businessman in a sharp suit and tie, a film that
was itself a modernized update on American pulp writer Ed McBain’s crime novel King Ransom, a hard-boiled 50’s
detective thriller that was the 5th book in a lengthy series called 87th Precinct Mysteries, where the child
of a wealthy industrialist is kidnapped and held for ransom, only the kidnapper
accidentally grabbed the chauffeur’s child by mistake, as the kids were playing
together and switched outfits. But the
kidnapper is unrelenting and wants the ransom money all the same, becoming
something of a morality tale. Kurosawa’s
film integrates character study and social commentary into a meticulously taut police
procedure, literally dissecting the socio-economic divide in the city, where
the Japanese translation of the title is Heaven
and Hell, where the most memorable sequences are when he departs from the
novel and moves his camera into the streets of the crowded slums, dancehalls,
and dope dens, delving into criminal depravity, accompanied by blaring rock ‘n’
roll music and bluesy American jazz, showing a subterranean, nightmarish
underworld where the criminal moves about undetected, even with the police
planted on every corner. It was a
complete departure for Kurosawa and is a brilliant lead-in for this flashy
young director to establish his own noirish atmosphere in the backstreets of
Manila. Shot by Sung Rae Cho, conveying
escalating tensions through the visceral use of a handheld camera, making
excellent use of decaying locations which accentuate a vast urban wasteland,
Arnold Reyes stars as Marlon Villar, a dutifully obedient chauffeur working for
a powerful, but thoroughly despicable boss, Congressman Changho (Menggie
Cobarrubias), a man with an uncontrollable desire for underage girl
prostitutes, where Marlon has the unsavory job of paying the girls off and
driving them home. This is an unflinching
look at the seedy underbelly of police-sanctioned, organized crime, where sex
trafficking is no different than drug trafficking, as it’s all about
controlling the means to make money, with no regard whatsoever for the damage
in human consequences.
Marlon has his own 13-year old daughter Elvie (Ella Guevara)
and an incapacitated wife in the hospital on an organ transplant waiting list,
so he has a mountain of medical expenses that are only compiling, forcing him
to endure the indecencies of the job.
The Congressman has a spoiled and precocious daughter of his own about
the same age, Sophia (Patricia Ona Gayond), often seen getting scolded by the equally
pampered and overcontrolling mother (Marife Necesito), who she completely
ignores. The two young girls seem to be
best friends, one with all the money in the world and the other without, where
they play hooky from school one day, only to get an earful from Marlon when he
picks them up, as he was inexplicably fired by his boss earlier in the day when
the Congressman’s sex crimes are plastered all over the newspaper, so he’s seen
by school staff yelling at the girls angrily as he shoves them into his car and
speedily drives off, only to be stopped by a motorcycle cop who’s suddenly interested
in kidnapping the Congressman’s daughter.
When one of the girls protests, she’s immediately shot by one of the two
kidnappers, swiping the other girl, threatening to kill her unless Marlon can
persuade his boss to pay a hefty ransom, before then knocking him out. When he awakes, Sophia is dead in the
backseat and his daughter is gone. Not
knowing what to do or who to turn to, Marlon’s head is spinning out of control,
completely helpless to the evolving circumstances. Bad only gets worse as he’s lured into the humiliating
position of being dictated cellphone orders by the kidnappers, who aren’t shy
about using the screaming cries of his daughter as an incentive. Desperate to get his boss to pay the ransom,
Marlon tells the investigative team of cops that they took both girls. Despite his cooperation, they beat and
brutalize him anyway, as he remains a key suspect in their eyes, as it’s not
uncommon for lowly paid employees to turn against wealthy employers, especially
after being fired earlier, giving him a motive.
Despite intentionally leaving out pertinent details, Marlon holds up
under duress, knowing his best chance to get his daughter back is working with
the kidnappers, where they lead him around like a puppet on a string, which
only pisses off the cops even more.
Like the Kurosawa film, one of the things this film
highlights are the extreme contrasts between the moral decadence of wealth,
where spreading money around offers a powerful and seemingly invincible feeling
that you can get away with anything, compared to the utter devastation of the
impoverished underclass, where you have fewer and fewer choices, becoming
totally dependent on others to provide what you need, sinking into a huge pit
of despair when there’s no one to help, expressed through the desperate feeling
of near death patients whose only chance for survival is an organ donor. To see Marlon led through the dirt and grime
of his employer’s filthy habits, all sanctioned by hefty payoffs, it’s easy to
lose one’s bearings in this nightmarishly disturbing world of extreme
corruption. His helplessness only
increases when he becomes a willing participant in the kidnapping plot to
extort money, as he’ll do anything to keep his daughter alive, so once again he
dutifully follows orders. While the
constant cellphone instructions become irritating after awhile, matched by a
tiresome, one-dimensional portrayal of corrupt cops, it becomes increasingly
clear, however, through the use of some interesting flashback sequences, that
the kidnappers have more on their minds than money, where it becomes
personal. One of the most haunting
images of the film is seeing how a 13-year old prostitute nonchalantly goes
about her business, where her life is already stripped of that childhood
playfulness and enthusiasm seen earlier in Elvie and Sophia, where this becomes
an excruciating portrait of poverty, both economically and spiritually, as
she’s literally sapped of any inner spirit.
This barren wasteland is also shown in the garbage-strewn landfill where
the kidnappers lead their victims, forcing them to tread on contaminated
ground. Reyes’s gutty performance
throughout, however, is the key to the film, offering a sweaty image of
weariness and fatigue, continually trapped in a hellish underground of human
anguish and impending doom, where the rules of the game are constantly
changing, inventing new barriers to overcome, where lies are the only
constant. How does anyone survive in
this brutal game of ever shifting power and corruption? In Marlon’s mind, it’s all a continuous blur,
a horrific expression of the effects of poverty, where the bosses may come and
go, but the helpless subservience remains the same.
