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| From http://rapideyemovies.de/wp-content/ uploads/2016/10/a4_alipato_rgb.jpg |
Director: Khavn
Screenplay: Khavn and Achinette
Villamor
Cast: Khavn, Dido De La Paz,
Marti San Juan, Robin Palmes and Bing Austria
Synopsis: Split into multiple segments, Alipato begins in the near future with a child gang, led by the
Boss and all the infant and adolescent children left abandoned on the streets,
stealing and killing an adult in their way. Events spiral out of control when
the Boss decided to rob a band, the off-screen robbery and its disaster leading
to many years later when he is finally released from prison as an older man
back into the slums and to the members still alive.
To experience Khavn's film Alipato is difficult to describe. Honestly Khavn's style, the poet/musician/songwriter/filmmaker starting properly
in 2004, is arguably of his own. So much
its really on multiple viewings a film like this can be absorbed, where even
its prologue catches you off-guard. Handheld camera. Quotations from the likes
of Muhammad Ali, quotes talking of
both the slums of Manila to fighting gorillas, with a man in a gorilla suit
involved. A musical number at night that is elaborate and takes quite a few
minutes amongst its fire lit figures. A pan into a television where, in this
futuristic tale of poverty dystopia, the Natural Pornographic Channel (sic)
plays, the news broadcast banner at the bottom talking about none of the other
members of U2 expect Bono caring if African children starve, all as an
obnoxious Western host sets up the hell the slums have become.
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To tone of Alipato is a vast carnival, these first moment introducing the dank, hyper violent world of the Manila slums. Even if Alipato has a deliberately provocative tone, it is explicit as a exaggeration of poverty, crime and general chaos. Not that you won't baulk at the taboos mind anyway - in its first of three segments you begin with an all-pubescent criminal gang led by the Boss, given title cards for even one shot characters which emphases various transgressive details, like killing one's father to the youngest member being a baby girl who learnt to smoke before she could walk. Alongside child actors smoking on camera and brandishing guns, it's a very shocking juxtapositions. Adding this is that Khavn uses the "throw in the kitchen sink" approach to its fullest. Juxtaposing hip hop beats with classical music, alongside songs he composed and sings himself of various genres, as eclectic in the music as the material on camera. A scene of the police chasing the gang that has them completely motionless whilst the camera pans around them all, a three dimensional moving statue a la The Hypothesis of a Stolen Painting (1978) and its staged tableaus. Elaborate one-takes such as with the kids rampaging around a supermarket where they've already slaughtered all the adults. All with a manic energy but too precise to be messy technically, Khavn in a music genre comparison an avant-garde punk rocker.
Very soon into Alipato, you are met with the most reoccurring
technique, which is the one emotional thread in this hyperactive content - that
for every character when they die,
even the most minor of ones, it always cuts to their grave stones at the end of
each scene in another time briefly listing those who've died by their graves.
Considering many characters are killed, so much so whilst there is a sick
humour to it, it becomes also unnerving. It causes one to realise that that Filipino
director Khavn is a fellow countryman
to Lav Diaz. Both are radically different
from each other, but its pertinent both have dealt with the Philippines being
riddled in a despaired atmosphere, of poverty and death between them. Especially
in the second segment this stands out - where a character's prison sentence, including
being raped by a fellow prisoner and then killing them, is depicting in stop motion entirely in a
prison cell, with plastic lizards coming out of a corpse's mouth and an
improvised gory use of a Spiderman
mask. Drastically different in aesthetic and style to Diaz, but both from a colonised nation which has felt centuries of
history and trauma throughout its existence, both exorcising them in different
ways for the same goal.
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| From http://i101.fastpic.ru/big/2018/0822/61/ 2d9f60e58ad63dc09ab9b60a1a8e5a61.png |
Whether Khavn's film is able to hold a serious emotional effect on a viewer is entirely to debate. I cannot lie, however, that it's a compelling experience. Arguably a unique style entirely of the director's own. Alipato is a film elaborate in production value - one sadly suspects a lot of the slum locations the adult version of the Boss returns to are real as much as its dressed up, the sight of American pop culture like Ben 10 or a Pixar's Car duvet in the world of lowlifes being systematically bumped off profane. Colourful yet dirty, bizarre (such as having a character Mario-like mushroom swaying off his crotch) yet also like Harmony Korine with a willingness to have idiosyncratic faces and scenes that are humanising. Khavn like Korine could be seen as parading a freak show to some, but is actually more empathetic than most socially conscious filmmakers in their ability to show the piss and shit of life and allow actors/non-actors of all shapes and size, disabled or dwarf, to be equal in the worse of these characters' lives as much as their best alongside everyone else. In such not only do you see a man with no actual legs, in a major role, manage to keep up with a car on the street just by walking on his arms, but also a very sensual and explicit sex scene, scored to an old Filipino love song, that just happens to be inside a toilet with an actor in his forties and a (real) pregnant actress involved. Dressing everyone in deliberately garish and distinct costumes, everyone is on an equal playing field too.
Khavn is a dynamo of energy, able to pull out novel ideas and
visibly, painstakingly yet then accomplished onscreen, someone who with Ruined Heart: Another Love Story Between A
Criminal & A Whore (2014), that was all shot in one day, clearly plans
his work out even if he's a punk. How else do you explain the
"Goat-Cam"? A female character, part of a subplot of surviving
members of Boss' gang being killed one-by-one as adults, whose corpse is left
in a sexually demeaning place atop a mascot for an American burger franchise,
on top of a very real dump for plastic that spans a great deal of land, all shot
on a camera that has been strapped on a small black goat, who the production
managed to coordinate to trundle around the actress, to have an establishing
shot and detail of the scene fully, whilst seeing its head from the back and
with the cameraman still a goat who wanders like an actual animal. Its moments
like this, even in films you despise, that nonetheless burn themselves into
your memory, and Alipato has many
such scenes that do so.
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Even as an overload of material, a base crassness that could be off-putting in its rainbow colours, it's a film that surprises. Young Boss cursing all adults in a fire lit night in an industrial waste land. The surprisingly poignant final scene involving a spirit of a character leading the newly deceased away. The prologue musical number, a literal carnival of dancers, disabled performers and Khavn himself performing with a song about the pointlessness of life yet with a celebratory tone. The sticky end of a pair of corrupt cops, a karaoke group session that is bizarrely in a slaughterhouse for pigs, turning sour to someone's singing being criticised, the camera wandering to and from as cop, singer and nude female staff are shot off-camera.
The result, full of moments like
this, is a delirious and profane spectacle that deals with everything from
infant death to police brutality of an old woman. Does it register at all with
an emotional connection though? Entirely dependent on each viewer, though as
Boss curses the adults who spawn children like him, leaving them on the streets
like dogs to fend for themselves, there is a sense, no matter how exaggerated,
of a very bleak view of modern Filipino culture as depicted in this film set in
the future. That it can still be triumphant is due to the moments of life that
struggle and scrape to survive, but entirely on the side of the lowlifes, Khavn views everything else as nasty and
prone to death around them as a result.
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| From http://www.offscreen.be/sites/default/files/images/movie/alipato_06.jpg |
Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Delirious/Grotesque/Transgressive
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium
Personal Opinion:
Obviously the obscurity of most of Khavn's work is a detriment for me, finding Alipato an all-consuming experience, one which is difficult and
crude but with a potency and violent energy that is awe-inspiring. View with
caution but those who want to see a film which is truly unique, this is it.
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