Kinatay (2009)

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Reviewing a movie like Kinatay (English title: The Execution of P) will prove to be quite a challenge if (a) you watched it in one of the seedy movie houses on Colon Street, (b) the only trailer shown during the screening was this laugh-out-loud-funny sex drama called Salat, (c) you’re not sure if you caught the ending or not, and most importantly since (d), it’s directed by brutal and unsympathetic auteur Brilliante Mendoza, who, just earlier this year, was booed at the Cannes Film Festival for winning Best Director for the movie in question.

For (a), no other movie house in the city chose to screen Kinatay but this old-school movie house somewhere in the Colon area that’s infamous for, well, I’d rather not say. Let’s just put it this way: some moviegoers walked all around the theater the whole time, which made my friends fear for their belongings. I tried to convince them that unless they had a penis, they had nothing to worry about. (They were all female friends, by the way). The one good thing about the movie house being seedy, though, is that since there was no air-conditioning, you’re free to smoke while watching the movie. It actually felt very bourgeois, considering.

(b) Salat is a rare gem. The trailer starts with a naked man and woman who appear to be having sex, but they could very well be just lying down side-by-side caressing each other. I’d like to say it was foreplay, but it seemed too boring to be one. But what makes the movie Salat really stand out from the rest is the acting; it’s hysterical! One scene involves the lead girl pacing around at the beach, in knee-high water, and in a nightgown all mad and distressed, the reason for which is, and I can only guess, she cannot have the man of her dreams. So she paces around crying, screaming, seemingly unsure of what to do next, and then she dives into the water—for an evening swim or to commit suicide, I will never know. Through the trailer alone, I can tell that the screenplay is a winning masterpiece. The lead girl gets consoled by a friend (or a sister) with the following words: “Siya na lang kaya ang pakasalan mo. Total, guapo naman siya at mayaman.” (“Why don’t you marry him instead? He’s handsome and rich, anyway.”) Props to the writer/s for coming up with such a complex character, because apparently, the lead girl does not want to settle for just handsome and rich. Maybe she’s looking for someone no Austen leading man could measure up to? Perhaps, perhaps.

(c) The version of Kinatay that we watched ended abruptly, without the end credits or anything. I felt really uneasy so I turned around to wave at the projectionist in the projection booth behind us. Lo and behold, the projection never came from the projection booth all along as in a regular theater, but rather, at the very front of the balcony, in front of where me and my friends were sitting. So I approached the projectionist and asked him if that was the end of the movie. He said yes. It was too obvious, though, that the movie was not played from a reel, but, I think, from a pirated DVD, so whatever the real ending is, I will only know if and when a legit copy of the movie comes out.

(d) Brilliante Mendoza is brutal and unsympathetic because he does not seem to care what his audience thinks or feels. He just tells the story as it is, with a certain level of detachment that he himself seems like just another spectator. Worse, he’s completely ignored that virtually everyone, even those who claim to be the snobbiest of cinephiles, grew up on Hollywood movies, and would look for proper lighting and scoring. Mendoza might as well be a Dogme filmmaker, because all light and sounds coming from the movie seem to have been shot as they were. No enhancements whatsoever. This does not work all the time. However, in a movie like Kinatay, all the terror is magnified instead. You cannot see much of what’s going on, but you know it’s happening and it gives you chills. This probably contributed to why the movie was walked out on.

See, here’s how the story goes: Peping (Coco Martin) is a newly-wed criminology student who gets invited to run some errand along with other policemen, including Kap (Julio Diaz), the captain of the city’s police force. Unfortunately, they do not go out to do police work but to execute Madonna (Maria Isabel Lopez), a bar girl who owes Kap drug money (Kap, by the way, also happens to be the drug kingpin in the area). When the men start beating Madonna up inside the van, with barely enough light to make anything out, that all you have to make use of primarily is your sense of hearing—you hear Madonna’s pleading for the men to stop, the van running, the dull thuds of the men’s fists and the soles of their shoes stamping all over Madonna—right at that moment, you are placed in Peping’s shoes, who’s too shocked to do anything, too afraid to protest. For Peping, it’s a long night, one horrific nightmare that he wishes to get out of, especially when the situation elevates to the men raping Madonna before chopping up her body parts. The difference between the audience member and Peping is, the audience can easily walk out of that nightmare; Peping has no choice but to play along and stay calm, even to the point of helping out in disposing of Madonna’s body parts. If you’re one of the audience members that sticks to the end (or whatever ending the theater you're watching the movie in offers you), you’re probably sick in the head. That, or you’re in that Colon theater walking around, looking for, well, I’d rather not say.

One of my former bosses pointed out to me that Kinatay seems to be a rip-off of Training Day (Antoine Fuqua). He said that just like Training Day, Kinatay is about a good cop being put in a situation where he is forced to be bad. Well, having seen both movies, I can say that both are just too different to be compared. Next to Kinatay, Training Day seems more like a colorful Disney movie. I can even picture Ethan Hawke now bursting into “Part of Your World,” flipping his fins. This isn’t saying I like one more than the other. I like Kinatay for how different it is, and how real it felt, even at the risk of sounding like a complete psychopath. But I also like Training Day because of great writing, good acting, and top-grade lighting and scoring.

I can totally understand why people hate Kinatay. I even understand why film critic Roger Ebert would deem it unwatchable. But I can also understand why Brilliante Mendoza won Best Director for it. If I were in Cannes that time, watching Brilliante Mendoza accept his award, I would never have booed. I would have probably lit a cigarette, nodding, nodding.