the sleeping typhoon
by douglas Messerli
Kidlat
Tahimik Mababangong bangungot (Perfumed
Nightmare) /
1977
When Philippines
filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed
Nightmare was first shown in the United States in 1980, The New York Times reviewer Vincent
Canby—despite somewhat disparaging the idea that any film might be described
this way—characterized the film as being “primitive,” while also being “sweet,
funny, witty” and “intelligent.” But, although Tahimik’s movie is shot in 8
millimeter film stock; presents it titles on hand-held cards; portrays numerous
static images in a grainy, slightly washed-out color of the quality of a
home-made movie; and casts much of its narrative in the form of fables, Perfumed Nightmare, in its humorously
clever analysis of international economic disparities and in its unsentimental
embracement of the handmade over what is industrially created, is highly
sophisticated. Just as the director reveals the locally-made jitneys to be far
more beautiful and useful than the Westernized modes of public transportation
(the Philippine jitneys, moreover, are crafted our of war tanks and other
leftover US weapons, machines of war being converted into things of beauty),
and as he suggests the narrow village bridge of the small village of Balian to
be just as wondrous as the great architectural feats of Charles De Gaulle
Airport, so does Tahimik demonstrate that his little film is more pleasurably
infectious and moving than many an grand American motion picture—and at a far
smaller cost!
Our hero, performed by Kidlat himself, is
a naïve lover the new, an admirer of everything his economically backward
community has no opportunity to offer. Born in the 1942 Occupation of the Philippines,
the character Kidlat has spent his 33 years in “a cocoon of American dreams.”
Working as a jitney driver in his primitive village, he is presides over a
small group of young boys and girls as head of the Werner Von Braun fan club,
listens nearly every day of his life to The Voice of America on radio, and
dreams of visiting Cape Canaveral and witnessing the wonders of American and
European technology.
Wise elders attempt to warn him against
his absurd idolatry, and his mother even recounts how his father died, in a
furious reaction (mythically described as the breath of a typhoon) when, after
fighting against the Spanish colonists, he is locked out of Manila by American
soldiers. Yet Kidlat remains unconvinced. Why would anybody prefer the old over
the new, and how can anyone not recognize that the new is encapsulated by the
US?
At the same time, however, the film slowly
builds up a series of images of daily life in Balian that convinces us that
these simple people are living, in many respects, a life richer and clearly
more satisfying than many of us in the Western world. Sacred white caribous
stare down at the natives; a patron saint, carried to the cathedral each morning,
protects from evil; a rather painful-to-watch mass circumcision deep in the
woods, welcomes the young boys in manhood. The beautifully decorated jitneys
transport ice, statues, beauty queens, animals, and the citizens of Balaian
through the town and across its single bridge in grand style. An old man with a
mythical butterfly tattooed across his chest, weaves sturdy bamboo houses that
stand up to the most violent of storms, and tells wonderful tales, including
his personal myth that when the sleeping typhoon wakes up, it releases the
butterflies to new life.
All of these images, moreover, are
accompanied by a lush score composed of sounds, words, songs, and native music
that utterly enlivens the narrative.
Even a rich American visits Kidlat’s
small village, disguised, outrageously as a boy scout leader who fails in his
demand that he, who is willing to pay money to the organization, be designated
as the head of the local troop, reiterating what we all know, that the US
perceives itself as the leader of everything, no matter how large or small.
The American in this fable, stomps out—wades
out might be a better description—of this meeting to flag down Kidlat’s jitney
to take him to Manila. In the director’s gentle satire the locals get their
revenge as the jitney fills up with villagers and their animals, forcing the
indignant would-be-leader to sit atop the suitcases trailing behind.
Yet he takes a liking to Kidlat, promising
to take him and his jitney with him when he returns to his castle in Paris.
Suddenly the whole village is buzzing with news of the event. Kidlat get his
picture taken (posing with a charming smile that expresses the joyfulness he
will leave behind) and a celebration of their soon-to-be wayfarer—replete with
marching bands, dancing children, and beauty queens—is organized. One of the
few people of Balian ever to fly on an airplane, Kidlat is suddenly the town
hero.
His first views of the West are just as he
might have imagined as he is awed by walkways that move people forward without their
walking, doors that open automatically, and bridges, bridges everywhere he
looks! Just as the director had created a kind of travelogue in the Philippines
countryside, so now does he continue to film Paris: only the Paris he shows us,
from Kidlat’s perspective, is quite the opposite of what we know as the stately
tourist city. Everywhere he goes, things are crumbling; rooms are over- jammed
with junk; buildings are scaffold, with pylons jutting up like ugly eyesores
which block out the view of the great cathedrals and Eiffel Tower. The American,
it turns out, is chewing-gum magnate, and immediately puts Kidlat to work
filling his ugly gum dispensers placed at tourist destinations (including
cemeteries) throughout the city. Kidlat’s Paris, in short, is the polar
opposite of the glamorous city of lights depicted in most films.
In his off hours, the likeable Kidlat
seeks out the friendship, just as he had back in Balian, of local workers,
learning snippets of French and befriending these figures by transporting them
about the city in his jitney. He becomes particularly close with an egg seller
(each egg containing two yolks) named Lola. Lola and her compatriots work at
small carts parked by a mammoth new building project, a supermarket which is
also soon to be fitted with several enormous plastic chimneys, that is also
gradually eating up the space of the fresh-food vendors. Lola tells him of a
dream in which she has been forced to close her stand. Finally, Kidlat begins
to ask a few questions he has failed to perceive back in his unbeknownst Eden
of Balaian. Why displace the beautiful produce of these simple vendors with
lower quality foods sold in a vast department store? If the old chimney’s work,
why replace them with a chimney big enough for 6 people to live in?
Yet Kidlat is still trapped in his “perfumed
nightmare,” and granted a several-day vacation, he heads off to Germany to
visit the home of his beloved Werner Von Braun. There he discovers the
community about to celebrate a festival for which they each year build, by
hand, an onion-shaped dome. The workers complain, however, that this may be
their last year, since factories are now making the same domes out of plastic.
Kidlat still cannot comprehend what he sees as their sentimentality: why would
they prefer the old to the new?
During the celebration a pregnant woman he
has met in the town suddenly goes into labor, and Kidlat saves they day by
taking her, presumably, to the hospital in his still-elegant jitney. Drivng
back to Paris, he feels almost as if the newly-born child, who the woman has
named Kidlat in honor of her savior, looks somewhat like him.
In Paris, he discovers that Lola in no
longer among the remaining vendors. The American, knowing that the nearby
chimneys will soon be belching their smoke in the direction of his castle,
announces that he has sold his chewing-gum enterprise, and is planning to
return to the US where he has purchased a company which manufactures blue
jeans, the logical next step—so he declares—in his rise to become a munitions
and tank manufacturer for the US military. Once more, he promises to take
Kidlat with him, suggesting he’ll be the first of his kind to fly on the
Concorde.
Before the two leave, however, this ugly
American plans one final celebration, inviting some of the world’s leaders, who
have come to Paris for a conference, to his castle.
This is a handmade film, one must
remember, with no budget for actors with makeup and costumes which might allow
them to resemble those dignitaries. Kidlat presents the entire affair somewhat
like a masked pageant of old, as each figure arrives decked out in archaic
clothing one might expect to find in a film studio storeroom, a handmade mask
representing distorted depictions of the celebrities hiding their faces.
Introduced to these grotesque figures, the
normally amicable Kidlat becomes terror-stricken, suddenly feeling that he,
like Alice in Wonderland, is growing smaller and smaller by the moment. In
reaction to his feelings, Kidlat, like his father before him, suddenly begins
to blow up a typhoon, leveling all those before him and destroying the American’s
castle. With seemingly nowhere to go, he escapes into one of the giant
chimneys, closes it tightly, and flies off in what now resembles a Martian
space ship, back to Balian.
The following credits are presented on a
series of letters and postcards, each of them bearing a stamp from a small
country that features one of the US space ships, the last of them, a Philippines
stamp depicting the chimney in which Kidlat has returned, proving the assertion
as he has repeated throughout the film, “I choose my vehicle, and I can cross
any bridge.”
And so too does Kidlat Tahimik prove that
he can create a stunningly profound film by his own means, without the help of
wealthy financers.
Los Angeles,
April 28, 2016
