By Carmen Aquino Sarmiento
Movie Review
Babae at Baril
written and directed by Rae Red
THE NOIRISH mood for Rae Red’s Babae at Baril (Woman and Gun) is set with Radioactive Sago’s Lourd De Veyra channeling a Beat poet in an artsy 1950s dive, as he nihilistically intones:
“Alak, sugal, kape, babae… araw-gabi, tumodo kami (Booze, gambling, coffee, women… day and night, without any let-up — it’s not as catchy in translation).” For the film’s first half, the soundtrack cooperates, heavy on the moaning saxes, squealing trombones and throbbing percussion.
The nameless Babae (Janine Gutierrez) stands for Every Woman, voiceless and put-upon. She meekly undergoes the various daily indignities that millions of Metro Manila’s minimum wage endo’s must endure: the lengthy queues to get a seat on a jeepney; the intrusive body searches by the company security guard. Her overbearing manager (Gie Onida) humiliates her repeatedly as he calls her out for her creased uniform and snagged stockings, implying that these may cause her to lose her job any day now. Her poor toes, abraded by the cheap, too-tight shoes she must wear while on-duty, never heal. Ms. Gutierrez is believable, with a touching vulnerability which should make us more patient with the “little people” who wait on us.
Every evening, Babae gets catcalled by the drunks she must walk by as she makes her way home. The slum landlord (Raffy Tejada) is a sleazy voyeur who spies on her roommate making out with her thug of a boyfriend. He threatens to throw Babae out on the street if she cannot pay her rent in full. The director Red sympathetically shows painful details in the hard-scrabble life of the working poor. Babae buys her sanitary pads tingi (by the piece). A good chunk of her small wages goes to supporting her demanding mother, who wants her to stay, homesick and lonely as she is, and keep working in the city where the money is better, while she makes lovey-dovey in the province.
Things come to a head when Babae picks up a loaded .22 in the trash. Power comes from the barrel of a gun. With an incongruous red sticker heart on its stock, the gun seems meant for the sweet-natured Babae. The director brings up the reality of male oppression even within the same oppressed laborer’s class. Babae’s co-worker (Felix Roco) makes friendly overtures, offering her a new pair of better-quality stockings. He clarifies that even though she has a choice between two pairs, he can only afford one. He insists that she try them on before him as he towers intimidatingly over her. She acquiesces which he takes as her consent to rape. Afterwards, he threatens her should she report him to the authorities. There is no solidarity in their common suffering.
Then follows an escalating series of events where, armed with the seemingly heaven-sent gun, Babae confronts her oppressors. One hopes for another satisfying rape-revenge film in the venerable tradition of the master Lino Broka (Angela Markado, 1980 and Babangon Ako at Dudurugin Kita, 1989) although the busted National Artist for Film Carlos Caparas who spawned the Massacre Movie genre might more popularly come to mind: (Vizconde Massacre: God Help Us, 1993; The Maggie Dela Riva Story: Why Me? 1994, and most recently Jacqueline Comes Home: the Chiong Story, 2018). Unfortunately, just as Babae is standing over her rapist, the director takes us into a long-winded back story of how the Baril, which is the second half of the title, came into her possession. If there were a case for cineaste’s blue balls, this is it.
The gun’s origin story goes as far back as Marcos Martial Law to the paltik-maker (underground gun crafters) then to its first owners: crooked cops-for-hire (Archie Adamos and Alan Paule). The gun passes on to Paule’s son, a second-generation policeman (J.C. Santos) who uses it as he goes after small fry in the Presidential War on Drugs: i.e., a lowly balut vendor (Elijah Canlas). His pleas to spare his life as he has exams the next day, evoke the Kian delos Santos murder. Balut Boy ends up with the policeman’s gun which he passes on to his friend, Steph, a newbie holdaper (Sky Teotico). On his first gig, Steph manages to shoot — and kill — in the darkness and from several yards away, the old woman (Ruby Ruiz) whose house he has broken into. Frightened, he runs off and dumps the gun (miraculously still fully loaded) in the trash for Babae to serendipitously find.
After that long history lesson, we are back to Babae, literally standing over her rapist who is too frozen by fear to move, with the gun pointing directly at him. From that distance of just a few feet, she fires all her bullets at him, on a downward trajectory yet — and misses! He comes to his senses and escapes unscathed. What are we supposed to make of that? A burglar handling a gun for the first time, hits his target in the dark with deadly accuracy, while a righteous woman misses on several tries at close range. One of the QCinema juror opined that perhaps Babae had a change of heart. He thought that was well and good, in keeping with the ideal of the soft, virtuous, ever compliant and forgiving woman. In this age of #MeToo and #BabaeAko, it is psychologically unsatisfying. There is a reason for the popularity of the rape-revenge genre.
But the puzzling change in the soundtrack from those boozey jazz riffs to the folk quartet Asin’s preachy “Magnanakaw,” when the film shifted to the baril’s backstory, should have tipped us off to the film’s dubious intent. The song’s lyrics definitely do not apply to the film’s protagonist though:
“Tingnan mo ang iyong sarili, suriin mo ang iyong ginagawa
Ikaw ba’y isang magnanakaw at taong mapagsamantala
Hindi nagpapapawis, hindi lumuluha
Ginagamit ang galing sa hindi tamang gawa.”
(Look at yourself and what you do —
Are you another thief and user?
Never sweating or shedding a tear,
Using your talents only for ill.)
The implicit message seems to be that women do not know how to handle power, especially when it comes from the barrel of a gun. So after all those great expectations and opportunities, the bad guys (all male) get away, and she is left empty and defenseless.
