Cannes. "Kinatay"

By David Hudson on 05/17/2009

[Updated through 5/28]

Splllitttt! Here we go...

"There are few prospects more alarming than a director seized by an Idea," blogs Roger Ebert. "I don't mean an idea for a film, a story, a theme, a tone, any of those ideas. I'm thinking of a director whose Idea takes control of his film and pounds it into the ground and leaves the audience alienated and resentful. Such a director is Brillante Mendoza of the Philippines, and the victim of his Idea is his Official Selection at Cannes 2009, 'Kinatay.' Here is a film that forces me to apologize to Vincent Gallo for calling 'The Brown Bunny' the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival."

"Dedicate a movie to one thing, respect the singular attention of the camera, and a film should be rich enough to overcome just about anything," writes Daniel Kasman in The Auteurs' Notebook. "This rich vision of so much gloom, dim suspension, no action, no spectacle, no drama is a beautiful thing, something out of an avant-garde film dedicated to textures, subtle shifts in color, and spatial uncertainty of a sunless world.... 'Kinatay's' immersion into nightfall stands strong, splendidly, as independent force."

For Jay Weissberg, writing in Variety, this is "an unpleasant journey into a brutal heart of darkness. Mendoza strengthens his gift for describing space with inquisitive cameras, but as the helmer's star rises, his subtlety wanes, resulting in obvious statements made banal by heavy-handed ironies. This noirish tale of an innocent guy drawn into a dark world of torture and dismemberment understands that an unwilling accomplice is still tarred by fate, but the pic's graphic nature does realism no favors."

"Showing the kidnap, beating, humiliation, rape, murder and dismemberment of a young prostitute, Brillante Mendoza's new film 'Kinatay' (which means 'butchered' in Tagalog) is a nerve-shredding exploration of crime which is both repellent and grimly compelling," writes Mike Goodridge in Screen. "Offering audiences no relief or redemption, it is perhaps most notable for its daring in attempting to capture the moment a young man crosses the line into irrevocable evil. Well-made by Mendoza and more coherent than last year's 'Serbis,' it will nevertheless be hard for even the most adventurous arthouse audiences to stomach."

The Hollywood Reporter interviews Mendoza.

Cannes has press conference video.

Updates: For the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu, this is "infinitely darker [than 'Serbis'] but an equally strong depiction of modern-day life in the former American colony that some are comparing to Gasper Noé's 'Irréversible.'" But "Mendoza is no gore-hound. He's more serious than Noé. This is a fiercely moral and horribly unforgettable denunciation of societal corruption."

"With the artistic choices he has made, Mendoza achieves a singularity of purpose in hammering home his message, and the experience compels one to watch even as one wishes to turn away," writes Maggie Lee in the Hollywood Reporter. "He deplores this human treachery with almost Old School, religious morality. He preaches it unequivocally - at the climax of the slaughter, the subtitles 'If you lose your integrity once, you lose it forever' appear. Laying on the Christian symbolism, the [raped and murdered] woman is called Madonna, while the camera occasionally cuts away to a picture of Jesus on the wall."

"There's no drama, no moral, no respite and (arguably) no point; like us, our 'hero' can only watch in mounting horror and fervently wish himself elsewhere. It's a singularly grueling experience from which I learned nothing except that I can survive singularly grueling experiences." writes Mike D'Angelo at the AV Club: "I admire 'Kinatay' for its uncompromising rigor - the lengthy van ride, which constitutes nearly half the film, is a tour de force - but I can't bring myself to like it."

"Mendoza likes melodrama," blogs the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris. "He likes human energy, and emotion; drag queens, hookers, big families, and porn. He likes locating the beauty and comedy in the gross and unhygienic. And in 'Serbis,' the beautiful, comic grossness was also the stuff of life. 'Kinatay' is thoroughly lifeless and more about what Mendoza doesn't like. Here that appears to be women.... When a movie like this goes right, it feel like magic. The same is true when it goes it goes wrong: How did this happen? And yet I couldn't leave 'Kinatay.'"

Cannes has notes and audio from the press conference.

Updates, 5/19: "Mendoza is just convinced that ideas must equal difficulty," writes Alison Willmore, "and so, with last year's 'Serbis,' the theater itself had to be the main character, the teeming human dramas it sheltered deliberately, coyly captured only in oblique fragments. With 'Kinatay,' the problem is more that the ideas aren't that good, unless you want to take its protagonist, a callow kid who can't look away as things get more and more unpleasant, as a stand-in for the audience. In which case, maybe you're meant to do what he never manages to and walk away - the film gives you plenty of opportunity to, and plenty of people did."

"'Antichrist' is a trip, a jape, a work of camp that might have been devised by the Joker; 'Kinatay' is, as it is meant to be, an ordeal." J Hoberman for the Voice: "It's not a movie to be recommended but it is something that has to be experienced to be understood. One critic likened 'Kinatay' to a snuff film; the most favorable notice compared it to 'Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.' A better analogy (and one Mendoza is hardly subtle in suggesting) would be The Most Disturbing Movie of The 21st Century, Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ.' The victim's street name is Madonna, images of Jesus can be spotted in several locations (including the gangster's abattoir). Like 'The Passion,' 'Kinatay' draws on the lowest horror movie tropes in its grimly experiential representation of human suffering and depraved indifference."

Update, 5/21: "However detestable," notes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, "the film has some interesting points: namely the opening sequence where the young cop gets married; and the post-slaughter scene in which the same cop falls asleep in the taxi home, awakens when the car tyre blows out, and remembers that one of the others has given him a present to mark his grotesque new manhood: a gun. This is yet another example of 'arthouse rape': male film directors subjecting female characters to sexual assault as a way of exerting dramatic power and establishing their realist credentials."

Update, 5/28: "A jugular piece of agitprop that wouldn't seem out of place on a grindhouse double bill with the original 'Last House on the Left' or 'I Spit on Your Grave,' the movie wants to rankle audiences at home and abroad by confronting us with the senseless cheapening of human life, which happens daily on the streets of the developing world and too easily passes unnoticed." Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly: "Mendoza, who was one of the only directors present at Cannes this year to use such explicit violence for a discernible artistic purpose rather than for superficial titillation, seems aghast at the potential brutality of his fellow man, and how those men can wash away their sins with a shower and a change of shirt - sometimes even a police shirt. To that end, he has made a duly aghast film that cannot easily be shaken."

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Kinatay," The Match Factory, 2009]

Tags: Brillante Mendoza, Cannes 2009, Kinatay, Philippine Cinema