Kinatay director gets Cannes Top Plum

"Kinatay" director Dante Mendoza got the top prize as Best Director in the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. This is the first ever recognition made by the Cannes for a Filipino film art work. Since the late Lino Brocka's foray into international film competitions such as Cannes, no Filipino film has been adjudged best among the best, except of course, this one.

What's so stunning about this award is it recognizes a Filipino filmmaker as one of the world's best. Oscar winner and maverick director Quentin Tarantino praised Direk Mendoza, for reminding him about Brian de Palma. Surely, the gore and savagery of Mendoza's film reminds one of that classic film Scarface, which De Palma megged and got none of the praises which Mendoza got from the purely international jury.

I saw the film and found it fantastic, to say the least. Critics lambasted Mendoza's work as an orgy of mindless violence, but it is'nt. The film tells of a tale of a newly married cop who got involved in the gruesome murder of a Filipina prostitute. Mendoza says its based on a true story, the story of the Philippines, and I believe him.

Films are allegorical art pieces that show slices of life bent and scaled down to a 35mm. Those scenes of gore, of blood, of murder and savagery shows how unsafe, how murderous and how violent our society has become.

Lift all those layers and cleanse all those blood splattered all over that roll of film and you'll find a synopsis of Filipino society. Think of that cop as authority, the power, the change maker. Think of that prostitute as society.

Filipino society has succumbed to the basest situation, a society made beautiful by Western makeup and bastardized, err, ravaged even by money, foreign capital. That prostitute represent the State of Filipino society. It has been taken slave by monopolistic powers, and raped by numerous and erroneous influences that it has been transformed into a dirty, mindless, mismash of social neuroses and psychoses.

It lures unconscious and innocent victims into its vicious vise grip, draining all innocence, and sucking all those delicious marrows in. Those who succumb to the wiles of the Prostitute are made helpless and dirtied. The cycle of filth continues while the Prostitute lives.

Those who have the ideal and the correct consciousness brave convention by thinking of the bizarre. Murder is frowned upon, yet, in certain situations, the killing of cretins is justified. Dismemberment is a long-held literary convention. Poe used this to describe that 18th century killing of a beautiful lass. De Palma did that in Scarface to show how one can go to the basest depths just for money while others show that to prove a point that humans are barbaric, savage creatures made more vicious by a vicious society.

That cop needs redemption from a society who has now been turned into a prostitute. BY killing the prostitute and dismembering her, the cop feels a sense of neurotic satisfaction, knowing that he rid the world of a smelly contemptious thing when in truth, and in fact, he just made the world a tad cleaner.