Ang Babae sa Septic Tank

When my friend Madonna learned that I had just seen Ang Babae sa Septic Tank, she asked how the audience responded to the film she line-produced.  I texted that they loved it.  Now, thinking about it,  my text-message should've been  based on what the great French director, François Truffaut, once said: "The most beautiful thing I have seen in a movie theater is to go down to the front, and turn around, and look at all the uplifted faces, the light from the screen reflected upon them."  Of course, I Googled that.

First-time director and ad exec Marlon Rivera’s entry to this year’s Cinemalaya comes from a long line of movies about movies like, Fellini’s 8½ , Ed Wood, Boogie Nights and a Cinemalaya winner, Jay, from a few years back.  But Septic Tank reminded me most of a film made in 1973, Truffaut’s Day for Night. 

Day for Night, which starred one of the most beautiful actresses from the 70s, Jacqueline Bisset, is Truffaut’s homage to the whole movie-making process.  It’s chaotic, zany, circus-like but nonetheless meaningful for people who just love to be on the set.  All the artifice you see on screen (shooting night scenes during the day, included) is a by-product of real-life dramas in the making of a film.

Rivera’s take on the movie-within-a-movie formula is actually more hilarious.  Two idealistic young filmmakers (played by the wonderful Kean Cipriano and JM de Guzman who has the most soulful eyes) are bent on making the first Pinoy film – Walang Wala –  that would win an Oscar.   They’d like to have big movie star Eugene Domingo play the dirt-poor Mila who’s forced to sell one of her seven children to a pedophile.   The movie (Septic Tank, not Walang Wala) starts with a sweep of the squalor in Manila’s urban poor.  It cuts to a quiet, blank-faced and emotionless Mila preparing one packet of instant noodles which she divides among the seven kids.  Then unceremoniously, she bathes one of her daughters, dresses her in an ill-fitting Sunday dress and finally drops her off in the pedophile’s condo unit.   Those opening scenes were a precious ten minutes or so.  It feels real.  There’s grit.  It’s so indie.

Then the directorial treatment of those same Mila sequences ricochets from sensitive to showy to farcical.  What if Cherry Pie Picache played Mila?  What if it slum people broke into song?  And everything else just gets crazier and crazier on the road to Kodak Theatre.  It's craziest when the two young men visit Eugene the actress who is even more flamboyant than her overly designed home.  Eugene’s acting there along with her lines is pure genius.

Got some beef though which could be inconsequential for some.  The musical numbers in the squatters are too many and extended.  The photography should have been as spirited as the writing, as nifty and pliant as the change in directorial flavor.  The daydreaming device, while cute because the imagined scenes were all happening inside the head of the production assistant who had no speaking lines, was too familiar and easy.

But by and large, Madonna, I was one of those uplifted faces in the theatre.  The light on the screen reflected the joy I had from watching your movie.   And I felt for the two idealists.  We are all from advertising, you see.  We all hope for a nice and fulfilling ride each time we work on a piece of film.  But shit always happens.