ANG PINAKAMAGANDANG HAYOP SA BALAT NG LUPA And The Ethos Of Moral Order

Ang Pinakamagandang Hayop Sa Balat Ng Lupa

While Ishmael Bernal has made his melodramatic films self-reflexive of the genre and Lino Brocka has politicized the family as national melodramas, Celso Ad Castillo has turned to the classical notion of a pure melodrama. In this turn, the filmic world represents the ethos of a self-contained, morally just society. The problem is never social, it is the individuals who do not exercise their moral choices. As the narrative progresses, Castillo invents details that unfold a personality subjected to pressure from her immediate environment and the social milieu. He goes minimalist in giving a rural Filipino treatment to his story. Isabel (Gloria Diaz), embodies the tragic figure of Castillo's melodrama. She is counterposed with Saling (Elizabeth Oropesa), ruthless and pessimistic throughout the film. In a dramatic moment, Saling confronts Isabel about Simon (Vic Vargas). The camera does a subjective shot of Isabel looking at the women staring back at her. While suggesting her guilt, she implicates the women looking at her. This shot, I think is crucial in Castillo's working of the melodrama. In Ang Pinakamagandang Hayop Sa Balat Ng Lupa (Gemini Films International), the viewer is implicated in the moral filmic world. The subjective shot of the women looking at Isabel also represents the subject-position of the viewer. Thus, the viewer is woven into the filmic world, where emotions are drawn into the ethos of the moral order.

Through this manipulation of a system of gazing, Isabel is codified as the tragic figure of the moral order. What is problematic about Castillo's film is the use of women as contrapuntal to the ideal of the heroine. Saling's hatred is pivotal to realize Isabel's own flaw to neither transcend nor accept her condition. Women represent both the ideal and bane of the moral order. The melodrama that gets reworked is of a faulty kind. In a quest for a pure affect of melodramatic ethos, the film passes on to the viewer the ethos of the moral order, neither adequately positioned historically nor contextually, the film becomes a media for channeling a perceived notion of a perceived ethos. However, even ethos has its historical contexts. The desire for pure ethos and aesthetics has a long history in formalism. It thinks of art as an autonomous sphere, where the senses can disappear in emotive and intellectual bliss. Isabel and Simon are Castillo's most sympathetic principal characters, contrasting types that have been given flesh and blood by Gloria Diaz and Vic Vargas. The woman, vulnerable and the man impulsive. The straight-forward plot is formulaic but Castillo's sense of irony refuses the temptations of sentimentality, giving the film a certain solidity through secondary characters played by Elizabeth Oropesa and Lito Anzures as Liloy, the village idiot. Castillo's reworking of the melodrama offers little of what we already know. While being more competently filmed, Ang Pinakamagandang Hayop Sa Balat Ng Lupa provides new tactics in the perception of realities, much so with newer present-day realities.

Directed By: Celso Ad Castillo
Screenplay By: Rafael Ma. Guererro And Iskho Lopez
Cinematography By: Ricardo Remias
Music By: Ernani Cuenco
Edited By: Augusto Salvador
Produced By: Gemini Films International
Release Date: October 26, 1974