Benito Bautista,
Chard Bolisay,
Coke Bolipata,
Filipino Cinema,
Joel Shepard,
John Bedia,
Lawrence Fajardo,
McCoy Tarnate,
Oggs Cruz,
Raymond Bagatsing,
Ronnie Lazaro,
YBCA,
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A half hour into
Benito Bautista's
Boundary (2011) [
Facebook] and I'm mesmerized by Bautista's orchestrated sense of foreboding,
McCoy Tarnate's neon-stained and vehicularly claustrophobic cinematography, and the grating disquietude of
Coke Bolipata's anxious violin score. This is Manila neo-noir, darkly beautiful and atmospheric with distrust, uncertainty, desperation and pathos.
As synopsized by Joel Shepard for YBCA's
"New Filipino Cinema" series: "
Boundary is set in the crowded urban roadways of Manila during Christmas. A nervous taxi driver picks up an easy-going businessman as his last passenger for the night. Their journey together to a far-flung suburb takes a wrong turn in more ways than one, and becomes a wickedly tense portrait of urban anxiety and shifting identities."
Winner of the NETPAC Award at the 2011 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival as well as a special mention in that festival's South East Asian competition, it's easy to understand how
Boundary ended up on
Oggs Cruz's Top 15 Feature Length Filipino Films of 2011 at
Lessons From the School of Inattention, where he praised a storyline "that unites top-level corruption with bottom-level criminality."
That storyline bears striking similarities to the urban narrative of
Amok (2011), undoubtedly because it shares
John Bedia's co-authorship. "New Filipino Cinema" provides a fantastic opportunity to experience Bedia's burgeoning screenwriting talent, as both of his film credits to date have been programmed into the series. Whereas
Chard Bolisay was referencing
Amok when he wrote that the film's denouement was a "gala of predictable outcomes and unpredictable victims", his observation could just as easily apply to
Boundary. Bedia likewise seems drawn to the interior world of vehicles, momentarily safe from but ultimately encroached upon by the menace of Manila. He scripts the permeability of this boundary.
How directors
Lawrence Fajardo and Benito Bautista have stylized the
mise-en-scène of Bedia's confined vehicular sequences in their respective films is an equally fascinating consideration of the auteurial conversion of word to image.
Amok's diurnal and sweltering visualization is in sharp contrast to
Boundary's lustrous nocturnality, awash with vivid oranges and greens bleeding in from the city's neon lights, as well as the Christmas lights strung up within the cab's interior. Tarnate's containment of so much color and movement within the constraints of the vehicle is downright masterful. I found myself frequently intrigued by his shifting camera placement and wondering how even one more person (
i.e., the cameraman) could fit into an already crowded cab?
In the role of the guilt-ridden cab driver,
Ronnie Lazaro—who I last saw in
Affliction (Yanggaw, 2008), reviewed by both
Oggs Cruz and
Chard Bolisay—exudes the sweaty desperation of Manila cab drivers sympathetically described by Cruz at
Lessons From the School of Inattention. His fare, the ruggedly handsome
Raymond Bagatsing, suggests a different temperature of menace. Together, within the confines of the cab and the guarded limits of their conversation, they reflect in microcosm the shady ways of the outer world.
Boundary negotiates its interior and exterior spaces at YBCA's "New Filipino Cinema" on Friday, June 8, 9:00PM, with Bautista in person to Q&A with his audience. I envy this opportunity as
Boundary has emerged as one of my favorites from the YBCA series. Ticket info can be found
here.
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