I MIGHT AS WELL COME RIGHT OUT AND SAY it: The main reason my family and I, along with a sizeable delegation of the Jimenezes and Braganzas (and the Tecsons) trooped to the Cultural Center of the Philippines last Thursday was to watch the ?performance? of my nephew Jami Jimenez in the indie movie ?Baby Angelo,? a finalist in the ongoing Cinemalaya Film Festival.
In the best traditions of nepotism, one of the movie?s producers, my niece Coreen (known in the industry, and billed as, ?Monster?) tapped her youngest brother for the bit role of a policeman. The scene comes fairly early in the movie, and you can bet no scene was ever more anticipated by a segment of the audience than that brief exposure. And you would think, by the way we watched every second of the scene?as Jami desultorily tapped on a typewriter and uttered his memorable lines?that he was vying for Best Actor honors. At the end of the movie, we were volubly upset when we didn?t even see his name in the credits!
Still, even without the family connections, ?Baby Angelo? proved to be very much worth our while.
The core incident that sets off the movie?s action is the discovery of a 4-month-old fetus in a Dumpster behind an apartment complex. It is an incident torn from real life. Recall in just the past few weeks news reports of fetal and infant findings: the controversial fetus found inside a bottle tucked into a fruit basket and offered up during a Mass in Quiapo church; the newborn tossed from a unit in a high-rise condominium; even the baby who survived after being hurled by its teenage mother from a moving taxi.
But the incident that inspired ?Baby Angelo? dates farther back?when a fetus was found last year in the Dumpster of the office building where Arkeofilms, the production house behind the movie, is located. ?There was an ominous sign posted inside the elevator, mourning the loss of the baby, christened Angelo,? a background material narrates. ?It was the talk of the building for days. But it was that incident which sparked the story of the movie.?
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BUT the finding of Baby Angelo turns out to be merely incidental to the story. The movie makes no attempt to explore the moral, legal and social ambiguities surrounding abortion. It doesn?t even try to start a debate on sex, relations between the sexes or even family ties.
Instead, the movie tells us what happens when people, who are largely strangers to each other despite the fact that they live in such close proximity to one another, are suddenly brought together by an incident like the finding of a fetus. Tasked to investigate and ferret out the ?culprit? is Bong (Jojit Lorenzo), a nephew of the landlady, who has just moved into the complex with his wife, Lisa (Katherine Luna). Bong knocks on every door in the building, receives reactions that range from utter indignation to curiosity to queasiness. But soon, he and his aunt Nora (Ces Quesada) focus their attention on the tenants in 1-F, five young women who leave the complex at night and return home early in the morning, filling the hours between with endless sessions of videoke wailing.
Bong strikes up a friendship with Apple (Diana Malahay), the ?boss lady? of 1-F, and through many nights of talking over beer and cigarettes, they discover things about each other, things that lead them to re-think the many assumptions that rule their lives.
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LIKE many indie films, ?Baby Angelo? is grainy and gritty, and dark, the last literally. Many times in the course of the movie, the apartment is plunged into darkness, the result of faulty wiring. In one climactic scene, Bong and Lisa start fighting over the fact that they have only the stub of a single candle to illuminate their room during one such blackout, an argument that swiftly and inevitably escalates into a major blow-up that dredges issues they had sought to paper over.
In the end, both the apartment dwellers and the audience are left with little to go on as to the identity of Baby Angelo?s mother and her reasons for throwing his remains away. But everyone involved in the ?investigation,? from Bong and Lisa, to the girls in 1-F, to Mrs. Nora, her cold and indifferent husband (Mark Gil), and her teenage son Ike (Cedric Lamberte), and their neighbors has somehow been changed, their placid, meaningless lives altered forever.
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JOEL Ruiz, who directed ?Baby Angelo? and co-wrote it with Abi Aquino, won acclaim during the first Cinemalaya festival in 2005 with his short film ?Mansyon.? It is about a couple who are hired as caretakers of a sprawling mansion (whose owners have gone on a trip abroad), and how in the course of exploring the huge home and daring to imagine a different life for themselves, they find their marriage revived and revitalized.
He shows the same sympathy for the ?little people? in ?Baby Angelo,? his debut feature. The more economically secure characters, such as the landlady and her family, are shown up as caricatures, while the less fortunate tenants are more finely drawn. Among them is Mr. Chiu (Dante Balois), an ailing old man who occupies his days sweeping the compound and surrounding streets, a silent observer and voiceless commentator on the events he witnesses.
Then there are the brothers MD (Archie Alemanis) and Raven (Alchris Galura), a study in contrast with MD, the jock and call-center agent and Raven the gay brother who serves his kuya hand and foot.
Appearances can be deceiving, and kindness and integrity can come from the most unexpected places. There are no heroes or villains in ?Baby Angelo,? only flawed human beings with interesting stories to tell.
