| The world shouldn’t always
be miserable. But in Endo, the world is indeed a bleak
place, populated with the briefest encounters, petty
ambitions, and inconsequential dreams. Such is the world
behind the counter – the dim locker rooms and
packed store rooms – places inhabited by contractual
workers as they constantly struggle to survive.
The movie Endo zooms in on this shadow world. It tells
the story of Leo, played by Jason Abalos, who has learned
to survive while helping his family by hopping from
one contractual job to the next. His relationships with
women prove to be as fleeting as his stints in fast
foods, grocery stores, and department stores. When he
meets the ambitious Tanya, played by Ina Feleo, however,
he is seemingly roused from his stupor as he confronts
the possibilities of a better future. Life, Leo realizes,
must go beyond merely “making do.”
Promises of premises
Endo is slang for “end of contract,” a word
which has gained notoriety among employees mostly from
the retail and service sectors. It signifies the end
of a three to six-month contract, which compels workers
to look for another job usually offering the same terms
of employment.
The film is conscious of the issues surrounding the
said employment scheme. Before the first scene, the
movie states that contractualization has become a “common
practice” of establishments in order to “avoid
complying with legal obligations such as health care,
union, social security, and other regular employee benefits.”
The scheme traces its roots to Department Order No.
10 of the Department of Labor and Employment signed
in 1997 by then Labor Secretary Leonardo Quisumbing.
It was employed as a concession to foreign companies
who are investing in the Philippines following its membership
to the World Trade Organization in 1995, which led to
the further liberalization of the country’s economy.
Establishments naturally followed suit. Between 1995
and 2005, the number of contractual employees in the
Philippines soared from 65 percent to 78 percent of
the country’s employed labor force. In an article
in Bulatlat.com, Donald Dee, president of the Employers’
Confederation of the Philippines, admitted that “easily
seven in every 10 companies practice contractualization.”
State of the nation
Director Jade Francis Castro, meanwhile, claimed that
Endo served as his “state of the nation address.”
He recounted how a friend who worked as a clerk in a
clothing outlet once described his job as “five
months-five months.” It was a situation which
Castro said described the predicament of a lot of his
friends and neighbors as well as himself who, after
college, worked in the entertainment industry “with
no security or regularity.”
A few years ago, Castro found the time to converse
with striking workers from the largest chain of department
stores in the country. “The issue of contractualization
was a larger beast than I thought, rooted in corporations’
interests and government indifference,” Castro
mentions. It was during the said conversations that
Castro realized that the typified predicament of contractual
workers could be made into a film.
Through the character Leo, Castro was able to flesh
out his original objective for the film. “I originally
envisioned Endo as a study of man – to describe
a young life with no permanence, no direction, no future,
and how this quality of life shapes his behavior, or
vice versa,” Castro said. This disposition, moreover,
has also served as an allegory to the national dilemma,
the country left in shambles also because of skewed
interests and government neglect.
Shadow world
Producer and co-writer Raymond Lee stressed that there
is a concrete political message to be found on the film.
He, however, insisted that it is better if the pronouncement
was subtle, allowing the audience to extrapolate their
own conclusions.
Endo’s settings, however, portend the inherently
political insinuations of the film. While various landmarks
obviously locate the film within Metro Manila, it is
actually in the peripheries of the urban terrain where
the narrative is situated. Leo and Tanya seem to occupy
a shadow world, a landscape concealed behind the cosmopolitan
fantasy of posh restaurants and the opulent retail outlets.
Much of the film is shot in the dark corners of locker
rooms and store rooms, a prohibited space where the
anxieties and frustrations of contractual workers are
supposed to be resolved and contained in order to sustain
the cosmopolitan fantasy.
The establishment, moreover, has been defaced. Supervisors
and managers were either shown briefly or with their
backs turned towards the screen. While markedly silent,
however, the establishment is perpetually present in
terms of company policies, restrictions, and qualifying
exams. Endo, as such, occurs as a dialogue between and
among contractual workers amidst the matrices layed
out by the silent but ever present establishment.
Hopes in excess
Contractual workers such as Leo and Tanya, in this sense,
illustrate the excesses of the cosmopolitan fantasy.
Their predicament as casual workers provide the structural
support for the continued operation of various establishments.
Contractualization has been employed as a scheme that
takes advantage of the massive reserve labor which is
concentrated on urban areas. The scenes of Leo’s
commute to work, as such, is telling. The jeepney that
he usually boards to work is always full to the point
that passengers could no longer sit comfortably.
Endo invests on portrayals of how Leo and Tanya cope
along the margins of the said fantasy. After every contract
expires, they engage in a typical drinking session.
These events actually structure the time of the whole
film: a series of expiring contracts and the corresponding
coping mechanisms. For Leo, this structure takes the
form of his cellphone and CD player, remnants of his
past relationships which he continued to use because
of his inability to purchase them – ironically
signifying security and stability in a routine structured
by his fleeting employment.
More importantly, Endo insinuates that it is never
enough to simply survive in an oppressive milieu. It
tells contractual workers not merely to cope, but to
also dream. For there will always be ruptures in the
static routine, moments of resistance that define how
one lives amidst the overwhelming prospect of passive
complicity. # Philippine Collegian
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