August 06, 2007

Cavite

Anxiety in the Margins

What makes bad dreams bad? Perhaps it's the feeling of a total lack of control – the all-out eruption of our anxieties, otherwise tucked away in our subconscious during waking hours, into full-blown fantasies of personal peril. There’s lucid dreaming, after all, but who ever heard of lucid nightmares?

If it’s the lack of control that makes for a bad dream, life for Adam, Cavite’s principal character, is a waking nightmare. A San Diego security guard working the graveyard shift, Adams’s nearly half dead, wandering through the dark, silent and bored. His girlfriend is pregnant with his child, a child she doesn’t want, no matter how much he insists he could make it work – by working more: he says he’ll take two jobs if he has to.

Things get worse. Adam’s father has just died, so its off to the Philippines for the funeral – Adam was born there, though it’s clear he’s lived in the States most of his life. Then the real kicker-to-the-gut: just upon arrival in the Philipines, a cell phone rings in his bag, he answers it: Abu Sayyaf terrorists have kidnapped Adam’s mother and sister and will kill them if he does not do exactly what they say. His anxieties reach fever pitch as he’s ordered this way and that, to this package and that package, not knowing what the consequences of his actions might be.

People and place are central to Cavite; so much so, it may be the first neo-realist action movie. Like any film of post-war Italy, people crowd the busy streets, casting their glances towards the camera; likely they’re spying the film’s production, but it’s as if they are eyeing Adam himself, heightening the atmosphere of fear and paranoia. But not everything feels so totally estranged. Brief titles flash the location as Adam travels from place to place; even the film’s title is taken from the province it was filmed in.

For all the realism, Cavite’s plot is the stuff of any blockbuster thriller. I read somewhere that the filmmaker’s themselves cite Speed as an influence. Sometimes this harms the film: the villain at times is too sinister, too bad for action-movie plot’s sake, and the quick pace of the film leaves poverty as a too-quick justification for the bad guy’s villainy.

But Cavite is ultimately more honest about itself than any major action movie can afford to be. Action movies are usually about catharsis: the anxieties of predominantly male viewers are forgotten as they live out their battle fantasies through the exploits of the action movie protagonist. Cavite isn't about exploits: it’s about the exploited, the contradictions and rifts among the exploited, and the anger, fear, anxieties that erupt from those rifts.

Cavite is a film about being pinned between the world’s margins. As a security guard, Adam’s less than a cop, but slightly more than working poor: essentially the working class patrolling the working class in the interest of the employing class. As a Filipino American, Adam’s stuck between Global South and Global North; in the US he’s poor, but in the Philippines, he’s richer than any one he encounters in the squatter camps he wanders through; the anonymous voice on the cell-phone makes constant note of the contrast. And as a Muslim, Adam’s pinched between the extremism of Abu Sayyaf and the Islamophobia of his adopted country.

These rifts are the origins of Adam’s masculine anxieties, and they are front and center, not hidden. Adam's worried enough about his girlfriend thinking he's not capable of being a good father; The angry voice on Adam’s cell incessantly insults Adam’s manhood. He’s even led to a large cock-fighting arena and beaten up in the bathroom by two large men, a metaphor for masculine angst if there ever was one.

In fact, the pains of modern mandhood and capitalism are so up front, the film makes an interesting – if roundabout – contrast with Fight Club. In both films, the stresses of modern-day capitalism induce crises of masculinity in the main characters; both Jack and Adam’s anxieties reach such a fever pitch that their subconscious minds go bonkers, causing their lives to becoming living nightmares.

In Fight Club vesus Cavite, my money's on Cavite – despite it's having a budget several millions of dollars lower (it was filmed by two guys, Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon, with a digital camera). Not only does Fight Club have a levity that lets you forget it’s a nightmare; the thesis of the film hinges on whether you’re willing to believe capitalism really emasculates middle-class men rather than constitutes their life-force. Cavite, on the other hand, concerns itself with anxieties that are very real, not fantasy.

In a way, we do have control over our worst nightmares. We have control to the extent that the substance of our dreams find is found in this world, in society – in its politics, economics, gender, all of it. Dreams come true, but often the reverse is true, too: truth is in dreams. In other words, we are the stuff dreams are made of. “Fueled by guilt, sorrow, and above all, visceral alienation, Cavite is a nightmare vision of an expatriate's homecoming,” reads Dennis Lim’s review for the Village Voice. Cavite’s tale is certainly a nightmare, but it highlights the real world sources of all our bad dreams. If there ever was a lucid nightmare, Cavite is it.