A Film a Week - Ode to Nothing / Oda sa wala

Death is certainly one of the main points of Dwein Baltazar's Ode to Nothing, which makes it by definition a morbid movie. Luckily, Baltazar's points are somewhere else other than in death-obsessed individuals and society, so death here enters the familiar and always welcome territory of absurd humour. The film had its world premiere at home, at QCinema International Film Festival, before internationally premiering in the competition of Karlovy Vary and heading to the North American premiere at Fantasia in Montreal.

It seems that our leading lady Sonya (played by Marietta Subong, alias Pokwang, a huge TV star in Philippines) just waits for the death to take her in her home above the funeral parlour where she works. The business is slow and even when a potential clients come, they are usually trying to bargain. Other than that, Sonya co-exists in silence with her father Rudy (Joonee Gamboa) and tries to sweet-talk the loan shark Theodor (Dido de la Paz) into extending her credit line, hoping that the business will pick up. The mood Baltazar sets is conveniently drab and devoid of colour in a slow-moving pace, with sudden visits of the local taho vendor Elmer (Anthony Falcon, the star of the Baltazars previous films Gusto Kita with All My Hypothalamus and Mamay Umeng) being the only ones to bring some colour in Sonya's life.

Her luck might change with a Jane Doe dead body being delivered to her shop one appropriately rainy night. Since it remains unclaimed, Sonya decides to dress it up and adopt it as her personal talisman of sorts, hoping that the dead will bring more dead, which will bring more money and drive Theodor away. She even talks to the body and sort of prays to it for help. It seems that the solution works for a moment, at least for Sonya and Rudy internally, as they start to communicate to each other and even to the outside world. But when the lack of financial gain meets up with Theodor's exponentially growing greed, Sonya is being pushed well over the edge of reason...

Baltazar's films feature uncommunicative characters, with a lot of internalized emotion and conflicts, so Ode to Nothing is no exception to that. It certainly works as a social commentary of sorts about Filipino way of life, especially in quiet suburbs and provincial towns where the slowly decaying of the setting is confronted by the pressure of financial and other hardships of the ever-faster world of power, influence and capital.

In that sense, Baltazar does good to keep his pace down and to use the colours of the interior and exterior and the architectural structures as his means of expression. The boxy 4:3 cinematography with cropped corners handled by Neil Daza serves the purpose well and the chiaroscuro play with natural colours in dimmed lighting sometimes feels like poetry on certain level, especially combined with the meditative feeling it evokes insisting on minutiae of the daily life.

The acting is flawless throughout and it is completely adequate to tell an endearingly bizarre story of death, life and superstition which we should take at face value. That is not that hard to do since Ode to Nothing never ceases to hold its viewers in a firm grip. The only problem with it is that we might want a bit more of this strange and unique atmosphere and the brisk format of 90 minutes seems a bit too tight.

A Film a Week - Verdict

previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

The topic of domestic violence is usually a tricky one. Luckily, the Filipino director Raymund Ribay Gutierrez picks the right approach: the straight one for his feature debut “Verdict”. The film has just premiered at Venice, in Orizzonti competition and its universal appeal of domestic drama combined with procedural about the faulty state of the country’s bureaucracy should assure its vibrant and long festival life.

The film opens at home with Joy Santos (Max Eigenmann, quite active on the domestic film and TV scene in the recent years) and her daughter Angel (Jordhen Suan). Their evening routine is suddenly interrupted when Joy’s husband and Angel’s father Dante (Kristoffer King, also pretty prolific lately) comes back home violently drunk and angry about some miscommunication between him and Joy. As the argument gets more and more heated, he gets physically violent toward his spouse, even hitting their child who gets in between. After slashing him with a kitchen knife in an obvious act of self-defense, Joy, pretty beaten up, runs with Angel to the nearest police station.

There is no doubt that it is not the first time Joy takes a beating from her husband and it is also granted that it would not be the last, unless she does something about it. So she files the charges against her violent husband and puts him in jail, at least temporarily, while the two of them move to a safe house kind of establishment. The trial at the court of law ensues and, as it is usually the case, it is less about justice or even law per se. So the lawyer’s games of rhetorics and establishing the narrative in which the evidence and the testimonies by witnesses would or would not stand, while everything is more or less left to the judge’s frivolous interpretation.

No doubt that domestic violence is still a big thing even in the most developed parts of the world and that countries with stronger patriarchal culture face even more problems in that regard. It is usually not the matter of positive legislative that condemns any form of discrimination and abuse of (physical and let us say economic and political) power, but the one of patterns deeply rooted in culture. Most of the cases are not being reported for various reasons and even those that are processed by the police and the court are being treated as some kind of minor offenses.

Gutierrez knows it and is not shy to show it openly using the stylistic choices along the lines of cinema verite and its echoes all over the world, usually relying on long, hand-held takes done by the cinematographer Joshua Reyles and somewhat rough editing by Diego Marx Dobles. The emotional effect is maximized even before the film’s greatest trick – the smooth transition from the domestic violence drama to procedural and court thriller of sorts that also corresponds with the transition from an individual to a more universal level. The ending with a twist is also a treat that deserves to remain spoiler-free.

It is evident that Gutierrez has a good understanding with its cast and crew and that should not be an issue since he has already worked with all of them on a similarly themed short film titled “Judgement” that treats only the courtroom part of the story. In the process of converting a short to a feature film, the actors had the most work, since their characters were developed over the course of it. Both Eigenmann and King are quite compelling in their performances, without slip-ups to the territory of over-expressive melodramatic acting, although her control is visibly better than his. Luckily, they both have to interact with a number of supporting characters played by competently relatively unknown actors who serve as the perfect buffer between the two of them.

All things considered, “Verdict” is more than a film with a good cause. Its importance is multi-layered and being simply a very good film also contributes to it.