Erik Matti's
Non-Porn

Dos Ekis  (2001)


What I like in Erik Matti's films Dos Ekis and Prosti is the fact that they're not so much a realist's photographs of realities as a neo-realist's non-apologetic expressions of reality/realities. In short, Matti has become an expressionist, but one who has nevertheless maintained a relationship with realism and would not be tempted into the fabulations of a Nick Deocampo in Pedrong Palad or the utterly personal.
     Whereas a realist would conceal his art, Matti happens to separate the art and the reality under it and comes out presenting both with the same value. Even the dialogue can be Tarantinoesque, almost contrived to be unrealistic to be able to present more real facts and the poetic bits of/in life.
     All this seeming Matti-isms happens because Matti (along with young director Yam Laranas) arrived in the Philippine cinematic scene to become a purveyor of the arty shot (and of trendy film editing and cinematographic extremes). Instead of using actor blocking which can often be laughably theatrical for the camera's singular  angle, as in a Joel Lamangan oeuvre, Matti goes beyond Maryo de los Reyes' Tagos ng Dugo's achievements by not limiting himself to the off-center long shot. It's as if Matti advises his actors to do away with blocking worries and puts the cameramen to task instead. So Matti's camera/s would go handheld a la cinema verite now, around and around a couple later, or ride the beams of a building's lost ceiling later.
     With this obsession with craft, therefore, the story becomes itself, independent of the camera's own craft and action. With this obsession with craft, the unrealities, the incredible, become extensions of the arty part -- an achievement in Dos Ekis that was missing in Matti's earlier Scorpio Nights 2. In the end we are brought to an examination of the story's reality in our minds instead of outside the window or in the streets. We are sent to examine instead the psychological effects, as against the melodramatic surface emotional effects, of these cinematic perceptions on realities.
    Avoiding tears, Matti even overplays the putang-ina's (sonofabitches) of a screaming pimp in Dos Ekis, and although you could say here was pure realism, still it's as though Matti did this more to push our expectations and tolerance to the wall.
     Matti brought his Matti-isms (mannerism, in art parlance) to an intimate level in the later Prosti. But it is in Dos Ekis where he was able to do his thing with a larger canvas. And everything coheres for his possibly inadvertent philosophy. Is there really such a thing in Manila as a dilapidated moviehouse's movie screen that hides a hall behind it, a hall occupied by squatters? But does it really matter if there's none? Should we censor such Matti-ean symbolic expressions, expressions behind and beyond the cliches and realities offered us by popular (or even "artistic" or "literary") realist cinema on the screen of our memories? Should we rate such expressions with a double X?
     In Prosti, the movie screen turns to a sky silverscreen of sorts (seen from a roof haven). And what is this Matti obsession with abandoned buildings and roofs and ceilings? Can serious Philippine cinema criticism ignore it? Did Matti produce a fluke?  (VISV III, July 2004)

 

back to Vicente's Pinoy films collection index

 

 

Copyright © 2004 Vicente-Ignacio S. de Veyra III. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.