ALL THE BOYS THINK SHE'S A SPY

"Ideologically, none of us should like the Bond films. They are sexist, heterosexist, xenophobic, everything that is not politically correct." (Professor James Chapman)

He was the flamboyant antithesis to the sober, conflicted British real world working class spooks embodied by Harry Palmer and George Smiley and Tom Quinn. Bond, that is. James Bond. Not so much a spy but a superspy, but really, The Superspy.  With an iconography that has exploded and calcified into its own self-contained rubric. Every James Bond film had a status quo to safeguard, from the voluptuous tremolo of its theme music to the softcore chic of its credit sequences, but it would also include at some point an ungainly, often unfortunate fondness for silly sight gags and sillier tech. At some point, Bond had become this jokey anachronism, a cash cow still but coasting on nostalgia more than anything else. Johnny English was having a go at James Bond, of course.  But Bond, at least in the films, eventually became his own Johnny English, a caricature of what was vaguely one already.

Dean Martin’s Matt Helm was having a go at Bond, too.  Having a go, specifically, at the lothario in him.  Bond slept around, sure. That singular trait almost superseded every other facet of his character. But much as the Bond films did objectify women to a point, one can argue that it isn't any more sexist than that laptop wallpaper of Ryan Gosling with his shirt off. Kingsley Amis generously described Bond's attitude toward women as “Protective, not dominating or combative.”  But Alan Moore, who appropriated the Bond character under a thinly-veiled disguise in his League of Extraordinary Gentleman comics, says otherwise:  “The overriding factor in James Bond's psychological makeup is his utter hatred and contempt for women.” And there is a sinister thrill in re-visiting the series with a firm grasp of this particular, and rather subversive, kink in his persona. Bond Girl is the collective by which these women are known, and they have in common, if nothing else, a latent exotica and a double entendre name, with Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore from Goldfinger being the juiciest of them all. “My name is Pussy Galore.” she tells Bond, who retorts “I must be dreaming.”

But it’s Ursula Andres’ Amazonian Honey Ryder from Dr. No whom the world regards as the sovereign Bond Girl. And there’s no denying the charge of that first time we see her, emerging from the ocean in nothing but a white bikini. “What are you doing here, looking for shells?” she asks Bond. “No” , Bond quips, “Just looking.” Oddly enough, the Bond Girl never did adhere to this look. In the next film, From Russia With Love, Danielle Bianchi‘s Tatyana Romanova was neither as robust or statuesque, and was in fact, almost aggressively feminine, her strength being her demeanor, less of a co-dependent damsel in distress but more a pro-active ally.

The films pulled back on the history of sexual violence the Bond Girls shared in Ian Fleming’s novels. Pulled back almost to the point of ignoring it, their film counterparts having less turbulent backstories.   Significantly, too, in the first two films, both the swashbuckle and the promiscuity were also pulled back, not yet succumbing to the pulp tendencies and the tongue-in-cheek, outlandish vibe, nor to the alleged misogyny and xenophobia and sexism. The clause we sometimes unwittingly invoke to take pleasure in the Bond films without qualifiers was that they were espionage fantasies as fetish cartoons, that they were not to be taken that seriously. Because, seen one way, the Professor was right.  And so was Paul Johnson, whose scathing review of the Dr. No novel, boiled Bond down to “the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude snob-cravings of a suburban adult.” Still. Drives fancy cars, has a battery of science-fiction gadgets at his disposal, sleeps with every beautiful woman he happens to run into. Being Bond, even for a day, is the ultimate male power fantasy.

But if we persist in the argument that he was a remorseless Casanova, who only saw women as a means to an end, as necessary collateral damage to getting the job done, then we can break the Bond Girl down to two types.  Those who succumb to his wiles and often seal their doom when they do, like Solange from Casino Royale or Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger or Andrea Anders from The Man With The Golden Gun.  And those whose wiles he succumbs to or the ones where he meets his match, like Michele Yeoh’s Wai Lin from Tomorrow Never Dies , who not once felt she needed Bond’s help to save the day.

There are gray areas, the Bond Girls that are neither one or the other, and are consequently  the least interesting ones, if only because they were passive, a little ditzy at times and amounted to little more than eye candy, with Denise Richards’ Christmas Jones from The World Is Not Enough being the most vacuous of the lot. Jane Seymour’s mysterious Solitaire from Live And Let Die  does tend to fall into this limbo but she gets a reprieve out of how she seemed to genuinely throw Bond on a loop.  Grace Jones’ May Day in A View To A Kill  started  out as a foe, one who could power lift a grown man and parachute off the Eiffel Tower, and finished up on Bond’s side but suffering for it, becoming quite possibly the only Bond Girl to embody both types. Like Pussy Galore, except Pussy Galore managed to get out unscathed. They were both, of course, henchwomen. Sophie Marceau’s Elektra King from The World Is Not Enough was, significantly, the one calling the shots, the first, and so far only, female evil mastermind in the entire franchise, and canny enough to know what would break a man like Bond and almost did.

Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale was the bolt from the blue, the smite of no return for Bond. The Daniel Craig reboot was revisionism by risk management, sure, but it also meant to prop the sag in the franchise by realigning it with the real world, with its powderkeg urgency, with its existential angst, with its apocalyptic melancholia. With its Jason Bournes and Jack Ryans, really. Gone was the suavity of Connery , the cheekiness of Moore, the earnestness of Brosnan, and in its place was something a little darker, a little wounded, a little more vulnerable. Craig played Bond as brash, brutish, and verging on everything they tried to pin on him all these years. And the chink in the armors of men as fortified as he is here is always love  At one point, he tells Vesper “I have no armour left. You’ve stripped it from me. Whatever is left of me, whatever I am, I’m yours.” and that he intends to quit and run away with her. She, of course, sees to it that it never happens.

If we go by the chronology of the films, rather than the novels, Vesper is not the first girl Bond falls in love with. That honor belongs to Diana Rigg’s Teresa Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the only girl Bond went so far as to marry.  Their wedding is quite possibly the most joyous sequence in a Bond film ever.  And in the penultimate scene that comes after, as the newlyweds drive off to their ever after, you get to feel something you rarely feel in a Bond film, a genuine sense of empathy and a genuine sense of threat. Here is Bond. The misogynist, the xenophobe, the heterosexist,  the superspy.  Rehabilitated by love but also made impervious to harm by it,  just before he is ultimately destroyed by the only thing that could: a heart broken in half by true love and an assassin's bullet.

*Originally published in Vault

CATHOLIC GIRLS

Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena was, in hindsight, far less than its reputation would have you believe, and whose exaltation I’ve always regarded with mild bewilderment and pin on whatever residual goodwill there was left for its auteur, who claimed the world as his oyster 12 years before, after Cinema Paradiso somehow nudged Italian cinema back into the spotlight, becoming the universally-beloved arthouse film for people who don’t like arthouse films. Prey as it was to a gnawing sentimentality, Cinema Paradiso was nevertheless seized by this confluence of mischief and wonderment that gave it a litheness and buoyancy that was nowhere to be found in the middling, ham-fisted predictability of Malena. You can argue, of course, and to be fair, Malena has retained a coterie of die-hards to this day, but the only aspect of it that’s resistant to argument, or indeed, to dissent, was, and still is, the intoxicating smolder of its star , Monica Bellucci.

The consensus reality among cineastes was that, after WWII, neo-realism begun to progressively exhaust its surplus. Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 Umberto D. was sort of its last bow and more or less the point when Italian cinema began to splinter and diversify, into pink neo-realism, into Spaghetti Westerns, into giallos, into the vibrant climate under which the hormonal phenomenon known as the Italian Goddess would emerge and hold sway, tapering off in the 1980s and becoming, in 2000,  little more than remaindered exotica many times re-purposed by advertising into pop cultural iconicity. But here was Monica, on the screen, in the now, a few years before she posed on the cover of an American magazine wearing nothing but Iranian caviar, embodying its quintessence, rekindling its fervor, evoking on one hand, the earthy sultriness of Anna Magnani in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and on the other, the robust sensuality of Daniela Silverio in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman.

Movie stars, of course, routinely undergo being clustered, some would say objectified, into collective, and predominantly physical, stereotypes. It’s branding. Boil it down and the Italian Goddess comes from the same fetishizing impulses that infect us today with Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Or, to bring it to closer and less annoying iterations, the Hitchcock Blonde and the French ingénue, both of which proliferated in pretty much the same 50s/60s period of overlap. But where the Hitchcock Blonde was all about icy mystery and the French ingénue about swoony obliviousness, the Italian Goddess was about a sharpness of feature so fierce it refused to succumb to either enigma or doubt, statuesque glories but leavened by vulnerability, feeding a fantasy of indomitable yet attainable beauty, navigating their way in a world sticky with the wiles of men. You think of Claudia Cardinale’s tragic bride being engulfed by the town in her first masterful sequence in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West, of Elsa Martinelli’s wildlife photographer turning the jaunty safari she joins on its head, and softening crusty old John Wayne while she’s at it, in Howard Hawks’  Hatari!. You think, too, of  Asia Argento’s call girl brokering a dangerous defection in Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel, and of Isabela Rosellini’s torch singer embroiled in the prickly suburban malaise of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Asia and Isabella were the other two Italian actresses in the first glimmers of the noughties that had achieved similar measures of profile as Monica. Coincidentally, both were legacies, daughters of Italian cinema’s two most ubiquitous auteurs. Between the three of them, they managed to represent the various permutations that fall under the Italian Goddess subgenus.  Asia came on like a feisty iteration of her father’s giallo damsels in distress. And the parallels drawn between Isabella and Giulietta Masina, the waifish prostitute in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria and his eventual wife and muse, more than make continual sense. And Monica, you trace her back to the Italian Goddess of Italian Goddesses: Sophia Loren, Italian cinema’s crossover superstar, whose allure managed to upstage even the shadowy elegance of Carol Reed’s optics in his criminally under-seen The Key.  Resplendent, ominous, heartbreaking Sophia.

But Italian Goddess  pre-eminence is something I ultimately reserve for and cede to the impossibly beautiful Monica Vitti, if only for the work she did with Michelangelo Antonioni. In Il Deserto Rosso, their fourth film together, the suffocation of human connection, the slow poisoning of whatever tenuous interstices transpire between its characters, is poeticized through blasted images of encroaching industrialization: a sudden shout of color turning out to be a small flower in an indifferent field of grey waste, a cargo ship passing through a line of trees, two men dwarfed by a gigantic and seemingly sentient plume of smoke. The fragile beauty overwhelmed by her surroundings and forced to burn through it is, in many ways, the précis of the Italian Goddess journey. And centering things here is the spectacle of Monica as a lonely housewife seemingly spiraling into madness. But is she really going mad? Or is she, in her colossal frustration from fighting a losing battle against this consensual deadening of emotions, the only one coming to her senses? In the film’s quasi-famous "orgy" scene, where everybody can't/won't/don't know how to articulate their hard-ons, Monica is the only one who opposes the torpor and pops those allegedly aphrodisiac eggs. She rolls them in her mouth, savoring it, before turning around to face everyone else and proclaiming ,with equal parts sarcasm and seduction, disgust and defiance: "I feel like making love." 


*originally published in Vault

SUICIDE BLONDE

Consider the Blonde. In the context of American beauty, specifically Hollywood beauty, the Blonde has always laid claim to the uppermost tier in the hierarchy, its fabled mystique perpetually holding sway, if only because the misguided perception of eternal youth it summons is the sole grist for the myth mill of Absolute Celebrity, and never mind the connotations of dimness and cruelty that go with the hair. Blondes, dumb or not, not only have more shelf life, but they do have more fun in the eyes of the world, more so in its far-out post-colonial Third World corners where blondes do not exist without liberal amounts of hair dye and therefore gain a sense of the exotic, of the ungraspable. And Old Hollywood had its own deep bench of Blondes, from Jean Harlow to Mae West to Veronica Lake to Marlene Dietrich to Jayne Mansfield to Hitchcock’s own little mini-pantheon, Kim Novak and Janet Leigh and Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman and Tippi Hedren, whom he collectively described to Francois Truffaut, in that epic interview book of theirs, as “the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom.” 

None, though, had quite the singular ferocity of presence Marilyn Monroe had, what Billy Wilder called that “certain indefinable magic”. And , as it is with any star of similarly iconic charge, the James Deans and Bruce Lees, that is often enough. You can, of course, mine just the bookends of her short career and strike enough ore to justify the way she embodies the icon of the Hollywood Blonde. Her first role, in John Huston’s terse heist thriller The Asphalt Jungle, may have been tiny but it nearly upset the film’s balance of predominantly male energies. Her last , as a wayward divorcee in Arthur Miller’s misunderstood Western The Misfits  (see picture), was shot while she was in the ballistic throes of her raging addictions, mostly to alcohol and barbiturates, looking a little filled out and more than a little lived-in. And yet, even as the glare of her impossible prettiness had significantly weakened to expose some of her damage and most of her vulnerabilities, there she was still, at her most beautiful. You can make a case for the rest of her work as an actress, really, something that’s been undervalued and overlooked in the immense shadow of her fame.

Only Marilyn died a year after The Misfits came out, in 1962. And the icon she had become has since grown so colossal and so distant, so pervasive and so co-opted into the pop cultural parlance, that it’s been leeched of meaning, of nuance , of anything to do with who she really was or even what she really did, fetishized so thoroughly as to verge almost on caricature, on anachronism. Sure, everybody knows that shot of her standing over a subway grate with her white dress billowing, but how many have actually sat through Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch let alone know that’s where the scene came from? And yes, everybody remembers she sang Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend but are we remembering Madonna paying hommage in her Material Girl video or the original number from Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? This is what happens when stars get supernova-bright that they eclipse themselves.

Everybody recognizes Marilyn. But which Marilyn do they recognize? The little orphan who got bounced from foster home to foster home? The feisty ingénue who took it upon herself to rescue the dumb blonde from its stereotype by refusing to play any? The sex symbol who not only challenged whatever prudish conceits about sexuality prevailed in her time but turned them on their heads? The country girl who made her fallibility a facet of her persona? The global superstar inevitably beset and eventually damaged by the usual confluence of demons that come with being famous? The sultry temptress? The ditzy comedienne? The fashion icon? The brand? Because that’s what Marilyn has always been, at the height of her career and decades into the commodification of her myth. A brand that represented, superficially, an over-romanticized ideal of glamour, but also and ultimately empowerment and self-worth.

JFK was apparently the last person Marilyn called before her fatal overdose. And rumors that she was put to death, some say by Kennedy minions, some say by the mob, have always swirled around her death. Outrageous as the conspiracy theories tend to get, they do have a darkly poetic tingle to them, as if she were this fire who had raged too wildly and had to be snuffed. Whether it was assassination or accident or whether it was self-inflicted, her claim to the icon was sealed on that August day. Just as dying her brown hair blonde was a canny way to spin her career into motion, dying in the heat of her moment was an unwittingly canny way to end it, ceding her the one thing any of Hollywood Blondes never had: relief from obsolescence and with it, immortality.



*Originally published in Vault.

DANCE ME TO THE END OF LOVE*

DANTE PEREZ
1956-2013




"Lithium we know as a medication but one can misread it as a mediation and still nail it. The way it stabilizes frenzies that violently push and pull from both sides of the pole is a form of mediation, a truce of chaoses." (Notes on Lithium, Dodo Dayao)


He built a little village from the ground up, on a bluff in Zambales, then later burned it down, with gasoline and a makeshift torch. This was my first glimpse of Dante Perez’s prowess as a production designer. A potent image, for sure, but I’m resisting the urge to milk it for poetic effect as I don’t want to cloud this with anything less than forthright. Nor lay anything on too thick. One thing you probably won’t hear much mention of, in the flurry of well-wishing and reminisces, is how funny Dante Perez (Ka Dante to us) can be. And if this gets a little too maudlin, he’d probably crack a joke or two just to lighten the mood.

What this is exactly I’m not sure, though. A eulogy to a dead star. A valentine to a friend. A celebration of an artist. All of these, perhaps. But more than that, a way to make sense of someone leaving too soon. I realize it’s arrogant to assume one is privy to the caprices of the cosmos when it comes to comings and goings. I realize, too, that everybody ultimately gets a lifetime. And Ka Dante had one that was packed to the gills.

The tiny inferno in Zambales was also my first glimpse of the synergy he shared with Lav Diaz. Ka Dante was Lav’s collaborator and production designer and eventually actor, from Heremias up to Florentina Hubaldo CTE. It is, without argument, one of the most vital and robust collaborations in domestic independent cinema, of world cinema even. And yet it remained a largely unsung one. Which is how Ka Dante would have wanted it, I suppose. He was never a man drawn to the blare of the spotlight. He was always about the work. And he worked incessantly. He got restless when he wasn’t working. He drew comics, including an unfinished, wordless one about a Japanese straggler that he was going to show to me. He acted for other filmmakers, including Khavn De La Cruz in Mondomanila and Rico Ilarde in Pridyider. He made his own films, and his unflinching and often poignant feature-length documentary on Soliman Cruz, The Actor, has a raw, almost uncomfortable, honesty that makes its obscurity almost criminal. Before all this, of course, he painted. And had anyone known he wasn’t going to have another one-man show, the melancholia that permeated through his last, Lithium, would have seemed less residual and more prescient. The way Ka Dante explained it to me was that the new work was his means of grasping at transcendence. And much as the stark monochrome felt at first leeched of his usual color, his usual vibrancy, you do feel, in its place, a soothing sense of grace.

A couple of weeks before the opening of Lithium, Ka Dante and I were having a few beers at a Cubao X that seemed to be leeched of its vibrancy and color as well. It was a vibrancy and color we were familiar with and we missed. Six years ago, give or take, this was where our every night led us, talking about art and love and hope, all of us who were part of that ragtag community of like-minded friends who made films and wrote about films and worked on films and dreamed of films, and the future of the cinema we loved and the future of our lives as well was still fulsome, incandescent. That night, we talked instead about other things, about cycles running its course, about the parsimony of fate, about the infinite relief of art. But we talked about it in an oddly hopeful way, knowing full well we could easily rebuild that little village from the ashes anyway. And before he left us, Ka Dante, in many ways, did. “Sparkle”, apparently, was the last word he uttered. He was referring to the soft drink. But I prefer to think of it instead as an exhortation to all of us he left behind. Thank you and shine on yourself, Ka Dante. Shine on and live forever.



 *Lyric by Leonard Cohen
**This article originally appeared in the June 2, 2013 edition of PhilStar Sunday Lifestyle

JUST PLAY ME TWO BARS OF STARDUST

Sir (Chabet) and I hardly talked about art. I was in his class for only a semester. But we've been hanging out since. We did talk a tremendous amount about cinema though, maybe because I was the only one among us who was sort of into it to the degree that I was. But I was a misguided Hollywood nerd and he took it upon himself to set me right. He was like my de facto cinema guru slash pimp. And he schooled me. Every time we saw each other, all these years, at drink-ups, at parties, at exhibits, he always had some filmmaker I had no idea about that he wanted me to seek out : Bernal, Zialcita , Godard, Buñuel, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Howard Hawks, Alain Resnais. And like any good student, I did. And subsequently got hooked. 

He pushed this Antonioni film on me years ago, raving about the ending. I have since fallen in love with it hard and seen it many times. And in its own odd way, that desolate and beautiful finale makes the most fitting of codas for the occasion. 

Thank you, sir. 

RIP.