I had really low expectations for Serbis, Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s film about a day in the life of a family who both run and live in a decrepit theater which is also a hotbed of gay male prostitution, set in the city of Angeles (where the US military bases used to be located), right outside Manila. It was shown at the Chicago International Film Festival over the weekend. First, the reports and reviews from Cannes, where it was part of the Main Competition, the first Filipino film to be invited in 25 years, were disheartening - it was a highly divisive movie that received both ecstatic acclaim (including raves from Jury President Sean Penn) and withering, verging on the disgusted, negative notices (and quite a number of walkouts during its festival screening). Second, I’m pretty cynical about the quality of Filipino films that had been shown at the Chicago Film Festival over the past several years. I grew up in Manila in the 1980s, during a “Golden Age” of Philippine cinema and know the brilliant heights that Filipino directors (such as the late Lino Brocka, the only Filipino director until Mendoza, who had shown a film in the prestigious Main Competition section at Cannes) can achieve, if they put their minds to it, and if they get the right amount of funding and artistic support. The Filipino movies that have rotated through the Festival in the past had been trashy, exploitative, and badly-constructed, including Mendoza’s one-dimensional bore, The Masseur. Oddly, too, they were all focused on the sleazy side of gay sex and life in the Philippines (it almost seems like the Film Festival organizers kept on thinking- oh, we have this slot for a film about male prostitutes, their gay patrons, and the slums that they are all desperately trying to escape from, preferably with lots of gratuitous male-on-male sex and nudity, why don’t we go to the Philippines? Despite what Saturday nights at Roscoe’s might suggest, NOT everyone in the Philippines is gay). Serbis, which refers to the colloquial Tagalog for paid sex, seems to fit this bill quite nicely. Well, Serbis proves that pre-conceptions are meant to be shattered, and expectations exceeded, because it is one of the most astonishing and memorable movies I saw at the Film Festival this year. Imperfect, maddeningly self-indulgent at times, and yes, packed with gratuitous sex scenes and sensationalism, it also has searing social commentary, surprisingly detailed and incisive vignettes about Filipino culture, and the chutzpah to be an uncompromising, no-holds-barred, uniquely gutsy film that you won’t see anywhere else.
Tags: Brillante Mendoza, Chicago International Film Festival
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