Tessa Maria Guazon
The final scene in Eduardo Roy, Jr.’s Fuccbois (2019) perturbingly captured ill-fated Mico Reyes (Kokoy de Santos) and Ace Policarpio (Royce Cabrera) in a thicket; faces bloodied and bodies exhausted by a grueling escape from a local politician’s bodyguard. A call punctured their mounting terror and dread: it was from their agent Mother Dan asking whether they were on their way home. She confirmed Mico’s forthcoming shoot for a television series. The buzz and hum of forest life shrouded the nervous staccato of their breathing. The vastness surrounding them was a trap, as were the borders of their phone screens, the edges of a gay bar stage, the doors to the rooms of a vacation house, and the island that can only be reached or escaped from by boat. They were ensnared by various spaces where they gambled on their youth and risked their lives.
The moment Mico answered the call with combined desperation and relief made for a powerful and moving close. It led us to an ominous and invisible end. This disturbing snarl of emotions marks many of Roy’s films: he depicts his characters wrangling with them while enjoining viewers to partake of their inner struggle and to vacillate along. Quite often, these characters fall prey to the sinister machinations by those more powerful than them. Fuccbois’s strength is buttressed by this structure and the easy rapport between actors Royce Cabrera and Kokoy de Santos. The film’s opening frame cohered seamlessly with the final scene: all else in between subtly articulated the profuse confusion of its world. The narrative pivoted around a botched game of attempting to delete a sex video and getting back newly acquired passports. Cues pertaining to a ruinous end were dispersed in the film’s early scenes: the persistent phone calls, the threatening messages, and a recently concluded local elections. The fumbling scenes the morning after the murder and the choice of actor to portray Brithanygaile’s corpulence and comic greed are decidedly its weakest attributes yet overall, Fuccbois is tightly narrated, accurately placed, and unusually jarring.
We met Mico and Ace in carefree glory at the beginning of the film. Deftly doubled, they appeared on Facebook Live, cast from the narrow screen of a mobile phone which was transposed to a film frame. They easily pass as brothers, even lovers. We were placed as one of their social media followers, who comprise a modest number. Ace is purported to have 25,000 Facebook followers. They greeted us, indulged our requests and tickled us with their antics. We wondered whether they were lovers, but true to their game of tease and play they let the answer slide. They ended the live cast posing together with ‘brothers’ in their boarding house room. They playfully tagged the pose ‘dalagang Pilipina’ (Filipina maiden who is presumed to be a modest virgin). They were hemmed in by the narrow screen of a mobile phone, quite similar to how Ace and Mico would be later penned in by the vastness of an impenetrable forest. The shot from inside an SUV of their escape from Brithanygaile’s bodyguard, echoed the cat-and-mouse game that plagued their lives.
Mico and Ace’s entrapment did not begin with the murder of their gay politician patron. It was intimated in the multiple screens of the film (the Facebook live feed that was the opening scene); the paradoxical contrasts between the names of places where they performed and paraded their bodies (Club Mankind for the competition Mr. Galaxy Philippines); and the glamour and pageantry of their public lives against the tangled confusion of their private selves (the rumpled covers of their mattresses on the bedroom floor of their boarding house; the necessity of bathing together in a small, cramped toilet; of borrowing each other’s shirts and shoes, and the van where they had to squeeze in for their outings). These tangles of objects and forms chronicled the urgencies of youth. They also laid out the ominous trail of a murder and an ensuing futile escape.
Director Eduardo Roy’s gift lies in revelatory slowness. This manner of framing narrative alongside a well-orchestrated scenography brought to mind his films Bahay Bata (2011) and Quick Change (2013); but that which is probably closest to Fuccbois is Pamilya Ordinaryo (2016). Both Fuccbois and Pamilya Ordinaryo explored the heady atmosphere of youth, its reckless energy and unbridled passions; a halting and interrupting force that risks pain and loss, even death. Roy’s lens acutely records the emotive expressions of desperation; articulating agony, confusion and distress in magnified potency. He fills second by second of filmic time with their protracted unfolding, revealing a possible end we can intuit but never fully predict. It was a stolen baby for Pamilya Ordinaryo and a sex video for Fuccbois. Roy builds up these cases sharply and thoroughly, with a tight grasp of locale, a good choice of leading actors, and a keen reflection on human cruelty and injustice. All along he elucidates and gives form to a precipice or a point of no return.
Everything seemed short-lived in Fuccbois; its main characters’ lives were comparable to an exhilarating roller coaster ride. Their youth was contained in slivers of time: “fleeting, transitory and precarious… [time] in the mode of the festival.”1 Mico Reyes of Bacacay, Bicol and Ace Policarpio of Macabebe, Pampanga lived out fleeting presences on the stage of Club Mankind and before Brithanygaile’s baleful lust, which were similar to carnival grounds. They are pawns in games they will never win. Fuccbois frames the ritual of youth, albeit in a tragic and harrowing manner. Perhaps, the most compelling scene that captured this was Mico and Ace cleaning the portly and bloodied body of their manic and manipulative lover. Here, youth became a “dark, fixed, congealed [space] like stone or crystal”2 or more fittingly, like muck and quicksand that engulfed flesh and being.
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Notes
1. Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.
2. Ibid.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the 30th Annual Circle Citations for Distinguished Achievement in Film for 2019 is now scheduled on the first quarter of 2021 as a virtual event. The list of nominated and winning films can be found here. Reviews for these films, as well as other long-listed films, will be posted this week.