Filipino film SERBIS opens at the ANGELIKA Film Center

Featured in the Arts and Leisure section of last Sunday's The New York Times is an article about the Filipino movie called SERBIS directed by Brillante Mendoza. The film was an official selection at this year's Cannes Film Festival. This controversial film, starring Gina Pareno, Jaclyn Jose and Julio Diaz, tells the story of the Pineda family who operates a run-down movie house showing dated, sexy double-feature films. Preoccupied with their personal demons, the family is unaware of the transactions taking place in their theater between the patrons and "serbis" (service) boys. 

The movie opens today at the Angelika Film Center, located at 18 West Houston Street (at Mercer Street). 

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Review from the New York Times (By Manohla Dargis) 

Gentle, bawdy and at times rambunctiously, ticklishly rude, the Filipino movie “Serbis” opens with the camera ogling a naked woman preening before a mirror. “I love you,” she coos to her reflection, “I love you,” as the camera’s point of view drifts between her face and breasts. In most movies this scene might foretell a predictable exercise in exploitation cinema. But the talented director Brillante Ma. Mendoza is after something slyer and more thoughtful than easy nudity for his latest, a story about a dilapidated movie theater and the fractured family that is trying not to disintegrate further inside its derelict walls. Like the family, the adults-only theater has fallen on hard times. Both are located in Angeles City, where the massage parlors were once filled by American military personnel from the nearby, now shuttered Clark Air Base, one of the largest installations of its kind. Mr. Mendoza — whose earlier movies include “Foster Child,” about a poor woman who earns money caring for foundlings headed for overseas homes — doesn’t fill in the socioeconomic backdrop, perhaps because his native audience doesn’t need it. Nor does he explain that abortion is illegal in his largely Roman Catholic country: he just offers up a pregnant woman bitterly weeping while her lover looks on in panic, and the family’s regal matriarch (Gina Pareño) damns them both. Content to show rather than tell, Mr. Mendoza trains his roving camera on the family walking and running through the theater’s long halls and up and down its serpentine staircases. Among the most restless is Nayda (Jaclyn Jose), one of those besieged women whose good looks are being chipped away by everyday worries. Nayda doesn’t have much time to pause, much less rest, between chasing after her young son and tending to those customers who stop for a bite at the cafe next to the box office. Far less troublesome are the customers who venture inside, where, under the dimly flickering light of the movies, they unite amid lip smacks, moans, offers of “service” and mumbled haggling. Mr. Mendoza isn’t the first filmmaker to set his camera loose in an old movie theater, a conceit that has been put to nostalgic and poetic use by the diverse likes of Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”) and Tsai Ming-liang (“Goodbye, Dragon Inn”). He underlines the divide between the lives off screen and the shadows on screen every time a character lingers next to a colorfully gaudy poster for an attraction like “Frolic in the Water.” Yet the theater — incongruously named Family — functions as more than a metaphor for a crumbling world: it’s a business, a home, a playground and a refuge for the family and its gay clientele, who are unlikely to join the religious masses passing by the theater in the movie’s finale. In “Serbis” politics isn’t a matter of slogans but of real bodies, which perhaps accounts for why it paradoxically unwinds in a movie theater. The heavenly bodies that populate our films bring their own pleasures, of course, alighting on screen as if from a dream. The bodies in this movie — which received little love at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival — are not heaven sent, but neither are they puppets in a cinematically contrived nightmare. Rather, they lust, sweat, desire and struggle with ferocious truth. In one scene a young man lances a boil on his rear with an empty bottle, a grotesquely funny affirmation of real life and real bodies at their most humble and humanly poignant. You might gag, but you definitely won’t forget it.

Directed by Brillante Ma. Mendoza; written by Armando Lao, based on a story by Mr. Lao and Boots Agbayani Pastor; director of photography, Odyssey Flores; edited by Claire Villa-Real; music by Gian Gianan; production design, Benjamin Padero and Carlo Tabije; produced by Ferdinand Lapuz; released by Regent Releasing. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. In Tagalog, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.

WITH: Gina Pareño (Nanay Flor), Jaclyn Jose (Nayda), Julio Diaz (Lando), Coco Martin (Alan), Kristofer King (Ronald), Dan Alvaro (Jerome), Mercedes Cabral (Merly) and Roxanne Jordan (Jewel).

46th New York Film Festival - "SERBIS"

Youtube video from benpadero

Earlier this evening we attended a screening of a Philippine movie titled "SERBIS" (Service) at the Ziegfeld Theater. The movie is part of the 46th New York Film Festival that opened last September 26. The festival presented both newcomers and acclaimed filmmakers, Hollywood features and independent visions from all over the globe. Clint Eastwood’s highly anticipated "Changeling" is this year's NYFF centerpiece. 

Filipino veteran actress GINA PARENO stars in "SERBIS" under the direction of BRILLANTE MENDOZA. Not to diminish the artistic merit of the movie and its actors, this work though leaves me feeling tired of films depicting the social ills and poverty in the Philippines that are invited to be part of international film festivals.

Synopsis:

A drama that follows the travails of the Pineda family in the Filipino city of Angeles. Bigamy, unwanted pregnancy, possible incest and bothersome skin irritations are all part of their daily challenges, but the real "star" of the show is an enormous, dilapidated movie theater that doubles as family business and living space. At one time a prestige establishment, the theater now runs porn double bills and serves as a meeting ground for hustlers of every conceivable persuasion. The film captures the sordid, fetid atmosphere, interweaving various family subplots with the comings and goings of customers, thieves and even a runaway goat while enveloping the viewer in a maelstrom of sound, noise and continuous motion.

Director’s statement:

This story is closely based on real life, hence the treatment of the material will be in the cinema verite style, like my other films Slingshot (2007), Foster Child(2007) and The Masseur (2005). The events unfold as they happen in real life, seen from the various points of view of the characters involved: Nanay Flor, the proprietor of the movie house; her daughter who takes over the movie house while she is away; the various trade boys and hustlers and even the purse snatcher who seeks refuge in the movie house from pursuing policemen. There is an irony implicit in our lives. What is deemed immoral by the law is mostly lived and practiced freely by normal people, hence immorality has become a way of life as dictated or demanded by our need to survive.