SERBIS: The Family Business
Serbis (service) is a strange little dogma style film by Brillante Ma Mendoza about a family that runs a very large and run down cinema in Manila. But this is no Cinema Paradiso. Rather this theater called “Family” is a hulking monster of a decrepit movie palace with wooden seats and high ceilings. The cinema shows soft core, ultra low budget sex films and, while this is all going on, rent boys ply their trade.
Oddly the production notes say that the family doesn’t realize what’s going on in the dark recesses of the cinema, in the face of large numbers of gay young men, some transvestites who solicit on the lobby staircase. The family members are too distracted and absorbed by their own dramas to pay close attention to this sex traffiking. During one funny scene, as a goat somehow runs through the theater forcing the lights to come up, we see a scramble of bare buttocks with pants being pulled up quickly, no one remarking.
I call the film dogma-like because of it’s narrative and technical simplicity. Mendoza likes to shoot handheld, following his characters as they, in this case, climb up and down the stairs and go in and out of the labyrinthian theater. There is no musical score, just the noise of the street which is sometime so loud that it practically drowns out the dialogue of the characters.
There is no traditional approach to character development, only glimpses of the many family members who seem to live and work at the theater. There is the matriarch Nanay Flor (Gina Pareño) who is preparing to go to court for a bigamy trial against the husband who left her long ago. Her daughter Nayda (Jaclyn Jose) is married to Lando (Julio Diaz) but is attracted to the much younger projectionist Ronald (Kristofer King). Nayda’s brother Alan (Coco Martin) paints movie posters and billboards while irresponsibly impregnating his girlfriend and tending to a painful boil on his rear end, what Mendoza refers to as a literal pain in the ass.
If it all sounds crazy and messy, it is. And yet it is sufficiently odd and interesting to keep your attention. Just following the action as it flows back and forth, up and down the wide staircases and in and out of the theater is addictive in an odd way. Being fond of Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) and his manifesto, I am game for films that create a new visual language apart from the manipulative intentions of the classical Hollywood style that can’t resist telling us what to think and feel, pushing our buttons, placing us exactly where they want us. A film like Serbis, isn’t trying to compete on that level, it’s exploring the ways we watch, inviting us into a chaotic and unfamiliar world, keeping us off kilter, announcing from the beginning that our expectations of how a film should tell it’s story will be challenged.
I’m not sure I loved this film, but after all that’s not really the point. It was profoundly interesting, I can’t even say I enjoyed watching it. But what I can say for sure is that I enjoy thinking about it later, it will stay with me. It has me thinking, among other thing, about the family, about sex trafficking in the Phillipines, and then finally about crumbling palaces of culture and what they become amidst chaos, neglect and exploitation. That is what art is all about.
Serbis opens January 30, 2009 in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Brillante Ma. Mendoza; screenplay by Armando Lao; story by Armando Lao and Boots Agbayani Pastor; Director of photography, Odyssey Flores; produced by Didier Costet. Released by Regent Releasing. Running time: 93 minutes.
With: Gina Pareño (Nanay Flor), Jaclyn Jose (Nayda), Julio Diaz (Lando), Coco Martin (Alan), Kristofer King (Ronald), Dan Alvaro (Jerome), Mercedes Cabral (Merly) and Roxanne Jordan (Jewel).
