CLIMAX... Intimate And Familiar

Climax

The heart of the film's matter is dark because it is so intimate and familiar. One's hatred for kin is so intimate and almost unreasonable, it is corrupt and consuming. Lolita (Barbara Benitez), a young woman of the countryside serves her mother Mercedes (Daria Ramirez) and family well. But her sister, Emma (Anna Marie Gutierrez) cannot seem to come to terms with their mother's contentment. Climax (Victory Films, Inc.) deepens this commonplace theme to form complex entanglements, the elder daughter's estrangement from the mother whose lover raped the former. Emma's romance with Ruben (Patrick dela Rosa) and Mercedes' rage when she chances on Manuel's (Ruel Vernal) act of raping her daughter. For his part, director Anthony Taylor visualizes the premise with sensitive motifs, but in the end, Climax proves to be a sad film, if only because it fails to extricate Emma from the clutches of patriarchal compliance as she succumbs to the dicta of heterosexist tradition and stay with Ruben. We know full well that true love is some sort of a myth, but whatever happened to the radical potential of a kind of love that can conquer and not simply settle? One cannot fault Emma for making it clear that a woman's sexual awakening is political as it is personal. The accountability of her decision to fall in love, to make others fall in love, to consummate desire and to harness desirability is a moral one because it strikes at the core of certain values which prop up conditions of betrayal and limits of forgiveness. But what the film misses is the very practice that renders this possible.

One cannot simply praise a film for delving into a significant theme, albeit failing to ferret its truth out. One has to probe the mode of production of sexuality not only textually but also in terms of a particular political economy that regulates certain ideals. The exploitation of Anna Marie Gutierrez and Barbara Benitez as bold stars who has to be led to the rough of the genre and industrial perversities to lap up the staple fodder of obscenity, undermines the message of the film about the accountability of sexuality as an experience that refuses and wounds humanity, at the same time that it also unleashes possibilities. All this comes down to the film's moral world of Emma and Lolita's milieu which to a crucial extent exoticizes our country, not really as a pristine and idyllic essence but as a libidinal clearing of uninhibited sexuality. While we do not see the corruption affecting the rural locus, this mode of exotification nevertheless peddles and rapes both the territory of the probinsiya as a setting for sex and concomitantly the women portraying Emma and Lolita, who bare their bodies gratuitously just to make a point that purports to fight for their skin. If there is something pornographic here it is that. It is not so much the overdrawn sex scenes or the unnecessary closing of the film. It is the legerdemain that maligns the potential of the film as discourse on sexuality.

Directed By: Anthony Taylor
Screenplay: F.C. Gargantilla
Cinematographer: Gener Buenaseda
Musical Director: Boy Alcaide
Film Editor: Ernesto Jacinto
Production Designer: Edel Templonuevo
Produced By: Victory Films, Inc.
Release Date: July 18, 1985