Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay

Trying to provide a video sampler today of the major award-winners at Cannes, but it hasn’t been easy finding a representative clip from Kinatay which earned Best Director honors for Brillante Mendoza. I wondered how this video could possibly have much appeal as a promo, until I read that much of the movie is just like what we see here. Shaky night shots of a road trip en route to a gruesomely violent destination. (“Kinintay” means “slaughtered” or “butchered.”)

When it comes to accurately predicting awards these past few years, Roger Ebert has a track record pitted with potholes, but his brutal dismissal of Kinatay is rough enough to warrant a quote:

Here is a film that forces me to apologize to Vincent Gallo for calling “The Brown Bunny” the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival… You mark my words. There will be critics who fancy themselves theoreticians, who will defend this unbearable experience, and lecture those plebians like me who missed the whole Idea. I will remain serene while my ignorance is excoriated. I am a human being with relatively reasonable tastes. And in that role, not in the role of film critic, I declare that there may not be ten people in the world who will buy a ticket to this movie and feel the money was well spent.

Some might respond that not every movie can be as good as Knowing, but Ebert is not alone in his revulsion. I’d be happy to excerpt something from a favorable review for Kinatay — if I could find one. The New York Times says it’s “a grisly, widely loathed shocker.” The Star reports on the crowd’s reaction at the awards ceremony:

Many of the winners last night at the Palais des Festivals came right out of left field, and were greeted with boos and catcalls by film critics watching the ceremony via closed-circuit TV in the adjoining Debussy Theatre…

This reaction was nothing, though, compared to the gasps of outrage that greeted the awarding of the Best Director prize to Filipino helmer Brillante Mendoza for Kinatay, a horrific drama about a man who rapes, murders and dismembers a young prostitute.

Sometimes we feel envious that Cannes transpires and concludes with so many movies none of has seen and therefore cannot rationally judge or root for. But maybe we should be thankful that we don’t have much emotional investment in whatever more beautiful films we might have been hoping would win instead of the often bizarre selections made by the jury.