Serbis
Directed by Brillante Mendoza
Running Time: 93 min.
The prolific Filipino auteur Brillante Mendoza is not well-known Stateside yet and, more than likely, he will remain obscure. Although Serbis, his latest stylishly grimy modernist experiment, played at last year’s New York Film Festival his aesthetic is far too jarring to be appreciated by most art-house filmgoers—which is ironic considering how the film raps nostalgic about a porno theater whose ugliest features are also its most beautiful.
Run by the Pineda family, the theater is not just a place to go in the dark to get lost in a movie, it’s an active haunt for cruising homosexuals, transsexuals and maybe even heterosexuals (the lights are out for a reason). Considering the Angelika’s uncomfortable seats, bobo lobby and subwayprovided soundtrack, the film’s message of loving your proudly flawed local movie palace couldn’t have found a more fitting venue, except perhaps the unpleasant Noho art house where most of Regent’s line-up are released.
While Serbis is certainly intended to be an ode to cinematic decadence and the ephemeral charms of being seduced in the dark, it’s also a deeply felt declaration of love for the tacky, the cheap and the flat-out debased.
In Mendoza’s microcosm of Filipino domestic life, the crass and the everyday go hand-in-hand. His camera jitterily records its uncouth subjects as if they were the stars of a docudrama that’s unfolding in real time. Both earnest and grotesque, Serbis is a humanist spectacle.
Mendoza fluidly drops one subject for the next with a kind of urgent grace and playfulness that makes the seemingly commonplace building blocks of grand melodrama.
A nude woman puts on lipstick and pouts, “I love you” in a mirror; her nephew bounds down the stairs to tattle on her; his father momentarily looks up from his cooking only to return to it moments later.These minor events provide the context and bold detail to the by-now-advanced disintegration of the family’s various couples.
Mendoza’s is a kind of micro-level storytelling that’s not unlike the tight but wandering brushstrokes of Alan (Coco Martin), the talented but unfortunately afflicted artist of the family. His creepy infatuation with the vibrantly unwashed masses in Serbis is, like them, gross, gorgeous and totally transfixing.
While the Pinedas are obvious stand-ins for everything decadent and unseemly in the Philippines, they are so much more than walking metaphors.The characters are too unsparingly detailed to be political stick figures.That we can count the goose pimples on Alan’s ass while he applies medicine to a boil (thanks, digital technology!) is what strikes the viewer first, not their allegorical significance. In doing so, Mendoza champions the impermanent sensual experience and takes artsploitation to a new level of wondrously superficial pleasure.
Likewise, despite how persistently dingy and unclean everything in Serbis is,
Mendoza never treats his characters so heavy-handedly as to make them
the focus of a post-neo-realist tragedy.Titles of
double-entendre-filled porno posters break down the film’s events into
broad chapters with a winning sense of deadpan humor.Those posters are
never lingered on for too long nor really singled out as anything more
than part of the film’s scenery.
They’re presented only as the characters make their way past them as they endlessly climb up and down the stairs of the theater. As a parable, let alone a cogent story, Serbis’ ultra-loose plot has only a meager heft. As a twitchily sensational series of interconnected images, it’s an awesome nugget of faux-trash gold.
