John Bengan
Still from Death of Nintendo (2020) screener.
In Philippine cinema, movies with children or young adults in lead roles usually occasion a journey, in which the child heroes save the planet from ruin. In less spectacular instances, they are saving themselves from the myriad hardships of having been born in this country. They are gifted with vision, telekinesis, time-travelling, courage in the face of self-segmenting ghouls, or charm that transcends the most inane, body-shaming pranks on their adult co-stars.
What sets apart Raya Martin’s Death of Nintendo (2020)—a tactile, affectionate, and deceptively “small” film about four adolescents in the summer of 1991—is that the kids are not merely the means to a phantasm. Martin and writer Valerie Castillo Martinez are keen on sorting out what they feel about the present by reconstructing a particular moment in the past. Despite an occasional scrupulousness, Death of Nintendo proceeds elegantly, unimpaired by its tiny conceits, and is nothing short of remarkable.
Still from Death of Nintendo (2020) screener.
Somewhere in B.F. Homes, Parañaque, a gang of four is having quite a summer. They meet up and play games on a Famicom console, climb mango trees, collect spiders for fighting on twigs, and make decorative Palm Sunday fronds from coconut leaves. In between, they try to survive blackouts, confront bullies, join cliques, and entrap the neighborhood’s mananangal in a graveyard. They brace for the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which leads to one of them deciding to leave for good.
Each of the teenage friends has a song of experience, with varying degrees of fruition. Paolo (Noel Comia), a boy from a well-to-do household and the bashful leader of the pack, pines for Shiara (Elijah Alejo), a girl from the next village. He plans to impress her somehow, even if he’ll have to slay a winged bloodsucker. Gilligan (Jigger Sementilla) badly wants the boys to get circumcised, no less by a herbalist and not in a clinic. Meanwhile, Kachi (John Vincent Servilla) wants to beat the neighborhood bully (an obnoxious kid with a Fil-Am accent played by Cayden Williams) in a game of basketball, if only he had the money, or expensive sneakers, to gamble with. Secretly having feelings for Paolo, Mimaw (Kim Chloe Oquendo) tentatively wants to identify more with other girls. She joins a clique, whose leader is the girl Paolo actually fancies. They introduce her to more feminine implements, such as hip accessories and fragrant water beads that mysteriously multiply.
All four live under the roofs of strong maternal figures left behind by their husbands. Paolo is his mother’s only child, his father out of the picture. Kachi, the constant Player 2 in Paolo’s Nintendo games, lives with a brother and their mother in a neighborhood not too far from Paolo’s village. Siblings Gilligan and Mimaw are also living with only their mother (Nikki Valdez), their father “away” in the States. Danger lurks not just in the mountain ranges, but in the alleys outside of an exclusive village, with older menfolk—the only male presence in the film, apart from Kachi’s shifty but otherwise charming brother Badong (Jude Matthew Servilla)—plotting something sinister.
Barring an empty exercise in period style, Death of Nintendo presents class as a continuum: we enter the film through the window of a middle class boy’s bedroom and transition to the next scene into a poor kid’s house through the door. Paolo’s Nintendo game is interrupted by an earthquake. His mother barges into his room, chastising him for not securing his “emergency pack.” Soon, his nanny tucks him in with a bedtime story about an aswang. After the title card comes up, the frame reopens to a door in another part of town—a house in the outskirts. With headphones on, Kachi cycles to the subdivision to Snow’s “Informer,” a punchy track that signals a ’90s trip, but also just one of many deliberate anachronisms (the Canadian pop song doesn’t come out until 1993).
Still from Death of Nintendo (2020) screener.
Kachi cycles past low-cost housing, the stores selling assorted vegetables and fruits, little children playing in the street, teenagers rehearsing an earthquake drill, until he reaches a village with apartment buildings and two-story homes. When he gets to Paolo’s house, Kachi climbs into his friend’s bedroom window, from which only moments earlier the camera has panned out and cut to Kachi’s front door. In these first agile minutes, the film sets off with shifting perspectives, a sort of Tagalog movie multiplayer mode.
Extending Death of Nintendo’s allure is its fluent evocation of the movies made for young audiences back in the late 80s to early 1990s. Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes’s aswang movies come to mind, and the “Komiks” episode in Halimaw sa Banga, a film in which strange things appear in gaps and spaces: the talons of the wrathful dead could reach out from an heirloom jar, a sword-wielding monster could step out of a comic book’s frame. Between his early work and recent foray into a more popular mode, Martin may have found a calibrated, if not a more interior way of playing with form. Horror-fantasy adventure shifts to domestic coming of age; young adult comedy portends a natural catastrophe flick; folksy rites of male adolescence are undercut by a young woman’s departure for America. But somehow, Death of Nintendo doesn’t implode from all the maneuvers. Thankfully, too, the kids are not held by their collars in order to fulfill the expectations of genre. The metaphor of gaming barely expands to scenarios around the subdivision, which are structured almost episodically, mirroring the levels in a video game.
Still from Death of Nintendo (2020) screener.
Halfway into Death of Nintendo, time becomes denser. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo places the characters within the summer of 1991, and yet it feels as though half of a lifetime has passed after the volcano explodes, which is another trick of childhood: every year feels monumental. Playfully collapsible, too, is the film’s sense of space. The suburbs spill into the slums, then into the cemetery, and later, into the countryside, where Mimaw watches from a bamboo bench an improbable postcard-perfect view of Pinatubo spewing out lava. Forecasting a diasporic future, ash falls on her head like gray snow, while her three newly-cut friends convalesce under mosquito nets. In an interview, Martinez, who has been living in the U.S. since she was a teenager, describes how Pinatubo’s ash made her think of snow.
Still from Death of Nintendo (2020) screener.
The performances, particularly those of the young actors, keep the movie from becoming a pickled, lo-fi version of itself, as is usually the case with some independent films that strain for a certain wistful “mood.” Nikki Valdez plays Maribel, a soft-spoken single mom, with warmth and quiet acquiescence. As Paolo’s fastidious mother Patricia, Agot Isidro comports herself, as usual, with a machinist’s understanding of the role, until she reveals a vulnerability that only a glance or a tilt of the cheek could amply convey. Though enacting a sentimental trope, especially for creatives who grew up with barrio lass nursemaids, supposedly bit player Moi Bien Marcampo makes the most out of Lina. With her large expressive eyes and sturdy jaw, Marcampo has the face of someone who’s always ready to listen, even if she has a lot of work to do. Her Lina is that silent confidante to children who grew up in comfortable but high-strung households. In one scene, Lina tells Paolo a story about the maiden in her hometown who lures men at night, her voice lilting in such a way that we want to hear the rest of the story. In another, Paolo asks his mother about getting circumcised. Without disrupting the tense moment between mother and son, Lina casually flicks her ward’s nose.
All born in the 2000s, Sementilla, Servilla, Comia, and Oquendo embody those “’90s kids” with more fondness than irony. In one memorable scene, Mimaw puts on a floral skirt and pink rollerblades, trying to catch Paolo’s attention. After teasing her, the boys then follow Mimaw into a construction site where they find her braiding coconut leaves for Palm Sunday. While Gilligan and Kachi begin spider-fighting behind them, Paolo tries to apologize. But the clueless boy that he is, he brings up Shiara. Mimaw quietly responds, “Why are you so obsessed with her?” A question that boomerangs! Paolo could only react with his shoulders and eyes.
Still from Death of Nintendo (2020) screener.
Set designers Tessa Tang and Whammy Alcazaren cheekily reconstruct the period. Early in the film, Paolo shows Kachi a new game: Legend of Zelda. Before playing, Kachi blows air onto the cartridge, believing it will prevent the game from freezing up later. The barrage of memorabilia—the Reebok sneakers with a tongue that needs squeezing; a TV set bedecked with Legos, action figures, and plastic dinosaurs; the Super Mario Bros.; the milk caps game “pogs”—nearly tests one’s tolerance for such nudges and winks. But Martin and his designers never settle for period accuracy. The references are not entries to smugly tick on a list, but things these kids hold dearly, some of which are just as, if not more, ubiquitous today. For instance, Paolo’s Air Jordan 1s are more 2021 than 1991. The trendy hair clips, pop songs, and even Aling Nena’s sari-sari store are handpicked from a decade and tossed into one temporal blender, suffusing these young characters with a kind of pop romanticism and, for a supposedly nostalgic movie, optimism. The assortment of objects—these endnotes to the filmmakers’ youth—are gathered in one summer to create a sincere ode to a formative period in point-and-shoot camera colors.
Still from Death of Nintendo (2020) screener.
The inaccuracies in location and the odd treatment of time are all part of the ruse. Death of Nintendo evokes the decade not so much as historical fact, but an emotional and sensorial happening that later influenced a generation. Four years after the EDSA revolt, and one year before Fidel V. Ramos’s “Philippines 2000,” the movie situates us on shifting landscapes. The 1991 eruption of Pinatubo altered the planet’s cooling, the brunt of which we are bearing until now, not to mention the ties between the U.S. and the Philippines.
By appending the kids’ mellowing with these seismic moments, Martin and Martinez seem to be asking if we, at the closing of this century’s second decade, have defeated the big boss yet, or are still fumbling about the early stages. Beyond the decade’s accoutrements, Death of Nintendo gives us a richly layered homage to an era that doesn’t pine for lost time. Not a return to innocence, but a glance at what’s momentarily forgotten. The class tensions, paternal irresponsibility, crimes lurking in the fringes, and the earth trembling under these children’s feet are not so much period specific, but startlingly still ever-present. A clue as to why that is lies in the way the adults are either often distracted, in denial, or simply clueless. Instead of hammering these themes, Death of Nintendo invites us to revel in the group’s gangly but sweet and perceptive quests.
Still from Death of Nintendo (2020) screener.
In the end, it is Mimaw who we truly see grow up among boys too fixated on their games to notice stolen glances from a girl. Her decision to leave for the United States may be hasty, an autobiographical puncture in what until then was an elastic romp in time, but it echoes Death of Nintendo’s haunting last note. As Mimaw prepares to leave, Corazon Aquino’s state of the nation address plays on TV, mentioning the closure of the bases after Pinatubo. From the vantage point of 2020, the address rings hollow, as military exercises have never ceased, and unjust relations between the two nations continue.
Moreover, for a viewer living in a time when Ferdinand Marcos is buried in the “cemetery of heroes,” while his son Ferdinand Jr. himself is gunning for the presidency, hearing Aquino speak makes one feel like we’re stuck in a ghostly perpetual loop. History keeps coming back from the grave and will not stop until it has taken all of us with it. Death of Nintendo wagers that there is plenty of fight left in these kids.