★ 7 / 10
Kidlat Tahimik is a charismatic Philipino jeepney driver
CinemaSerf
Kidlat Tahimik is a charismatic Philipino jeepney driver who is obsessed with Wernher Von Braun - the former Nazi who was helping the American NASA get a…
Kidlat Tahimik is a charismatic Philipino jeepney driver who is obsessed with Wernher Von Braun - the former Nazi who was helping the American NASA get a rocket on Mars. It could hardly be more of a contrast between his small town existence where the only things not built of bamboo were the church and the ten metre long bridge that spanned the small river near their town. This character has a fairly torrid history: his father was killed by a GI and his open-minded mum lives a fairly hand-to-mouth existence, but that isn’t going to stop him dreaming - and dreaming big. Fortunately for him, his chewing gum machine owning boss decides that he is going to take him to Paris on business for at least a year and thereafter the promise of New York beckons. Can he make it there before man gets to the red planet? From a production perspective this is really very basic - much of it looks like home movie footage framed with varying degrees of success. What does work, though, are the clashes of not so much culture as of rampant industrialisation. Kidlat is dazzled by what he reads in magazines and hears on radio broadcasts, and that wonder only increases when he arrives in France to see a Paris beyond his wildest dreams. Quite quickly this friendly and convivial man starts to think a little more fondly of home and as he takes a trip to Germany to visit the home of his hero he becomes more and more disillusioned. These grand structures, the multi lane autobahns and the twenty-odd bridges that cross the Seine dwarf his own community but therein lies the dichotomy. It’s soulless, sterlile and he feels that he doesn’t quite belong. His prize possession is a wooden horse carved from the butt of the rifle that shot his dad - this is a man of simple pleasures who perhaps realises that his dreams were better as just that? There is also a slightly menacing narration occasionally peppering this docu-drama that adds to it’s ambitiousness and though it’s a little too long, it quite entertainingly showcases the stark differences between the west and the east through the eyes of a man it’s quite easy to like.
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★ 7 / 10
A Hallucinogenic Cross-Cultural Journey
Sturgeon54
There are a precious few directors who are willing to jump heedlessly off into the abyss of their own imagination for the sake of artistic expression.…
There are a precious few directors who are willing to jump heedlessly off into the abyss of their own imagination for the sake of artistic expression. Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of them. The Francis Ford Coppola who made "Apocalypse Now" is another. Kidlat Tahimik, director of "The Perfumed Nightmare" is one more. What is most remarkable is that he produced a film using scant resources but containing imagery to which most big-budget Hollywood visuals can barely compare.
Filled with dreams, tangents, flashbacks, breathtaking religious imagery, Tahimik's ironic Mark Twain-esque voice-overs, and bizarre visual ideations using mixed film-stocks and color schemes, the storyline follows a young primitive Filipino village jeep-driver and his journey from progressive worshiper of all things Western to dispirited critic of the West after travelling to Europe. I mention Jodorowsky here because his films are the only ones I can compare this one to: both are like pure symbolic representations of the unconscious mind.
Unfortunately, now for the bad news: the film is an unfocused anti-globalization tract. Actually, maybe it's just an anti-technological tract, I'm not sure. What I do know is that the movie does a brilliant job of portraying life - its sights, music, sounds, and small rituals - in a quiet Philippines village. This first act alone would make one of the greatest short films ever made. But as the second half rolls around and Tahimik moves to France, becoming appalled by Western technological prowess (a set of very large garbage incinerators being erected particularly irks him), the simplistic message of the movie began to irritate me. Are we as the audience supposed to view Tahimik's village as an unsullied Garden of Eden and the modern west as the First Circle of Hell? Because that is what he seems to be saying. Not only is Tahimik (correctly) against the Western colonial expansionism which made his country the property of both France and then the U.S., but he also dislikes the progressive technology of the West. Why?
What is most ironic is that Tahimik himself (his real name is Eric De Guia) had an advanced degree from the Wharton School of Business and worked as a research consultant to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - an organization committed to spreading Western technology to lesser-developed countries - in Paris for 4 years before making this movie. This makes me think that the movie is less a prophetic statement about the dangers of all forms of colonialism than a personal statement against the West made by a particularly disgruntled individual. The movie is all sound and fury, in the end signifying nothing. Why is globalization a target of derision the world over? It is such a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon that protesters are forced to make small, insignificant gestures against it (smashing the windows of a McDonalds) in order to make any kind of statement against it. It is similar to railing against the underground geological forces causing earthquakes - what is the point?
Great film-making skill is rare, and it is on display here in great splendor (Oliver Stone must have been inspired in his use of mixed-film stocks for "JFK" after watching this film), but it is only effective when its message is sound. If one discounted the hollowness of the message, this would be an unheralded masterpiece of independent world cinema, but one cannot separate the message from the messenger.
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6.9/10
1.2K
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@Suerte english dub talaga yung narration haha