THE Regional Trial Court (Branch 52) of Manila convicted Ronaldo Espinosa, a Sheriff of the Department of Labor and Employment — National Capital Region (DoLE-NCR), of direct bribery and was sentenced to imprisonment of three to seven years. The accused was also ordered to pay a fine of P45,000.00 and was meted the penalty of special temporary disqualification.
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Video Review
The Death of Louis XIV
Directed by Albert Serra
By Noel Vera
ALBERT SERRA’S The Death of Louis XIV shares at first glance the same status as most living royalty in this more presidential, more prime-ministerial world: it feels oddly anachronistic; it appears to hold little relevance to our lives; and very little is said or actually happens in its relatively brief and quiet reign, beyond the eponymous event. It’s also to my mind one of the most gorgeous-looking — and funniest — films I’ve seen all year.
Serra’s concept, far as I can make it out, is to give us literally what the title says: the king’s death, depicted in close and painful detail. Doctors worry over marks on the king’s foot (he has gangrene, and they wonder if they should cut), ply him with jellies and fruits. At one point a charlatan coaxes him into taking down an “elixir” made out of bull’s sperm, bull’s blood, and frog fat (ate my share of bizarre foods and even I would hesitate). At another, the doctors massage the foot with leaves, twigs, and what looks like chopped mushrooms and whole garlic cloves — I’m reminded of a porchetta roast, trussed and thoroughly rubbed prior to putting in the oven.
The real drama swirls around the film’s still, silent center: the royal doctor Fagon (Patrick d’Assumcao) argues with chief valet Blouin (Marc Susini) on whether to let either the dogs or the birds near the king (the doctor prefers the dogs; Blouin is for the birds); Blouin wants to bring in a doctor from Marseilles named Le Brun (Vincenc Altaio) and Fagon is skeptical (turns out Le Brun is more poet than physician: “What is love? Love is pain… love manifests itself because the picture of the beloved remains blocked between the eyes.”) The infighting and squabbles are endless if hushed: folks constantly seek influence and favor while trying to tiptoe round the elephant wheezing in the room.
As said elephant Jean-Pierre Leaud — wrote “Antoine Doinel” before I caught myself, but that’s how indelible Leaud’s work has been to the French New Wave: you see his face and the first word to pop in mind might be the name of his first and most famous lead role, as Francois Truffaut’s autobiographical double in The 400 Blows. He’s worked for other filmmakers since: Jean Luc Godard, Jean Eustache, Jacques Rivette, Agnes Varda, Aki Kaurismaki, Tsai Ming Liang among many others; as far as film lovers go he’s cinematic royalty and hence the choice to play French royalty.
Leaud cleverly underplays his Louis XIV as a man constantly exhausted by the least exertion; the one scene where we see him outside (the gardens of Versailles?) he’s being pushed on a wheelchair; when asked to join in a party he has to beg off and — as a gesture to their affection — asks for a hat to put on and doff them with. It’s a sly performance made up of a hundred little gestures, suggesting a ruler crippled by infirmity who still has his mind and — more importantly — his sense of humor. All the better to show how precipitous his fall when attacked by fever and then gangrene — the gestures ceased, the softspoken quips replaced by equally softspoken groans, the elegant expressiveness of the face congealed into a waxen mask.
Funny? Why, yes, yes I think it is, horrifyingly so: one look at that gargantuan wig on Louis’s head — as if a giant poodle decided to squat on his skull — and I can’t help but chuckle. The solemn process of attending to the death of a long-reigning ruler is stuffed full of absurdities, from a crowd of loyalists applauding Louis’s sucking on a spoonful of softboiled egg (“It’s wonderful Sire to see you have your appetite back”) to the royal physician holding up the royal large intestines like a chain of sausages and noting they are twice their normal size. The most affairs of state Louis manages to accomplish onscreen is to attend one council meeting (left undepicted) and to dismiss the issue of fortifications submitted by the Duke of York, presumably due to lack of funds — otherwise it’s all pain and sips of water and whether or not to cut off the steadily blackening leg. Democracy is hugely problematic till you realize that a form of government where the supreme leader has ruled for so long he can barely move his bowels, much less apply his brains, ain’t such a great system either.
Serra’s visual style avoids the Baroque opulence of the young Louis and opts for the more austere trappings of the late Louis — just a handful of richly red silks and velvets, and a pillow elaborately embroidered to lean on; the only real extravagance, and it’s admittedly a whopper, is the monumentally ridiculous wig (even in the king’s agonizing last moments it’s hard to repress a giggle). Serra indulges us by spending brief minutes outside (though carefully manicured hedges restrict our view of the horizon and dense tree branches cut off much of the sky) but soon moves indoors where the sense of claustrophobia becomes near unbearable — with Jonathan Ricquebourg as cinematographer, Serra takes his cue less from the official artwork of the period (Charles Le Brun, Adam Frans van der Meulen) than from the earlier smoky glass shadowiness of mature Rembrandt. After a while you may find it difficult to breathe.
In a way the film can’t help but be more relevant in 2017 than when first screened in Cannes 2016; watching it one can’t help but draw parallels with the present royalty sitting in the White House — the narcissism, the outsized ego, the way courtiers swirl around the sickly monster jockeying for position. Difference being Louis was well aware of the limits of his power and of the mistakes he made (onscreen at least we have a scene where the king briefs his grandson, Louis XV, on what to do or not do) while present king of the United States doesn’t seem to have a clue. Louis’s history can be instructive — he raised France to cultural and political glory but squandered much of the country’s wealth on building projects and foreign wars. The present king of the White House should really take heed, if he’s capable of heeding anything.
The movie is available on Google Play and Youtube paid online service.
Repeated calls for federalism by the Duterte administration actually point to more centralization of the national government — the complete opposite of what they’re advocating.
Here are some examples.
1. National taxes have been rising, instead of declining, which could have helped prepare federal states to have their own income and value-added taxes, etc. Instead of lowering the top marginal income tax rate of 32%, it was even raised to 35%. Instead of reducing the VAT to 10% or 8% with few exemptions, the 12% was retained but many sectors were also exempted.
2. Expanding the number of departments and bureaus instead of reducing them. The Department of Transportation and Communication (DoTC) has become two departments — the Department of Transportation (DoTr) and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT). Then there are proposals to create a Department of Housing, Department of Fisheries. A good federal set up is to abolish many existing departments (like NEDA, DA, DENR, DoH, DoT, etc.) and allow the state governments to create their own departments as they see fit, create, or expand local or state revenues to finance these state departments.
3. Forcing national legislative franchising like buses and taxi, instead of decentralized regional or provincial franchising. Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and other House leaders are behind the proposal.
4. Reversing integrated public private partnerships (PPP) where government fiscal exposure is very limited to hybrid PPP where national government budget and foreign borrowings (especially China ODA) is much bigger. A meaningful federal set up will empower the state governments to deal with local infrastructure like airports, seaports, provincial tollways and inter-city MRT/LRT.
5. Centralized declaration of class suspensions. During the anti-martial law rallies in Sept. 21, 2017, Malacañang declared a Luzon-wide or nationwide class suspensions even if many provinces and cities did not even have scheduled rallies. Then during the PISTON jeepney strike in Oct. 16-17, 2017, Malacañang declared nationwide class suspensions, even if many provinces and cities did not even have planned jeep strike. President Duterte should have allowed the mayors and governors to decide, saying something like “the national government will step back from these decisions and it is up to the local governments to decide what’s best for their people.”
Beyond federalism plans contradicted by more centralization of powers and taxation, a long-term alternative would be for the Philippines to split into many new countries and allow these new countries to compete with one another in the field of taxation, governance, infrastructure, trade, and tourism to attract more investors and visitors from around the world. Peace and diplomacy will be retained as fellow ASEAN member-states as well as various multilateral formations and the United Nations.
Many existing Philippine island-provinces are actually comparable in size to existing countries and/or big territories (see table).
This is a far out view and may not be considered in the current decade but would appear more viable through time. Singapore will not be as dynamic and developed as it is now if it was just one of many states of Malaysia.
Under the current activities of the Duterte administration, there lies a danger that when federalism is finally enacted, local entrepreneurs and job creators will be walloped with both high national and high local taxes, fees, royalties and various mandatory spending. This will be a good formula to encourage more corruption and black market business operation, or get out of the country and do business elsewhere.
For the federalism plan to be more attractive to the people, the national government should learn to step back, to tax less, regulate less, bureaucratize less, build confidence among the people and investors in the provinces that indeed they will be given more leeway, more opportunities to craft their own political and economic identity.
Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr. is President of Minimal Government Thinkers, a member-institute of Economic Freedom Network (EFN) Asia.
GMA NETWORK has ventured into creating original online content with the Jan. 1 launch of GMA ONE Online Exclusives, featuring three shows which are screened exclusively on the network’s YouTube page.
The three shows cover a variety of topics, from millennials’ problems, to lifestyle, to fake news.
Adulting with Atom Araullo is about how millennials and young professionals deal with adult issues as Mr. Araullo gives “netizens a peek at his everyday struggles as he faces the responsibilities of being on his own, and living on a budget,” said a company press release.
Meanwhile, #Goals with Gabbi Garcia is similar to many lifestyle channels, with Ms. Garcia exploring “her goals in beauty, style, makeup, travel and music.”
Finally, GMA News reporter Joseph Morong tackles the serious issue of recognizing fake news in Fact or Fake.
“Fact or Fake goes back to one of the tenets of journalism which is fact-checking,” said Mr. Morong in the press release.
New episodes of the shows — each are five- to eight-minutes long — will be uploaded every Monday at 5 p.m. The shows will have “at least 10 episodes,” said Nessa Valdellon, GMA Network’s first vice-president for public affairs, in an e-mail interview with BusinessWorld in late December.
“Each series of GMA ONE will have at least 10 episodes, though likely many more than that as we see these as being potentially long-running programs,” she said.
The online exclusives, Ms. Valdellon said, were in response to the “very, very dramatic uptake in our GMA YouTube following,” and in order to provide “the younger audience with good program options.”
“GMA has a very strong TV audience in the Philippines, especially among older, C2DE viewers [GMA classifies the C bracket into C1 or the upper C, and C2, or lower C]. Millennials, however, watch a lot of content online… In addition, we have seen a very, very dramatic uptake in our GMA YouTube following — our number of subscribers as well as amount of time spent watching — the past year and we want to expand this now huge audience further,” she explained.
The shows’ pilot episodes showed Mr. Araullo’s and Ms. Garcia’s utilizing the “vlog” style (where personalities bring a handheld camera around as they go about their day for a more intimate feel) though they also have sitdowns in front of the camera as they dispense advice.
In the first episodes, Mr. Araullo gives the audience a snippet of how he managed to move out of his family home and into his own abode while Ms. Garcia brought her viewers along for a trip to the beach.
“We noticed how popular ‘how-to’ videos are with millennials, hence the concepts of Adulting with Atom Araullo and #Goals with Gabbi Garcia. Both [Mr. Araullo and Ms. Garcia] have a very strong millennial online following so we wanted to reach the age range of their audiences,” Ms. Valdellon said of the rationale behind the shows.
Mr. Morong’s show was a bit different as it mostly showed him inside a café doing an explainer about the definition of fake news while inserting news articles and clips as examples.
“Meanwhile, fake news is one of the biggest issues that face us today and since most of it now spreads is online, it is just appropriate that we have an online show that discusses it,” she added.
In the series press conference held on Dec. 20 at the GMA Coop building in Quezon City, Mr. Morong pointed out that his show was timely because the country is nearing the 2019 midterm elections and he hopes his show will help viewers to form informed opinions.
Ms. Valdellon said the online exclusive content “marks the new era in our content production and programming.”
“We’ve been tracking Philippines and particularly GMA YouTube viewers closely the past years and we’ve seen which particular kinds of content are doing well and which audience these hit. The edgier content in fact has been the more successful. For our producers, honestly, we find it exciting to finally be producing content for an audience of people like ourselves — viewers in their teens, 20’s and 30’s — as for decades now we have been producing television content primarily for housewives 40 and up,” she said. — Zsarlene B. Chua
