film, eyeballs, brain

There’s a terrific scene in Brillante Mendoza’s new film that involves a goat. It’s a goat that wanders in, lost, through a hole in the wall of a filthy theater and ends up, as goats are wont to do, blocking the audience’s view of the movie. One would think it wouldn’t matter, since no one’s really watching all the softcore porn on screen – they’re too busy having sex with each other. But the goat’s bleating rouses the audience members from their ministrations, self-administered or otherwise: people stopped in mid-blowjob, sweaty coitus interrupted… by a goat, of all things. The confused goat runs up and down the aisles in panic, with the audience, pulling up their pants and running after it in vain. The goat manages to escape their clutches and run out to the lobby, only to be followed by the theater’s employees – all members of the Pineda family, our protagonists — scrambling madly to catch it. For a brief, almost transporting moment, we have the different levels of clientele united in one fruitless, hilarious endeavor: not to get off, but to get the goat. The goat escapes nonetheless.

The title Serbis most obviously is about the sexual services openly and indiscreetly performed by the trannies and hustlers inside the theater – all this, despite the “No Loitering” and “Bawal ang Sex Dito” signs on the walls. (“Bos, serbis?” the teenagers whisper in the theater lobby.) But “serbis” also refers to the daily business of running the seedy movie theater – picking up next week’s reels from the bus station, cleaning the restrooms, collecting tickets and making change. And while all the sordidness is frowned upon by the establishment, it’s also tacitly accepted by the family, as the hustlers ply their trade openly in the hallways. People buy movie tickets to get in, after all, and money’s money.

It’s a state of denial parallel to the way the family deals with its own domestic problems. (It can’t be a coincidence that the film is set in Angeles City*, which, if set only a few years prior, would have shown American servicemen wandering the streets in search of prostitutes. Surely a similar dynamic prevailed between the city / national government and the sex trade, though differently inflected in terms of power relations.) Serbis is also Mendoza’s finely-detailed portrait of a family struggling to keep both their business and themselves together.

The gray-haired matriarch Nanay Flor is played by the regal Gina Pareno, in a performance simultaneously quiet and angry. The emotional core of the film is Nayda (the always superb Jaclyn Jose), who runs the ticket booth and stands firm despite the mini-crises that affect the family. Nayda is married to Lando (Julio Diaz), who cooks in the grimy canteen on the first floor. (In a subtle inversion, Lando performs the more “domestic” chores in the family, serving up food and doing the laundry.) Running the theater is a family business in every sense of the word: the adopted daughter Jewel collects the tickets at the door, and two cousins paint the lurid billboards and run the film projector. (There’s another young boy running around whose relationship to the family I didn’t quite figure out; unlike the other famly members, he seems happily oblivious to all the seamy goings-on.)

Mendoza excels in all this portrayal of work, and the different transactions and processes that enable the serbis to be done. Running subtly throughout the film is the emotional labor which similarly must be performed in order to keep the family running. We are also made aware of the family’s thwarted ambition; the camera lingers, sometimes a little too obviously, over an engineering diploma and a nursing certificate framed on the wall along with wedding photos.

There’s a lot of narrative drama Mendoza (or rather, screenwriter Armando Lao) has cooked up for the family. When the film begins, the matriarch has filed a bigamy suit against her husband (we never see him), and is awaiting the judge’s decision that very day. One of the cousins has knocked up his girlfriend and is anxious about being financially unprepared for fatherhood and relaying the news to Nayda.

All these momentous events are arguably too much, actually; I would have preferred a focus on the routine drudgery (or pleasure, as the case may be) of the day’s events. The film’s signature scenes, if they could be called that, are a series of tracking shots that follow characters up and down the staircases and hallways through this gilded palace of sin. There’s a wonderful feel to these scenes, as they establish the theater’s crumbling green-and-ochre architecture (Mendoza’s palette of colors here is especially vivid) as practically another character in this fine movie.

Serbis is a more disciplined, tighter piece of work than Tirador (2007), which to me reeked of slum-porn, but it doesn’t quite approach the elegant pathos of Foster Child (2007). It doesn’t shy away from graphic scenes, just like Tirador; perhaps most controversially, there’s the scene where a bottle is used – depicted accurately, I might add — to pop a suppurating boil on a guy’s ass. It seems apparent to me, in any case, that these unusual provocations — there’s also a flooded bathroom in there that has to be cleaned, and one questions the necessity of showing one of the actors shin-deep in the piss and garbage – begin to smell more like part of Mendoza’s auteurist signature. (In comparison, the opening shot of full-frontal teenage pubic bush looks pretty normal.)

Whether the boil is a metaphor for the social condition, or a final rejection of parental authority and/or responsibility, it still feels like a bit of a gimmick, like the last in-joke shot just before the credits roll. And yes, we get the inevitable money shot: a closeup of the bloody pus spurting silently into the bottle. I fear we’ll get abscessed teeth or hemorrhoids in Mendoza’s next feature, but count me in anyway; I’ll be watching for sure.

*Almost all of the capsule reviews in American venues refer to Serbis as being “In Tagalog with English subtitles”, which is inaccurate; one of the fascinating things about the film is all the code-switching between Tagalog, Kapampangan, and Ilokano, sometimes within the same conversation.

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