Kinatay

Kinatay(2009)
Dir:Brillante Mendoza
Country:Philippines

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. Brillante Mendoza gives almost half of his film Kinatay to the nocturnal drive of a group of policemen out of Manila to its suburbs, and another half hour of night awaits them at their destination, a police black site. 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. There is a story of course, of a young police trainee just married (that very day!) taken along on an off -he-books mission to torture a drug addicted stripper, and for a long time Mendoza plays the story like Haneke’s Funny Games (or a Park film), building up the audience’s desire for his hero to act violently, here to lash out at his sadistic superiors. And some of Kinatay is that tasteless, with its handholding music (riffing off of Kubrick’s synth scores for A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket) and artless, didactic cutaways That Explain Motivation by showing the cops’ horrific acts, the home that must be thought of. But, as with Mendoza’s previous film Serbis, the rest of the movie is given as a handheld dedication to space—there, a porno theater, here, a sinister, anonymous police van traveling great distances at night for the purpose of terrible things, and later a torture house. But it is a space of obscurity, of uncertainty in a morally certain situation, and so the space, covered and run over again and again by the roving camera, takes on an abstraction nearly outside the story itself. A palette of sleek grays makes a death grip on this film that started—again, didactically—in daylight with a marriage, and Kinatay’s immersion into nightfall stands strong, splendidly, as independent force.

A grim Filipino tale of extreme police corruption that sparked as much outrage at Cannes as Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” not least when its helmer, current festival mainstay Brillante Mendoza, coolly picked up the Best Director prize. If you were paying even vague attention to the furore at the time, you’ve by now heard the film’s story in a nutshell: a naive police cadet is drafted by one of his superiors into a secret after-hours mission, which turns out to be the merciless rape, murder and dismemberment of a prostitute, a procedure depicted in real time and in shadowy, sometimes wincingly graphic, detail.

It’s not hard to see what about the film ruffled so feathers — but accusations that Mendoza is dealing in dangerous or self-gratifying torture-porn prove unfounded as the film, not unlike Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible,” reveals its rigid moral framework from the outset. Our perspective mirrors that of the increasingly horrified protagonist throughout; we lose our grasp of the situation together with him and suffer the significant emotional consequences.

Apparently based on true events, the film derives none of the pleasure from its pain that much mainstream genre film does, rather using the horrific central incident to probe social weaknesses. Like his quieter, more recent (and more accomplished) “Lola,” the film amounts to a stinging attack on Filipino bureaucracy, sometimes via over-egged symbolism, but often via intelligent observational detail. “Kinatay” is a hard film to love, and an even harder one to like, but it’s difficult to stand unaffected by its long night’s journey into day.