Patrick Flores
The dogged and peripatetic camera of Raymundo Ribay Gutierrez signifies, anticipates, and sustains a pursuit. It is a pursuit of a locale: dense, thicket-like, nearly a mangrove of social tides and unruly species in a quarter in the sprawling metropolis of Manila. But while the frenzy of cinematic work pervades the atmosphere, the lens also incipiently dwells on a domestic sphere: a man, a woman, and their daughter. It is a tight study of a situation of intense emotional and physical violence. Dante (Kristoffer King) has time and again beaten his partner Joy (Max Eigenmann). When in one of these hostile episodes, their daughter Angel (Jordhen Suan) is hurt, Joy goes public. At this existential instance, what do we make of the woman? Avenger, feminist, sufferer? The pursuit shifts from locale to procedure.
In the course of the routine that takes Joy through the methods and offices of the village unit, the police, and the courts, the world of Dante incrementally takes shape with cues of his involvement in a criminal ecology. Is he a petty accessory, a drunken thug, or a conduit of a larger operation? As in most networks of this sort in the Philippines, government personnel are in one way or another complicit and more or less drugs are part of the mix. Once this aspect is teased out from the fabric of the film, the extensive kinship unravels, marked by filial, if not feudal, ties, and the constellation of crime and all-over abuse. One may be tempted to bring in the word “systemic” to describe the condition in the milieu in the sense that it is “symptomatic.” This is a hermeneutic abstraction that is fleshed out by an intriguingly bare narrative and an exceptionally sensitive photography that evokes the details of locus as well as of affect. That the contentious predicament of persistent crime informs the film creates this engaging continuum between the aforesaid abstraction and the sensuous particularity of the story around a couple gripped in harrowing everyday violence, which arises from age-old patriarchy and present-day criminal habitus. From this welter comes a moment of decision. The woman finally subjects the man to the legal system, which complicates the notion of the systemic earlier posited. And at this point, the interpellations of the structure and process underlying the state apparatus fray at the seams, hinting at the possibility of, by turns, justice and corruption. The film rightly refuses to resolve this vital ambiguity by converting it to an intelligible juridical form or moral judgement, and instead risks a leap into a void. On the eve of the verdict, the man dies: Was he murdered? By whom? The suspicion oscillates between the woman and the cabal of lurking criminals of the vicinity. Either would have had the motive to rub him out. After all, the verdict would free him.
Verdict keeps the rhythm of suspense tightly, without containing it in the requisites of the genre of the neo-noir psycho-drama thriller, which is not altogether suppressed either. When it migrates to the courtroom, the scenography dilates to take in a dysfunctional bureaucracy and possibly the compromised integrity of jurisprudence itself. More granularly, it alludes to the fundamental asymmetry inhering in the law, which is oftentimes interpreted within uncritical empiricist premises and oblivious of the trauma of woman and child. This is where the “verdict” is complicated, because if it solely rests on “evidence,” justice may well elude the aggrieved, given the machinations of witnesses and lawyers and the mannerisms or affectations of due process and equal protection. In light of this structural constraint, another verdict tends to surface, a swift and unerring one that terminates a seemingly irremediable recidivist, or a generic fall guy.
The film deftly coordinates its scenario and the ways to render it intimately but with calibrated inclinations towards the various entry points into the socius, from home to street to court, and so on. It, therefore, decisively alternates between porosity and constriction so that it does not lapse into a kind of realism that is mainly shaped by the grit of context. That said, Verdict is able to index the condition that makes it possible mainly through an anecdotal approach that cites documentary and ethnographic devices. It is when it dramatizes human interaction, as in when the daughter is queried by the lawyers, that it loses its filmic language, prompting us to ask if action is at all possible within this aesthetic in the absence of agitation. Paradoxically, it is attentive to the cogent inflections of performance in which the ensemble of performers is not animated by a plot to advance but is instead moved by the contingencies to gesture towards a disposition and ensure decidability. Surely, this tendency verges either on the stereotype or the deus ex machina. The film bravely takes the chance and does not resist the temptation.
For offering a crucible of an affliction so cruel to women and merciless to their hapless children, Verdict enhances the valence of the investigation into internal abuse, or at least speculates on the cognitive mapping of how gender violence and the law converge and drastically reorganize the family. It is a tribute to the director and his collaborators, as well as to Kristoffer King and Max Eigenmann, for nuancing violence with the penumbra, if not the impossibility, of justice. It is keenly wrought, converting verité-like technique into a “structure of feeling” so that the house of law, of crime, and of violence is finally haunted by the death of the aggressor who absorbs substantial opprobrium. Is he a victim, a perpetrator, an accused? However cast, he is at once collateral and casualty, and the film rigorously examines the body of evidence even as it leaves the options open to the internecine though nebulous world of the extra-judicial. This is the abstraction that the cinema of Gutierrez may want to materialize.
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.