One theme of this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival is a celebration of the new wave of Philippine cinema, which is seemingly undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment. If we take Lawrence Fajardo’s urban fable Amok to be an example of this new movement, then it looks to have a very bright future indeed.
Amok concerns the intersecting lives of myriad characters as they make their way through the city of Pasay on a hot and busy day. The film opens with a group of children playing the role of Greek chorus by rapping about the hardships of life on the street, before seguing into a series of vignettes based around characters from wildly different walks of life. We follow, amongst others, a father and son making their way to the airport, an argumentative brother and sister on a long drive, a fading film star in a spiral of self-destruction, and a number of street vendors, one of whom takes drastic measures in an attempt to pay the rent. It is this latter act of desperation which links all these seemingly isolated groups of characters; a shocking act of violence borne of fear which draws all the threads together as we approach the film’s tense climax.
Amok is in fact all about fear, and the terrible things it can make human beings do. The unforeseen consequences of the actions of two would-be criminals ripple outwards, touching the lives of everyone featured in the film, forcing them to put their own petty fears and prejudices in perspective. Amidst the oppressive street traffic and ceaseless noise of the city, characters rediscover their humanity through painful experience, although the newscast soliloquies which close the film demonstrate that not everybody has learned their lesson. Fajardo’s camera angle never stays the same for long, and the many roving viewpoints he utilises to tell the story reflect the many different perspectives of the film’s characters, seen from under tables, behind food counters and in the backseats of taxis. The crisp clarity of digital film suits this unflinching vision of urban humanity, and the actors’ performances are uniformly excellent, particularly those of Gary Lim and Dido de la Paz as the afore-mentioned criminals.
If there’s one criticism to be made of the film, it’s that some characters plainly suffer from the vignette format. We simply aren’t given enough of an opportunity to care about some of the people we meet, and as such their ultimate fate seems somewhat inconsequential. Perhaps, though, this was Fajardo’s intention; to show every side of human life, even the banal. This small gripe aside, Amok is a riveting film that, despite its languid pacing, unfolds in a hypnotic fashion which keeps you watching even when you might prefer to look away.
Jim Taylor, geekzine correspondent
– Stay tuned for all of Jim’s incoming articles from the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012 –
[suffusion-the-author]
[suffusion-the-author display='description']