Mababangong Bangungot

Okay, is that overselling it? Perfumed Nightmare blew away all my expectations. Understandably, there's not a lot of expectations for Filipino cinema, and there's not a lot of expectations for independent film anymore (today, independent is anybody without studio money, and some with, making any kind of movie). But this film was a learning experience for me.

Instead of another gritty soap opera, the filmmaker presents a story about a guy from a one-bridge town who dreams of becoming an American astronaut. Instead of trying to ape a Hollywood film, he took advantage of his technical limitations: there's no dolly shots or zooms, and the audio track's perpetually out of sync. So, instead of a strictly linear narrative, Perfumed Nightmare unfolds like the browsing of a scrapbook, while the director narrates. It helps that even the disintegrating scenery is photographed beautifully, and the narration is sharp and succinctly funny. I'm still chewing on the symbolism and politics of the film, but it's heartening that the film recognizes the contradictions of the situation. And it's heartening to see tricks from directors like Spike Lee, Sodebergh, and Von Trier in a film made over twenty years prior (apparently, this film's director knew Herzog). Of course, that may be a personal bias (I'm half-Pinoy and an aspiring filmmaker). But mostly, it's nice to see a film that could surprise me every couple of minutes. It's not a perfect film, but it's one I'll never forget.

My review was written in December 1980 after a screening in Greenwich Village: Kidlat Tahimik's first film, "The Perfumed Nightmare", is an amateur effort, offering very slim commercial returns in its domestic release via Francis Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. The filmmaker's fashionable anti-American and anti-technological progress sentiments could whip up some fringe following.

Shot silent in 8mm, pic relies heavily on added soundtrack (including star-director's English-language first-person narration and comical radio broadcasts in English) for both narrative and gags. Tahimik plays himself, a jitney-driver in the small Filipino town of Balian who idolizes America and especially immigrant Werner von Braun and the NASA program. His father was killed for "trespassing" by an American sentry and he keeps as a totem a horse carved by his mother from his father's rifle butt. He has a friend, with a prominent butterfly tattoo on his chest, who offers him homespun traditional philosophy, but spurred on by American radio broadcasts, Tahimik is anxious to reach the paradise of America.

A young American businessman takes him to Paris where Tahimik services the man's chain of street gumball machines. A side trip to Bavaria has him befriending a pregnant woman who names her baby after him. Returning to Paris he comes to reject the advanced technology which has growing supermarkets crowding out of business a kindly woman street peddler he had known. In an unconvincingly militant finale, he resigns his presidency of the von Braun fan club and rejects an opportunity to travel via Concorde to the U. S., instead fantasizing his own space trip in one of the new plastic Parisian chimneys being erected nearby.

Tahimik's rejection of American technology and influence is a banal theme familiar from many Third World filmmakers. Extremely poor technical quality of his blown-up to 16mm home movie footage makes watching "The Perfumed Nightmare" a chore. It is possible to identify with his theme of turning inward and becoming self-reliant, but making NASA the whipping boy for U. S.domination of the economies and consciousness of other peoples of the world is both facile and misleading. Typical of Tahimik's sophomoric approach is that two benign institutions of international goodwill, the Boy Scouts and topical stamp collecting, are recurring targets of his satire.

What's wrong with "The Perfumed Nightmare" conceptually is evident in the awfully "cute" end-credits sequence: credits cards are adorned with space stamps from Sharjah, Panama, Paraguay and sundry other topical-specializing nations of yore, culminating in a hand-drawn mythical Filipino stamp picturing Tahimik on his space chimney. As with other issues raised (and dealt with on a gag level) in the pic, corrupt and exploitative stamp-issuing policies are a controversial and complex problem for philatelists, but mere fodder for laughs in this painfully naive film.

Tahimik is the delightful narrator of the story of his dream to become the first Phillipino in outer space. With elements of ethnography, history, biography and travelog this story is assembled from home-movie quality footage and radio snippets (plus Tahimik's voice-over) with great imagination and tenderness. From bamboo village to modern Paris and back, this a sweet/sad tale of clashing with the modern world, and the need for home.

It's revealing that this naive art movie became better know outside it's country of origin than the thousands of highly professional popular entertainment films of the Philippino cinema of the Marcos era. That is taking political correctness off the loony end.

On it's own, PERFUMED GARDEN is grossly over long and confused - when he becomes the second person from his village to fly abroad, the autobiographical lead loses confidence in both bamboo architecture and his hero, Werner Von Braun who he learned about from the Voice of America. He takes his Jeepney to Paris where he sees only ugly building sites and to Germany where he spends a large part of the movie watching an onion dome being put in place. This is mixed in with beauty pageants, ice making, re-birthing Jeepney taxis, a Von Braun fan club, a rogue American scout master, the bridge into his village that we first see him dragging toy versions of his cab over (there turns out to be another bridge, after a lot of voice over about the uniqueness of the first).

With more rigorous editing, we could have an interesting novelty, ordering the nice touches in here - the sister as an enterprising ice lolly seller, the flashback to his father fighting the Spanish, building the bamboo structure that resists hurricanes, the gum ball concession in Paris, the aging street seller whose death represents another parking space to the American. As Tarhimik's work became more professional in TURUMBA these tended to drop out.

Printing up the films of Eddie Romero or Lino Broka would have been a better use of the raw stock.

Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik calls Perfumed Nightmare his "magic carpet", as over the last 30 years, his first film is still bringing him to countries and film festivals around the world, reintroducing the film to new audiences and film students when it's screened in universities. An unconventional film, it is quite hard to believe that this monumental effort is a first film, having captured life in the village, before going overseas to Paris and Munich for the latter half.

Kidlat Tahimik stars as himself, in a semi-autobiographical way, that traces the life of a village boy, and his journey to the outside world. It's like a coming of age story with relevance to today still, with the impact of globalization more keenly felt as the modern world feels more like a global village, and with the almost inevitable assertion and influence of dominant popular cultures over traditional values.

Kidlat (the movie character) is a Jeepney driver, who is an aeronautical buff, having hailing himself as President of the Werner Von Braun club in his village of Balian. A fan of the Voice of America radio show, he gets offered to go to Paris by an American on a botched jamboree (which was then, and still is now, a very keen inclusion of the said country's foreign policy style), to work in the gumball vending machine business. That basically forms the gist of the outline as imagined by Kidlat the filmmaker, who worked on this without a prepared script.

The opening shot where a vehicle crosses to and from a narrow bridge, set the mood of the film - fun, eccentric, unpredictable, almost a mirror of Kidlat's character. Shot on Super 8, the special effects that he had included, and the various narrative techniques incorporated into the movie, makes you marvel at the rather innovative ways a filmmaker with a shoestring budget, gets his story told. I liked very much the fantastical sequences he had put in to tell the back story of his father, as well as the very horrific, almost documentary like style of capturing a village circumcision ritual, which must be seen to be believed, how it will actually would make you reel and feel pain (and you thought the Hard Candy one was bad enough).

There is no doubt that his passion and exuberance shone through this charming, imaginative film, which won him the International Critics Award at the 1977 Berlinale Forum of New Cinema. For those who missed the screening tonight (on 16mm film projection), you can cross your fingers as to a DVD release, possibly as early as next year!