‘‪#‎Y’: SUICIDE IN THE AGE OF SELFIE

11 August 2014

‘‪#‎Y’: SUICIDE IN THE AGE OF SELFIE

A film review by JC NIGADO

#Y movie poster

NO ONE’S licensed for suicide,” or so says Nadie Smith, an acclaimed 24-year-old English-Jamaican female author of recent vintage.

Still, some people take liberties with their own lives and knowingly leap into the unknown.

Such is the reality of a self-destructive character that is carefully examined through the lenses of a young filmmaker, who engages the ideas of European and US thinkers, to create a novel film framed in Filipino middle-class setting.

A stunning breakthrough since Mike de Leon, “#Y” (2014) indicates that Philippine cinema has finally come of age. And this time it’s global, in keeping with the present preoccupation on “borderless” activities that include the economy, education, politics and social media.

The analytic Lav(rente) Diaz cuts a dash in his laborious but literary “Norte: Hangganan ng Kasaysayan” (2013), a four-hour-and-ten-minute peroration on Philippine politics and economy, raising it to significant psychological and spiritual levels.

To do so the fiftysomething Diaz plumbs Russia’s 19th-century classic, “Crime and Punishment” (1866) of Feodor Dostoevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1963), a contemporary classic, also from Russia, and translates them to his own native experience. The resulting film, “Norte,” now stands among the classics of slow-but-seething cinema of, according to certain critics, Kenji Mizoguchi, Carl Dreyer, Roberto Rossellini and even Ingmar Bergman.

Comes now 24-year-old Gino M. Santos, wearing chic and clean-cut, and a whole generation and several lifestyles removed from Diaz, right on the latter’s filmic heel. True to his provenance, Santos’s “#Y” shows a curious slice of his own generation’s milieu, with the integrity and power of youth. Together with his also youthful writer, Jeff Stelton, they mine the genius of 20th-century Western literature of alienation, most notably Samuel Becket (“Malone Dies,” 1951, “Waiting for Godot,” 1952), Albert Camus, Jerome David Salinger, Bret Easton Ellis and Stephen Chbosky.

Youth and its achievement are the common threads that connect them. J.D. Salinger was 31 when his famously celebrated “The Catcher in the Rye” first saw print in 1951; Bret Easton Ellis was just 20, and still in college, when he wrote and published “Less than Zero” in 1985; and Stephen Chbosky must have been close to his “chum” Charlie, in years and in substance, in “The Perks of a Wallflower” (1999).

Of course, the then young prodigious talents Becket and Camus predate the three aforementioned US authors in the early part f the 20th century. Becket was 31 when his “largely ignored” –initially, that is—masterpiece, “Murphy,” was first published in 1938; and Camus was 29 when “The Stranger” (or “The Outsider”) first saw the light in 1942.

How the youthful Santos and Stelton have distilled the thoughts, from subtle to deep, of these outstanding literary stalwarts, and then woven them to their film’s tapestry is no mean feat. On the main, “#Y” is not a film with a story to tell, so to speak, but a condition to portray. And though well crafted to its utmost details, including the exquisite sound design and music score, the director rarely resorts to “technical cleverness” to illustrate the theme and advance its narrative.

Santos’s straight simplicity roots the film at once in the actual instance of suicide, for its opening sequence, and then moves to the everyday and the pages of the written word. The skyline shot of the 21-year-old protagonist, Miles Santiago Mendoza (the initials MSM, a play on information technology’s MMS?), perched on the ledge of the 21st story suggests an anxious faith on a free fall.

The edgy scene’s obvious visual reference quickly calls to mind the Chinese movie “Amphetamine’s” similar opening scene and, later, also the same film’s familiar closing shot, with that of Miles’s fatal plunge, sans the surreal and the hallucinatory. Intentional is the filmmaker’s deliberate device to speak through the suicide victim’s mind, in the spirit of an “autobiographical account,” which is alchemy of several selves.

Santos paints with pain his screen canvass, and with seeming ease and familiarity like a life being lived at the moment –from the first hint of foreboding (i.e. Miles’s parents’ bedroom discussion of their son’s delicate condition while the latter eavesdrops from their dividing wall, a fine defining moment) to the climactic fall. Throughout the film, Miles’s fragmented faith wavers as he negotiates between frail and failing relationships that surround him. Dislocated from himself and from others, Miles’s fate is tinged with despair and isolation that grow worse by the day. The banality of his existence, despite relentless partying and peer bonding, reflects the gnawing emptiness of Camus’s anti-hero, Mersault (“The Outsider”), whose character, observes one writer, “demonstrates the meaninglessness of life beyond the meaning one is willing to ascribe o it.”

All this, plus the pang of melancholy passively charged all over Elmo Magalona’s face and his whole persona provide the essence of his affecting performance, quietly ranging it on steady and shifting nuances, from start to finish. Intermittently, the film breaks the fourth wall, whenever Magalona faces and speaks to his therapist (or audience), before he eventually breaks down in silence.

This realization and resignation to one’s essentially meaningless existence are chronicled in today’s cinematic terms through an endless cocktail of drugs, sex, alcohol and parties galore. The intimate and casual conversation about morality, politics and religion, specifically sex, virginity, corruption and Catholicism, renders inoperative the ordinary opinion that “youth is wasted on the young,” thanks to Colleen Garcia’s appropriate acting and pertinent rhetoric.

Indeed, the vast waste and wretchedness that permeate throughout the world are telling legacies of the adult and old order that consume us to this very day. What then is the purpose of life, the film posits, in a world vacated by God?

“#Y” is both a statement and a warning coming not out of the mouth of babes, as it were, but from young lives lived to the fullest of their seemingly limited and limitless experience. George Orwell’s omniscient Big Brother, from the groundbreaking and highly political novel, “1984” (published 1949), appears and disappears like a fleeting “all-seeing eye,” portrayed with surprising turn by the otherwise staid Slater Young, as he scrupulously watches his sibling “ward.” By design, “eye pieces” are literally placed on the set (e.g. Miles’s bedroom), positioned to serve like CCTVs, as if to monitor Miles’s every move and whereabouts. Ironically, that which is consciously being avoided-- even a mere mention (of suicide) -- is that which actually happens to the subject.

Holden Caulfield’s “crazy cliff” in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” is mirrored in the ledge of a towering condominium that proclaims its faith in bold, large letters, though only seen from their fringes: IN GOD WE TRUST –partly and oblique, not unlike the unfull faith of the suicidal Miles. The techie selfie replaces the usual suicide note of yesterday, thus transmitting instant video images of the self-destructive act at the very moment of committing it. Departing from Virginia Woolf’s line of not describing the “experience” Santos (through Miles) instead shows suicide as it happens, sharing intense terror that surely would scar family and friends forever.

All other references, cinematic or otherwise, in the lushly layered film resonate with the here and now of blank commercialism that characterizes Generation Y. In sum, Santos and Stelton’s “#Y” is a direful indictment of a continuing colonial and colonized mind. Only this time around, the colonizers have become native and are our very own, but make us “foreign” in many ways.

In the end, “the city and generation that grew up knowing nothing else, rendered incapable of understanding anything about themselves or those that surround them” merely perpetuates the pleasure principle, as people remain lost in the quagmire of money and material goods. Gorgeous Kit Thompson’s vigorous masturbation scene, shown half-naked and on triple-split screen, and cut in on his occasional lovemaking, reveals a kind of current energy and mindless ethic at work.

They say the act of suicide is intended to punish someone or some people. In “#Y,” the case or the intended to be punished is not personal per se: rather it’s the entire system—society’s dysfunction and not the individual’s—that Miles is “suiciding” against, and therefore scathingly punishes.

As disaffection and emptiness simply float past in the film, an ancient romantic notion is freely dispelled and deconstructed: Love does not conquer all; death does.

JULIO CINCO NIGADO
Tagurabong City, Philippines, 2014