Purgatory

 

HONEYJOON (A-minus) - A vacation with your mom can be a challenge; when it's the first anniversary of your father's death, that's a steeper hill to climb. 

The feature debut of NYU grad Lillian T. Mehrel is a pristine, darkly comic character study of a randy daughter and her cynical grieving mother as they go to a spa retreat (a facility that caters to honeymooners) in the Azores with the goal of spreading the father's ashes on an island he had visited long ago and loved as a young man. Mehrel's script is understated and thoroughly amusing, while wringing true emotion from the situation she created.

Ayden Mayeri is appealing as June, the daughter, who chafes at her mother's nostalgia not just for her dead husband, but for the old era in Iran, her homeland, before the religious jihadists took over. June challenges her mother by flaunting her body at the hedonistic resort and flirting with the help. Amira Casar is moving as Lela, who has had the hopes and dreams knocked out of her, but who nonetheless has more than a little appeal to the young men that circle mother and daughter. She also has perfect comedic timing.

The genius here is in Mehrel's placement of mother-and-daughter into a fish-out-of-water milieu and watching how they react. She knows just how to pace the story, and she wisely gets in and out in 75 minutes.  She loops in several themes, some more subtle than the others. A print of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" hangs behind the concierge desk, and you associate it with June (and her flowing hair), perhaps seeing an opportunity for rebirth, or at least a reset. (And great casting of Antonio Maria as the deadpan concierge, always finding ways to gouge the women financially whenever they make a special request.) Mayeri calls to mind comedians like Jenny Slate, fueled in part by a sarcastic streak.

A minor blossoming love story provides a jolt of energy, but June's boy-crazy antics do not overshadow the dynamics between mother and daughter and their mission to pay homage to the dominant man in their lives. Instead, we get a heartfelt two-handed treatise on grief and coping.

FILIPIÑANA (B-minus) - This narrative slog takes an oddly fashionable, even glamorous, approach to the exploitation of workers in the Philippines, failing to build suspense amid the kindling of bone-dry comic set pieces. The lush golf course where it takes place is lovely to look at, and in the end the story comes across as thoughtful, but first-time filmmaker Raphael Manuel is too obsessed with aesthetics to bother crafting a compelling plot.

The film focuses on Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a 17-year-old golf-course "tee girl," whose main job is to place golf balls on the tee, machine-like, at the driving range for the golfers, many of whom are Filipino elites and Chinese visitors. Not only does this save the men from having to bend over and tee up the balls, but it places the young women in a subservient seated position facing them. Manuel shoots from behind the men's lower halves, so we see the females framed by the men's legs; if they were to look up, they'd see the golfer's crotch. Isabel is assigned to the country club's director, the revered Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman), who, she is warned, is not the great guy he is made out to be. 

 

Another storyline follows Clara (Carmen Castellanos), who shoots with her uncle, who wants to lure her back to the Philippines from her stint in New York, hoping to stem or reverse the Asian nation's brain drain. Clara is not comfortable having her every whim served by the female caddies and others. Her stilted manner is difficult to read.

Manuel is partial to static shots and painfully lethargic scenes, perhaps influenced by Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Laing or other classic slow-burners. He elaborately stages every frame for maximum aesthetic value, favoring long shots in which the action takes place off-center or in the background. He choreographs some routines -- the synchronized swings of golfers at the driving range, the pas de deux of the cleaning staff, the welcoming performance of musicians and dancers, the prancing of the massive sprinklers -- as if he is conducting a musical, with the whimsy of Jacques Tati.

What he does not have is a compelling story. The MacGuffin here is that Isabel is assigned the task of returning a golf club to Dr. Palanca after he left it behind, and that task turns into an odyssey that takes Isabel through some of the ritzy country club's more off-limits areas. First, it makes little sense that she would be assigned such a task; how difficult would it be to ping the director and let him know his errant five-iron is at the front desk? Second, why must Isabel take a serpentine Family Circus route just to drop off an item? 

If you can get past those distractions, there is a bit of dread that builds as Isabel carries out her mission. But it's not much. While she is meandering all over, there is a side story involving a little girl who has run off and gone missing, though no one is going out of their way to hunt her down or even show concern. This is the main theme of "Filipiñana": The rich have all of their whims catered to, no matter the cost or resources required, while the rest of us are elbowed aside to fight over the remaining scraps. 

It would be a more powerful message if it were not styled in such artifice. Manuel fetishizes his tee girls and caddies, wrapping them in fashionable outfits -- white knee socks and short pale-blue stewardess dresses for the former, pink frocks with matching rice-paddy hats for the latter. Don't get me wrong -- the visuals can be intoxicating at times, the balletic moves a feast for the eyes. But the stakes can be confusing and the pacing is turgid. (The 100 minutes passed by so slowly and the dialogue was so intermittent that my mind would stray or my eyelids would droop, and I'd miss a line of dialogue here and there.) There is a tonal disconnect at play here, and I'm not sure Manuel intended to get in the way of his own story.

BONUS TRACKS

The trailers:

 

Both films had interesting soundtracks. I could not track down the music from "Honeyjoon," scored by Retail Space. "Filipiñana" reached back for some retro and traditional tracks, including this instrumental, "Always in My Heart" by Los Indios Tabajaras: