Taklub (Trap)
Director: Brillante Mendoza
Starring: Nora Aunor, Julio Diaz, Aaron Rivera, Rome Mallari, Shine Santos
Three stars
After watching Brillante Mendoza's 2009 graphic thriller Kinatay (Butchered), renowned filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was so impressed that he sent Mendoza a handwritten letter: "Bravo on your difficult, troubling work. Your decision to never dramatise the murder, never indulge in movie suspense, was bold and daring."
The late Roger Ebert, the respected US film critic, thought otherwise, writing in his review: "Here is a film that forces me to apologise to Vincent Gallo for calling The Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival."
Such is the polarising power of Mendoza’s work. Never easy to watch, the indie auteur’s films tackling troubling subjects such as rape, death and extreme poverty have their champions, but also their detractors.
His latest film, Taklub, could turn the haters into admirers.
It is his most subtle, most gentle work to date, both technically and thematically.
Shot in a sepia tinge and scored with barely any music, the film is set during the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which ravaged the Philippine coastline in November 2013 and killed 6,300 people.
Yet the film manages to eschew the histrionics one might expect from a work tackling the most devastating natural disaster that has hit the Philippines in years.
Mendoza instead focuses on the small, human stories of three survivors from a community in the central province of Tacloban: a mother dealing with the death of her three children, a husband who has lost his wife, and three siblings mourning the death of their parents.
The focus is less on physical damage, than on the psychological scars. Such a sensitive approach has produced a compassionate portrayal of suffering and despair, as well as of the resilience needed to rebuild a life.
Sure, one can still accuse Mendoza of exoticising poverty. But in giving us less of his typically bleak vision of the world, he has given us a lot more to think about.