Sophomoric experimental film
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.
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.
- lor_
- Dec 28, 2022