Kinatay by Brillante Mendoza

Cannes has a hard time appreciating the work of Philippine director Brillante Mendoza. Last year, his Serbis got very bad reviews from journalists and critics from all around the globe, and this year Kinatay has managed to repeat the violent reactions.

In the beginning, the realistic tone of his cinema remains intact: camera on the shoulder, natural light and quick movements inside slums summarize the director’s idea of contextualizing. However, after fifteen minutes of documentary-like shooting, the ambience changes drastically. As evening arrives in the story (the whole narrative is set over a period of less than 24 hours), a thriller comes into play and our protagonist sees himself implicated in the kidnapping of a prostitute. We will know very little of this young man, since the director places him inside a dark car, shows him often from his back, and gives him rare opportunities to express himself in dialogues. Even if he’s not comfortable with the violence he witnesses, he is not capable of doing anything to stop it from happening - which makes him, in a way, the perfect mirror of the position that the public finds itself in.

What follows shocks less for the explicit content of the images than for the situation itself: there is no judgment; no consequence to the acts - in a way, the violence in this film is the opposite of Lars Von Trier’s moralist approach in Antichrist. Mendoza’s film consists, most of all, in a genre exercise. He experiments with time, with ambience and sounds; he pushes the shots to their limits and tests the public’s ability to hold on to a plot that turns around one single and powerful action. The director proves to be able to master the rules of horror films, whilst applying them to his typical way of filmmaking. It’s a shame that critics react so negatively to Kinatay, which seems to contain everything they normally look for in a film: originality, personal traits and a great control of the cinematic language.

Bruno Carmelo