By Andrew Paredes
The good news: Kinatay is not as bad as Roger Ebert said it was.
The bad news: At the UP Film Center screening on July 30, the last thing director Brillante Ma. Mendoza introduced the film that won for him a Best Director award at Cannes last May with these prophetic words:"I'm not going to tell you to enjoy the film…just watch it." No direr warning–or harder command–was ever issued.
The truth is, Kinatay is a difficult film to sit through. Not because the title refers to a washed-up prostitute who gets hacked to pieces by corrupt policemen, but because audiences weaned on the attention-deficit-disorder plotting of Hollywood movies will probably be lulled to sleep. And for a film that deals with such horrific subject matter, that may not be a desirable effect.
Kinatay follows a day in the life of police cadet Peping (the director's muse Coco Martin) who, as the film opens, drops off his seven-month-old son with an aunt and rides off to city hall to get married to his girlfriend Cecille (Mercedes Cabral). Later on, Peping gets a shady job offer from a friend named Abyong (Jhong Hilario) that promises a huge payday. Accepting the offer, Peping then watches in horror as Sarge (John Regala) pummels a deadbeat prostitute/junkie named Madonna (Maria Isabel Lopez) and takes them both on an interminable ride out of the city that ends in her dismemberment over drug debts unpaid.
