(Shadow)
Considered as Raymond Red's official return to short films yet a departure from his experimental trademark, Anino is Red's homage to the Cannes Filipino veteran Lino Brocka whose award-winning film, Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon) in 1975, shaped the young filmmaker's social realist vision. The "simple and pure cinematic style" found in Chinese director Zhang Yimou's Not One Less further inspired Red to tell his story vividly. An innovative amalgamation of film and photography with a metaphysical thrust, Anino is man's thirteen-minute descent into the underworld.
The story is anchored on a penniless photographer who seeks physical and spiritual comfort inside a church. As he leaves, a curious figure greets him - a "devil on the doorstep" - wearing a black shirt and gold chains. Caught at the threshold which separates God and the ungodly, the photographer listens to the devil who, with furtive glances towards the unseen church altar and in a hurry like a pimp or a drug pusher trying to make a quick deal on the streets, taunts him: "Hindi mga totoong tao 'yang nasa loob ng simbahan. Ang mga totoong tao 'yung nasa labas. (The people inside the church are fakes. The real people are outside.)" The improvised character of the script, interestingly enough, renders the devil inarticulate and redundant, like a victim of Babel suffering from a confusion of tongues. He neither bargains nor makes a pact with the devil who suddenly vanishes into thin air.
The photographer eventually leaves the church with his camera and last roll of film, combing the city in search of "real people" as subjects, only to discover, as critic Gino Dormiendo poignantly notes, that he is "unable to reconcile his religious beliefs and the widespread misery around him." With social realism at its core, Anino strikes a discordant chord for those who would believe that the Philippines is a mosaic of high-rise buildings, well-engineered flyovers, and postmodern subdivisions. This is but an illusion of truth. The truth lurks in the "shadows of progress" and in the unbridgeable gap between the powerful rich and the abject poor. But Red lets the city speak for itself and respects its noise - its visually palpable sound: mountains of garbage, clogged sewers, wretched squatters, and annoying traffic. These images are committed to memory by the photographer; his camera capturing the innocents along the margins. Produced on a modest budget, critic Denis Ladaw finds Anino "as expensive as a Muro Ami." Perhaps he saw in the floating human excrement the glitter of 24-karat gold.
The beginning of the photographer's descent into the abyss is traceable to the scene where a street urchin offers to take his picture. Finding this amusing and unprecedented, the photographer steps back for his pose. Like the devil, the boy disappears as soon as the photographer turns his back, and with his camera. With a dupe's expression on his face - a symbolic encapsulation of the city's own ignominy - the photographer goes in search of the boy.
Intermittently cutting through the film is a scene of a man in a white Mercedes Benz caught in heavy traffic. The roaming photographer, disheartened by his unfortunate encounter with the boy, stops in the middle of the road. The narrative suddenly makes a 180-degree turn and a major collision occurs. Road rage takes over the man who gets out of his car, verbally abuses him, and brandishes a gun. Unlike Jose in Ang Magpakailanman, he does not commit an actual crime although he seems to consider it. In fact, as though possesed, he strikes the man to waken him. Soon a syndicate of thugs, like escorts to Hades, arrives from nowhere and assaults the photographer.
The inexhaustible power of the film lies not only in the crystallized documentation of reality, but also in its suggestion that reality is both shadowed and is a forehadowing. Dormiendo accurately recognizes that the film opens "a veritable Pandora's box of our transgressions and, at the final stage of the journey, there is but a faint shadow of redemption." This is not a film about the conflict between the secular (state) and the sacred (religion) but their complicity: the socio-economic and political misgovernance of our time mirrors and conspires with the metaphysical forces of evil. Thus, if the boy had stolen his camera, the devil his soul. And these are destiny's calculated (mis)transactions: chained to poverty, condemned without sinning. "Uuwi na ba tayo? (So are we going home?)," asks the devil to the half-conscious photographer who, having fallen from grace, is being transported to the underworld.
Red's first and last films are consistently funereal, a cosmic balance of physical and moral deaths. In Anino, escape from what seems to be an eternity of socio-economic oppression or spiritual damnation seems impossible. But where there is anino (shadow), there is liwanag (light). And for the indigent boy, a palimpsest of the roaming photographer, one must have hope or faith like the woman in church with hands raised to the Ama Namin (The Lord's Prayer).
Pearlie Rose S. Baluyut
Producer, Director, Story, Cinematography: Raymond Red
Editing: Raymond Red, Renewin Alano
Production Design: Daniel Red
Cast:
Eddie Garcia
Ronnie Lazaro
John Arcilla
Ronnie Pulido
Ermie Concepcion
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