The poster of this film was starkly to the point - - it would be about life of squatters living within cemetery grounds. Admittedly it sounds just like a typical depressing indie film about impoverished lives in the big city. However, it had won the coveted Best Picture and Best Director award of this year's Sinag Maynila filmfest, so I made sure I had to catch it.
The setting of the film is present day within the sprawling compound of the Pasig City Cemetery where several families had illegally occupied various crypts of their choice as their informal residences. Bangis is one such resident, who lived with his wife Barbie and sickly daughter Ningning. Bangis and his friend Pepe (Ryan Sandoval) earned a living by transferring bones from big to smaller niches.However, when push came to shove financially, they also resorted to robbing freshly-interred corpses in connivance with unscrupulous funeral homes.
The acting talents of lead actors Joem Bascon and Mara Lopez in indie films like this are already well-known, and they deliver strong performances here again as Bangis and Barbie. Bascon, in particular, goes all method here, never missing any beat at all. He just went on doing even the most private things people do in the bathroom or bedroom, as if the camera was not there at all. His one big dramatic moment at the end had a very sincere outflow of tears, pain and emotion that crossed the screen right into the audience.
The main story was simply that of Bangis and Barbie's daughter Ningning, her week-long fever and repeated convulsions, and what her parents do (or not do) about it. The rest of the film brings us around their little microcosm of the city inside the cemetery walls. Aside from the grave workers, there was also the wanton harlot Lala (Jalyn Taboneknek), the corrupt security guard Temyong (Jun Nayra) and those "Action Line" personnel who regularly threw all the cemetery denizens out into the street in the wake of their surprise raids.
There was an entire, practically wordless, barely lit 30 minutes dedicated to showing in full an actual grave robbery, step by step, that took place at 2 in the morning. I personally thought that that whole part was too long, too quiet and too dark. With only one security bank doing the rounds, there was practically no real danger nor tension to make this sequence more exciting. I would have also wanted to know what the funeral parlor would do with these new corpses they have stolen because the reason was not mentioned.
Production quality-wise and acting-wise, "Pailalim" was a reasonable choice for best picture and best director for Daniel Palacio in his debut effort. There were some simple but very nice dramatic touches at the end, like the revelation of Bangis, Barbie and Ningning's family name as "Malinaw" and the fulfillment of a little promise of a Hello Kitty ring made at the beginning of the film.
However, while I was watching this film, another relatively recent Cinemalaya indie film came to mind -- "Pamilya Ordinario" (Eduardo Roy, 2016). They were both realistically shot films about a young couple with a child who had to make ends meet while living a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence in the most oppressive conditions. Of course, Bangis and Barbie are older than Aries and Jane, and they are portrayed by more recognizable actors, thus the originality, shock value and realism are all affected somewhat. 6/10.
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