Bangkok 09: Kinatay

Posted on Wednesday September 30, 2009, 16:54 by Sam Toy in Under The Radar

Hype is a dangerous thing. It has the potential to make very good films feel a little underwhelming. And despite all of the hoo-ha and an award for direction at Cannes this year, that’s what Dante Mendosa’s slice of Filipino underbelly is – not brilliant, not as obscenely awful as some critics would have you believe, but very good.
At first it reminded me of Carlos Reygadas’ Battle In Heaven, in how deliberately and frustratingly slowly both films move at times, but are punctuated by explosive moments. Kinatay though, is the better film by some significant distance, simply because a) it’s not as slow, and b) it accomplishes a much better rhythm, whereby you can see where it’s going to end (which is not to say you can see how).

Peping (Coco Martin) is a cop in training, who as the film opens, is on his way to be married. He and his partner (Mercedes Cabral) already have a baby, which means money is beyond tight. This is the Philippines, and if someone is willing to throw some extra cash your way for an under the table job, you take it, bent or otherwise. An offer is made to Peping by a young friend - $2,000 for an ‘after hours raid’, which sounds fine for Peping, and he finds himself in a people mover with five other guys. One of whom is called 'Sarge', another is 'Captain'. But are they fellow officers, or gangsters? at least one of the five is a sociopath. The translation of ‘kinatay’ is ‘butcher’ or ‘slaughter’. This is going to end badly, especially for the target of this ‘raid’ – past-it hooker Madonna (Maria Isabel Lopez), who owes someone a lot of money.

The idea behind the structure of Kinatay is that Peping realises early on that he is about to become an accessory to murder, and must decide what to do about it; what can he do about it? This isn’t Hollywood; it’s going to be a long night, and we’ll be watching his agonised brain ticking over for pretty much every minute.

The extreme violence is played utterly matter-of-fact (it was a tough watch after Fixer), but I think Kinatay has been unfairly swept up in hyperbole since Cannes, when everybody got their knickers in a twist about Medosa’s film, Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (not as shocking as the media made it out to be), and Gaspar Noe’s Enter The Void (haven’t seen it yet, role on LFF). I don’t often find myself disagreeing with Roger Ebert, but this film isn’t as irredeemable as he makes it sound. Mendosa doesn’t pull his punches, but I appreciate that.

Where I do agree with Ebert are on his issues of timing and cinematography. The film is far too long, and for a good while, I couldn’t see a bloody thing. I can appreciate that we’re wading through grim, bloody treacle here, but this is a 60-70 minute idea, padded to 110. I understand that the journey in the car to a safe house out of town is supposed to be uncomfortably long (almost in real time), but it’s not the only drawn out scene. Chop the beginning down, chop the car ride, chop the rape scene.

Kinatay is also shot using natural light, at night, and for the most part, in a car. I don’t think it’s been shot on DV, or something could have been done to crank up the brightness – and I don’t buy this “say it with sound” theory; at least let us see what Peping is seeing, instead of the useless, handheld murk we have to put up with. As you may have guessed, I started getting a bit antsy by this point. But my interest picked up after the second act (the car), when events on screen get really awful.

After all this though, I’m not even sure how the film ends, as there seemed to be some problem with the final reel. I knew it was the last scene of the film, but it just stopped dead. No credits, nothing. I could have missed one word, I could have missed five minutes – I have no idea, I have only the gist of it. Kinatay is like sitting through a traffic jam caused by a messy road accident: if you’ve got the patience to sit in a car for a very long time, and are prepared to be shocked by something you know is going to repulse you if you choose to look at it, you might just spend a while dwelling on the arbitrary nature of human existence (or wonder why they couldn’t have cast Paris/Perez Hilton as the hooker). Gruesome stuff, indeed. Ponyo, anyone?