not that i'm sure if ataul for rent was made with low budget or not. a friend and i saw it last saturday (we missed the start of the last screening of stardust and i declined watching 30 days of night because i will be watching it with daryl later). when i saw its movie posters after we got out of the cinema, i realized that i've those posters before without really paying attention. i thought it was for a fantasy movie because of the golden, solid-looking font used for the movie title; the letters reminded me of mountain fortresses which i found strange for a movie that is set in a poor metro manila street.
ataul for rent was bookmarked by two similar dream sequences. it gave to me an impression of the movie being someone's (say, the director or screenwriter's) dream of some sort: a dream of making a really good movie. with a cast that included joel torre, jacklyn jose, noni buencamino and pen medina, it became clearer that the movie did dream of making it big.
in a poor street somewhere in metro manila called kalyehong walang lagusan (roughly translated as "street without a way out," a dead-end street), joel torre plays guido, the owner of a funeral parlor that rents coffins. he's also the embalmer. living with him was jaclyn jose, a beautician who serviced both the dead and the living, sometimes one after the other and using the same make-up. we could see that jacklyn jose had bruises in her face that she tried to conceal with make-up. one by one we were further introduced to the people who lived in this squallid street. there're the requisite tambays and drunkards headed by pen medina and noni buencamino. there's the mom with two sons, the elder was a good-for-nothing small-time criminal, the younger was a more street-smart snatcher and rent boy. there's the inept visayan hooker and her gay pimp, living next door to another hooker pretending to be a college student.the story was introduced by a dream: guido woke up, went to the toilet, noticed the toilet light flickering, then saw that the other lights used for wakes were flickering as well. in his workshop, he saw one of the coffins with him inside. then he woke up properly; it was only a nightmare.
the story then properly starts with a dying old woman. as she was given the last sacrament by a priest, the neighbors spied on her family and callosly (and audibly) wondered when exactly will she die so they could move on prepare the wake. a few moments later, flowers and condolences came from the barangay captain, given to the family of the old woman who has not quite passed away. we had to laugh at the absurdity of life and the callousness of people had very little respect to anyone's life.
then the first problem of the movie presented itself: shaky camera. as we were slowly shown the different people populating the street (which is really just a small alley), whom (like any depiction of squatters' areas in metro manila) all spend their day outside in the cramped alley, the camera jerkily moved from one side of the alley to the other. half a minute of bad camera shake was enough to give me a headache so i whispered to my friend that i wished they asked somebody with a steadier hand to hold the camera for that sequence.
we were shown how poor these people living in the dead-end street were: people owed other people money, always promising they will eventually pay their debts but they never will. the dying woman had finally died and her son pleaded the owner of the funeral parlor for a coffin and the embalming of his mother. guido seemed to be one of the few people in the alley who is more or less well-off: people will eventually come to him with their dead, and in that street, people dying will eventually present itself to be commonplace. it was something that he's not above taking advantage of.
pseudo-philosophical commentary was given by a street madman played by ronnie lazaro, describing the fates of the people living in the street as a near-omniscient narrator. ronnie lazaro is another amazing actor in a cast full of really amazing actors, but his character was another flaw of the movie: it does not make any sense in the whole scheme of things. for most of the movie, he is a ubiquitous outsider: somebody constantly in the background that people in that street hardly notice. eventually it was revealed that he was joel torre's grade school classmate, a very bright kid that has gone crazy at some point, after which people have begun to acknowledge him. he would be the last character to be shown in the movie, providing a philosophical summary of what just happened. and yet it still did not make any sense. what was the point of the madman, really?
another flaw of the film was the presentation of time. i'm not one who nitpicks in continuity details but at some point i had started to wonder how time moved in the that street. all of a sudden one of the tambays died (we were not told how it happened, it just happened) and i was wondering how long ago in movie time did the old woman die. did she die a few days ago? yesterday? just that morning? i tried getting clues from the shirts people were wearing but without getting any clear reason why, i felt an inconsistency in the continuity.
one subplot in the movie involved the professional student and how she was seen by the people in the street. some people know that she's not really a student, but some people seemed oblivious to that fact - including the supposedly more street-smart son, even after he realized the girl had been inconsistent in her answers to which school was she really enrolled in. personally, i thought that was strange; someone who lives a double life normally acquires a good ability to keep track of the lies one tells other people in order to create a more consistent fictional persona to mask the other life. if one will be living behind a lie, it should damn well be a consistent lie for it to be useful.
another thing: for most of the movie, the person who would wonder most audibly about whether the girl was really a student was the gay hooker pimp. eventually it was revealed that the professional student was pimped by the gay pimp before he was able to get the visayan hooker. WTF? did that make sense? so what was the point of the gay pimp wondering about what the professional student was really doing if he knew already that she was another hooker? one could arguue that he was trying to draw attention to the professional student, but nobody seemed to care. honestly, the movie seemed unaware of the average filipinos interest to gossip and ability to put two and two together.
which, all in all, was a waste of really good acting. and i mean really good acting. the movie has a great cast of veteran actors and stage professionals, and even the new-comers (particularly the actress who played the professional student) were able to act well consistently. there were one or two details that stuck out oddly - joel torre didn't know how to hold a hammer properly, jacklyn jose had problems sitting with one foot raised on the chair like it wasn't really her habit - but those are trivial. there was good (and even great) acting all around which was wasted on a story that tried to explore too many subplots but ended up doing so only superficially and so making the story weak and inconsistent. a shame, really.
meanwhile, my friend complained about the many lingering shots featuring gutter rats (which at some point was a significant plot element). i agreed with him: many of the shots involving rats lingered longer than what was necessary. rats were used as a running metaphor for the people of the dead-end street (i'm still undecided if it was an effective metaphor or not), but many of the shots called attention to themselves. which i thought was the biggest flaw of the movie: it dreamed of something big and it showed. unfortunately, some of the more important things for a movie (a consistent story, good cinematography and editing) were overlooked.
with that in mind, the second dream sequence again showed joel torre seeing himself inside a casket, which was too small for him. for him to fit, his legs were cut off and his feet were placed on either side of his face, which stick out in the glass window showing the deceased's face. it's ghastly and (strangely enough) morbidly funny, but it seemed like a unintentional metaphor of how the movie was made: too many ideas crammed in one movie. my friend and i left the cinema knowing that we watched a movie that could have been so much better.
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ataul for rent (casket for rent)
screenplay by anthony gedang and neal 'buboy' tan
director neal 'buboy' tan
photo taken from the philippine entertainment portal.
watch the trailer of ataul for hire.
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