By Carmen Aquino Sarmiento
Movie Review
Cleaners
Written and Directed by Glenn Barit
THIS THROWBACK to the pre-touch screen smart phone era, when owning a Blackberry was the ultimate in status symbol gadgetry, evokes the remembrance of things past with relentlessly flickering stop-motion animation throughout its 90 minutes or so running time. The novelty of re-shooting all the grungy photocopied frames wherein the major characters (all unknowns) have been laboriously color-coded in fluorescent marker, gives it the distinction of having what may be the largest carbon footprint, minute-for-minute, since filmmaking went digital. Cleaners should come with a warning that prolonged viewing may induce migraines or even grand mal seizures in those so predisposed.
Structured as an anthology set around highlights of the school calendar, the film is purportedly set in a private co-educational Catholic school in Tuguegarao. It is a fantasy institution, given the absence, indifference, or ineffectuality of teachers and other authority figures, and the lack of realistic consequences for students’ actions.
“Nutrition Month” is a tale of moral come-uppance for the unsympathetically portrayed Stephanie (green), who is unmistakably branded maarte (affected) as she repeatedly expresses disgust over having to sully her hands in the school’s vegetable garden. In case we don’t get that she is a germophobe, she is also repeatedly shown dousing herself with rubbing alcohol, even while fully clothed in the privacy of her bathroom. While performing with her high school dance club for the entire student assembly, she has explosive diarrhea onstage. Instead of running to the bathroom as a sane and civilized person would, she scoots across the floorboards like a sick puppy, the better to spread her fluid bacteria-laden excrement for her oblivious, barefoot fellow dancers to step in. The show must go on.
Then, still eschewing the use of her school’s sanitary facilities, Stephanie races to her class’s vegetable garden, to finish doing No. 2 in a conveniently prepared hole in the ground. She leaves her soiled panty hanging inside out on a papaya plant, like a flag, for further scatological emphasis. It is toilet humor taken to new depths. Her dirty panty remains hanging there until harvest time when succulent papayas, fertilized through her personal efforts, appear. Is the message this sends to the throngs of high school students being taken by their clueless teachers to watch this film: eat s—?
Next is “Buwan ng Wika” where the goody-two-shoes Angeli (yellow) must team up with a very mature-looking Goth triumvirate (orange) for their presentation. The reliance on visual anachronisms such as CDs, or the absurdity of Angeli rehearsing tinikling by herself are a banally soporific stretch. Sketch comedy should be under five minutes. But then, Filipino audiences are suckers for the Tito-Vic-en-Joey schtick and in a collective autonomic reflex, will laugh mindlessly. One wonders how this peculiarly Pinoy humor might translate on international film festival screens.
“Prom” deals with the ostensibly serious issues of teen pregnancy, slut-shaming, and bullying. Francis (aqua) is singled out for being supot (uncircumcised) by a pack of high school alpha males who are inordinately interested in his penis. Helpless before their sheer numbers and superior strength, and unable or unwilling to seek professional help and support, he resorts to performing a DIY pagtutuli (circumcision) with scissors before his tormentors in the school corridor. His member must have been engorged with excitement or arousal, as evidenced by the blood which photogenically sprays the leader’s face. Such crude self-mutilation is supposed to be an admirable act of bravado which the audience dutifully applauds. Francis is presented as a role-model in these times of rising rates of teenage depression/suicide and the popularity of cutting as an expression of adolescent angst.
“SK” examines Philippine social and political structures through the wide eyes of Jun-Jun (purple), the heir to a local political dynasty. His best friend Ramon is a bad influence, an incorrigible juvenile delinquent who spray paints penises in an homage to Netflix’s American Vandal. It turns out that Ramon’s family has been using, rent-free, land owned by Jun-Jun’s family for their pancit batil patong (a Cagayan delicacy) eatery. Nonetheless, Jun-Jun always offers to pay whenever he eats there.
Despite his friend’s obvious decency and the debt which they owe to his family, Ramon continually derides Jun-Jun as a “weak shit” for his reluctance to take part in his nightly spray-painting forays. The one time Jun-Jun gives in, they get caught by the police and, as expected, Jun-Jun’s father who used to be the mayor (a seat his wife is now keeping warm) gets him out of trouble. The daddy mayor is such a loving father that he doesn’t even scold Jun-Jun and assures him he understands that it was all misguided youthful high spirits. Later though, Jun-Jun’s father mentions that he needs the property which Ramon’s family has been using for free for their food business all these years. All good things must come to an end after all.
Jun-Jun repays his parents’ nurturing and his best friend’s insults, ingratitude, and vindictiveness (Ramon has defaced all of the posters of Jun-Jun’s family) by taking the money that his parents gave him for his SK campaign and handing it over to Ramon’s parasitic family. That’s where his loyalty lies. His questionable action is held up as admirable: be the viper in your own family’s nest; bite the hand that feeds you; s— where you eat. Like most of the characters in Cleaners, Jun-Jun clearly needs professional help.
The film’s climax, “Huling Araw,” confirms the poor mental health of the main characters. On the last day of school, they spontaneously screech profanities, ululate, hurl themselves against the walls, roll on the floor, shatter the classroom furniture. No one gets naked though so it all stays PG. Again, no responsible adult intervenes. There are no grown-up’s in the room. It is a teenage sociopath’s fantasy come true.
