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.
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