Whisky (Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, 2004)

(Whisky is one of those films. It is one of those days.)

Pa'no tayo umabot sa ganito?

Whisky begins when things are over. Lives had been lived. Chances, wasted. Opportunities, attempted. What's left to do is witness the austere aftermath, admire the absurdity, maybe even laugh, nervously, with a guarded thinning of the lips, at the sort of people we have become, at the series of events that had lead to here and now.

Perpetually hunched and pinched, Jacobo (Andres Pazos) owns a crumbling sock factory in Montevideo. There is a quiet dignity in his movements, a result, we surmise, of years upon years of overseeing an impersonal but reliable assembly line (there's a commentary here, too, on industrialist alienation, typified by talks on labor issues whilst picking colorful pastries). His languid stupor is broken when his brother Herman (Jorge Bolani) goes home from Brazil to visit. To put up a semblance of success in his life, Jacobo asks his assistant Marta (Mirella Pascual) to pretend to be his wife. Marta, as constant (and old) as the gears and pinions that animate the sock factory, agrees.

Ganda.

When Herman comes and Jacobo and Marta commence their performance, the everyday becomes the realm of fiction. Inevitably, we are made to notice the minutiae of living, of lying: the half-meant things we say, the little acts we perform. And so when someone at the hotel in Piriapolis comments, in reference to Iguazu Falls, the site of their fictional honeymoon, that "It's very beautiful there," "there" doesn't actually exist. "There" is nowhere. (There is an almost facile cue here that marked the start of the performance: when Jacobo presses an "Emergency Stop" button - a suspension of the daily mechanics - and the scene cuts to Marta, made up and smoking, appearing self-conscious of her newfond glamor).

How Jacobo and Marta treated this charade is for me the most articulate, satisfying facet to Whisky, how their response to an opportunity for escape eloquently defined who they are, what they have lost, and what they will do (if any) to regain it.

Easily the more transformed, Marta easily becomes invested on the role. She gets her hair done, applies makeup, and fixates on tiny details that will improve the performance (including the saddest couple portrait in perhaps all of cinema). She utters lines that are expected of her, and when a woman calls while Jacobo is out, she hangs up the phone, protective. From reserved and apathetic, she slowly opens up. In Piriapolis, she reveals to Herman that she can spell backwards. Clearly, this reversing of words and sentences, while the camera pans to sceneries, gestures toward a desire to turn back time. The final sentence she reverses is "Jacobo is exasperated."

:D

On the other hand, Jacobo always insists on the transactional nature of the performance. He is adamant about paying all the expenses, carefully keeping the charade to a minimum. For the most part, he is dead. His only vulnerable spot is his brother, and his desire to prove himself to him. To cite, the only time he holds Marta is during a game of table hockey. The only time he becomes alive is during football, sharing willingly in vicarious triumphs and catastrophes, with nothing, really, to call his own. When he realizes that Herman might have a thing for his pretend wife, he relishes the possibility. For the first time, he feels as if he has the upper hand.

We learn so much of the dynamic between the brothers when Herman offers Jacobo a wad of cash as "compensation" for having looked after their dying mother. What is unsaid here, of course, is that the money is compensation for a life wasted. While Herman has long moved on to a better place with a family of his own, Jacobo was just released from the burden and, in true Bona fashion, has nothing to look forward to now except a life of a barely discernible point. Too late comes to mind. And so the message undergirding the refusal was, too late; no thanks, fuck you.

It's over.

Then it's over. It's over.

This film's blatant fixation on mirrors tells me that these characters may all along have been self-reflexive in performing their roles. Jacobo knows he had become a zombie who has learned to reject any interruption of a routine that he has, for all intents and purposes, grown to love. Marta recognizes the charade as her only shot at escape, short-lived and fake it may be (she loves going to the movies, Christian would point out). Throughout the film, shots would cut their bodies in strange halves and shapes: while fixing the window (Jacobo, lower), hauling the oxygen tank (Marta, lower), crowding the tiny elevator window (the two's morose eyebrows and creased foreheads). Here are people, incomplete and stoic, trudging on.

Persistent, too, is a caller dialing the wrong number. "These things happen," Marta assures Jacobo, and us. These things happen. What exactly happens? By rendering the everyday as a confluence of fictions and myths, we wonder just how much of a performance lives are; just how many desires and whims are soothed by a superficial show of tenderness; if there is a tyranny that cannot be assuaged by an enthusiastic mouthing of a word that would physically arrange your facial muscle into a semblance of smile; if we, knowing this, can ask for more.

Hable con Ella (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)

(When I saw Kieślowski's Heaven with Alaysa, I unwittingly committed the worst crime in this relationship. You see, Christian and I appointed that film to be our first as a couple, and the transgression, free of malice as it was, just goes to show how utterly discursive things are here. And so we come to Talk to Her, one of the candidates to play second fiddle, along with Edge of Heaven and Silent Light. But things are always unpredictable, and one fine June afternoon, we saw Kimmy Dora and the Temple of Kyeme in SM Calamba, our first and, some would argue, a slight demotion from Almodóvar.)

Before you read on, play this. Now read on.

There is a question that anyone who sees Talk to Her will ask a beloved, existent or otherwise: if I fall into a coma, will you leave me? Will your love persist? This is a prosaic way to put it, and the discerning lover can easily ask back, Is that still you, somewhere in that vegetative body, peeking in between the automatic operations of your biology? Isn't life, after all, kinetic, and to proclaim a thing lifeless is to comment on its inactivity?

Precisely why Talk to Her is so fixated on the body, graceful and sensuos, limiting and yet boundless to he who persists and insists on an alternative. The two ladies in a coma are both corporeal creatures: a ballerina (Alicia) and a bullfighter (Lydia). The film takes great pain in illustrating this alertness to this phenomenon, in showing, to cite, how the two are dressed: lifeless Alicia in fine, virginal hospital linen and Lydia in rigid, ornate torero attire.

Skinny jeans ang peg.

And so this beautiful attention: to the body, its contours and definitions, its supposedly imperious limitations. At one point, Alicia's eyes open, jolting the nurse attending to her. You see, bodily functions, even the most primeval ones, are not necessarily animated by that tricky judgment called life. Thus we return to the narrative's central dillema: what does one do when confronted with a comatosed object of affection?

Benigno is Alicia's private nurse of four years who is revealed to have shown a creepy-endearing obsession toward her when she was still, well, alive. On the other hand, Marco, Lydia's boyfriend of a few months, is a hard-nosed journalist who cannot even look at her limp, bruised body. In classic Almodóvar fashion (-Christian), the two form a strange friendship over their shared misery. "Talk to her," Benigno tells an incredulous Marco, who predictably doesn't listen.

Things take an interesting turn when Alicia becomes pregnant (foreshadowed, I thought, by that otherwise just revolting cleaning-up-the-regla scene in the beginning). Benigno, whose "rape" of Alicia - an almost incommunicable event - is dramatized in congruently stunning fashion, claims that their love for each other is superior to those of law-abiding humans. Interesting: I, for one, believe him.

Nope, that's not a hirsute cardboard wall.

To begin, it is the "miracle" that wakes Alicia up, and if Benigno - blameless, benign - deems it an act of love more than transgression, what of it? If the body is the text on which the film's universe stands, can Benigno be justly crucified for the consummation that, in his mind, was not only natural and essential, but emancipatory? For in invoking the corporeal, you necessarily invoke the spiritual that powers every flexing of muscle and hinging and unhinging of joints. Alicia's dance teacher Katerina talks about this "ghost" - the ethereal, the imperceptible. Can one love a ghost?

Outside the discourse (and this blog's tenacious overreading), the two's friendship is tender in its unlikelihood. "I have hugged very few people in my life," an incarcerated Benigno tells Marco across a glass pane. He describes the four years of attending to a near-corpose the "most complete years" of his life. His final act of love is as inevitable as it is logical.

For his part, Marco, who, after his divorce, couldn't sleep on the matrimonial bed and had to buy a new one, all too willingly took residence in Benigno's sad, haunted apartment. From someone who doesn't understand, Marco has called Benigno "the only friend" he has (transformation, as always, being the hallmark of truly fruitful human relationships). And if the fading "subtitle" were to be trusted, a story seems to be in the offing for Marco and the recovering Alicia, who gets a glimpse, just like Benigno, of a grown-up man crying over something so beautiful.

So what is the tragedy here? That Benigno's love for Alicia has to transpire in an alternate plane, where bodies are not prisons and appearances do not constrict? That it has to manifest in ways that are unethical and criminal, in noctural transgressions and secret monologues. No: that this kind of love, in its purity, is deemed to have no place in the waking, cruel world.

Now play this.