(Persons Unknown)
Chaplin Takes The Bike
By: Iris P. Concepcion
As an icing to a smorgasbord of caviar (even food need to get mixed up), the recently wrapped up European Festival skewered a visual hilarity that is as craniumly deep as Einstein.
Done in a Charlie Chaplin celluloid execution, it is slapstick but with a brain dragging on every frame like a piece of conscience prickler.
A story about reformed convicts planned a burglary ( a house filled with art collectibles) and bungled it. The protagonists drilled a hole in the beautiful wall and a leaking water burst forth in a shocking surprise. I let out a huge laughter as I did with the ladies on my back following my lead laughter. There were bursting pipes with injured arms passing by them, and heavy luggages seen being sported around. This is my kick: I thought I'd be the only miserable fellow laughing over it but these ladies joined in that guttural fest like a hybrid bunch of chipmunks.
It feels good to poke fun at ourselves sometimes. The striking chord in confronting ourselves over misdeeds, past and present, is best spooled from the point of view of a truly piercing, laughing, tricky camera.
Everyone wanted forgiveness in the end but are afraid for their pride to crash that is why they continue being blind to these indiscretions. But we discern the seemingly wicked manner of looking at ourselves via a knowing audience gallery in spectral shock and awe. But only with the right script and material can you achieve these things. They do not grow on trees overnight.
This is a perfectly dubbed film with banters from people who can laugh at themselves while in transformation process without even realizing that thay might have saved the world for it.
One thing about this fest, it does not discriminate. It invites people of disparate ideologies to participate in the creative process, of being poked at personally that go straight to the conscience. I have seen people water their eyes for identifying themselves with the actors in the reel: the their real excesses were put to them in a tactful, soul-searching manner.
One of my retarded sons is one haughty craftsman and he of the proud mind once wrote that he knows only two writers: Nick Joaquin and Brillantes. I harangued him via Hotmail e-mail a piece discrediting his claim: I said, unknown Filipinos have been writing streams of consciousness materials ever since but are not given breaks for them. I just did not expect his lead will follow a much, much deeper cinematic interaction that spoke more in silence than noise. Even the ads and trailers were potent enough to drill holes in the mind like cockroaches crawling in the ground.
Shut and dazed. It is no fluke then that the opposing goodness and evilness of mankind get fair treatment in their textures. These people do not shut out people who oppose them. They get the best seats and crowd.
Then, they went out teary-eyed and thinly argumentative in the comfort room and you look into their eyes with a knowingness of decaying souls trapped in denial.
You want to say, "Hey, it is okay to sin" but out of that situation, they elongate their protruding breasts and show them amply in defiance.
You never see them again as poor souls but as people in transit, of the once cold winter nights spent in a faraway world, groping for truths about their own selves.
The ones who listened are not from here. The ones who eventually listened are the thespians I had admired singly over the years.
They spoke one name when I pass by: Iris.
I never get star-struck. They are just ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
They also happen to read this blog with enough familiarity.
Thank you for that gift of medium; for that seemingly blighted but opulent reward of having been understood in an array of useless noise and blah and threats.
I had been validated because of that.