Perfumed Nightmare

Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik calls Perfumed Nightmare his "magic carpet", as over the last 30 years, his first film is still bringing him to countries and film festivals around the world, reintroducing the film to new audiences and film students when it's screened in universities. An unconventional film, it is quite hard to believe that this monumental effort is a first film, having captured life in the village, before going overseas to Paris and Munich for the latter half.

Kidlat Tahimik stars as himself, in a semi-autobiographical way, that traces the life of a village boy, and his journey to the outside world. It's like a coming of age story with relevance to today still, with the impact of globalization more keenly felt as the modern world feels more like a global village, and with the almost inevitable assertion and influence of dominant popular cultures over traditional values.

Kidlat (the movie character) is a Jeepney driver, who is an aeronautical buff, having hailing himself as President of the Werner Von Braun club in his village of Balian. A fan of the Voice of America radio show, he gets offered to go to Paris by an American on a botched jamboree (which was then, and still is now, a very keen inclusion of the said country's foreign policy style), to work in the gumball vending machine business. That basically forms the gist of the outline as imagined by Kidlat the filmmaker, who worked on this without a prepared script.

The opening shot where a vehicle crosses to and from a narrow bridge, set the mood of the film - fun, eccentric, unpredictable, almost a mirror of Kidlat's character. Shot on Super 8, the special effects that he had included, and the various narrative techniques incorporated into the movie, makes you marvel at the rather innovative ways a filmmaker with a shoestring budget, gets his story told. I liked very much the fantastical sequences he had put in to tell the back story of his father, as well as the very horrific, almost documentary like style of capturing a village circumcision ritual, which must be seen to be believed, how it will actually would make you reel and feel pain (and you thought the Hard Candy one was bad enough).

There is no doubt that his passion and exuberance shone through this charming, imaginative film, which won him the International Critics Award at the 1977 Berlinale Forum of New Cinema. For those who missed the screening tonight (on 16mm film projection), you can cross your fingers as to a DVD release, possibly as early as next year!

My review was written in December 1980 after a screening in Greenwich Village: Kidlat Tahimik's first film, "The Perfumed Nightmare", is an amateur effort, offering very slim commercial returns in its domestic release via Francis Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. The filmmaker's fashionable anti-American and anti-technological progress sentiments could whip up some fringe following.

Shot silent in 8mm, pic relies heavily on added soundtrack (including star-director's English-language first-person narration and comical radio broadcasts in English) for both narrative and gags. Tahimik plays himself, a jitney-driver in the small Filipino town of Balian who idolizes America and especially immigrant Werner von Braun and the NASA program. His father was killed for "trespassing" by an American sentry and he keeps as a totem a horse carved by his mother from his father's rifle butt. He has a friend, with a prominent butterfly tattoo on his chest, who offers him homespun traditional philosophy, but spurred on by American radio broadcasts, Tahimik is anxious to reach the paradise of America.

A young American businessman takes him to Paris where Tahimik services the man's chain of street gumball machines. A side trip to Bavaria has him befriending a pregnant woman who names her baby after him. Returning to Paris he comes to reject the advanced technology which has growing supermarkets crowding out of business a kindly woman street peddler he had known. In an unconvincingly militant finale, he resigns his presidency of the von Braun fan club and rejects an opportunity to travel via Concorde to the U. S., instead fantasizing his own space trip in one of the new plastic Parisian chimneys being erected nearby.

Tahimik's rejection of American technology and influence is a banal theme familiar from many Third World filmmakers. Extremely poor technical quality of his blown-up to 16mm home movie footage makes watching "The Perfumed Nightmare" a chore. It is possible to identify with his theme of turning inward and becoming self-reliant, but making NASA the whipping boy for U. S.domination of the economies and consciousness of other peoples of the world is both facile and misleading. Typical of Tahimik's sophomoric approach is that two benign institutions of international goodwill, the Boy Scouts and topical stamp collecting, are recurring targets of his satire.

What's wrong with "The Perfumed Nightmare" conceptually is evident in the awfully "cute" end-credits sequence: credits cards are adorned with space stamps from Sharjah, Panama, Paraguay and sundry other topical-specializing nations of yore, culminating in a hand-drawn mythical Filipino stamp picturing Tahimik on his space chimney. As with other issues raised (and dealt with on a gag level) in the pic, corrupt and exploitative stamp-issuing policies are a controversial and complex problem for philatelists, but mere fodder for laughs in this painfully naive film.

Okay, is that overselling it? Perfumed Nightmare blew away all my expectations. Understandably, there's not a lot of expectations for Filipino cinema, and there's not a lot of expectations for independent film anymore (today, independent is anybody without studio money, and some with, making any kind of movie). But this film was a learning experience for me.

Instead of another gritty soap opera, the filmmaker presents a story about a guy from a one-bridge town who dreams of becoming an American astronaut. Instead of trying to ape a Hollywood film, he took advantage of his technical limitations: there's no dolly shots or zooms, and the audio track's perpetually out of sync. So, instead of a strictly linear narrative, Perfumed Nightmare unfolds like the browsing of a scrapbook, while the director narrates. It helps that even the disintegrating scenery is photographed beautifully, and the narration is sharp and succinctly funny. I'm still chewing on the symbolism and politics of the film, but it's heartening that the film recognizes the contradictions of the situation. And it's heartening to see tricks from directors like Spike Lee, Sodebergh, and Von Trier in a film made over twenty years prior (apparently, this film's director knew Herzog). Of course, that may be a personal bias (I'm half-Pinoy and an aspiring filmmaker). But mostly, it's nice to see a film that could surprise me every couple of minutes. It's not a perfect film, but it's one I'll never forget.

Tahimik is the delightful narrator of the story of his dream to become the first Phillipino in outer space. With elements of ethnography, history, biography and travelog this story is assembled from home-movie quality footage and radio snippets (plus Tahimik's voice-over) with great imagination and tenderness. From bamboo village to modern Paris and back, this a sweet/sad tale of clashing with the modern world, and the need for home.

There are a precious few directors who are willing to jump heedlessly off into the abyss of their own imagination for the sake of artistic expression. Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of them. The Francis Ford Coppola who made "Apocalypse Now" is another. Kidlat Tahimik, director of "The Perfumed Nightmare" is one more. What is most remarkable is that he produced a film using scant resources but containing imagery to which most big-budget Hollywood visuals can barely compare.

Filled with dreams, tangents, flashbacks, breathtaking religious imagery, Tahimik's ironic Mark Twain-esque voice-overs, and bizarre visual ideations using mixed film-stocks and color schemes, the storyline follows a young primitive Filipino village jeep-driver and his journey from progressive worshiper of all things Western to dispirited critic of the West after travelling to Europe. I mention Jodorowsky here because his films are the only ones I can compare this one to: both are like pure symbolic representations of the unconscious mind.

Unfortunately, now for the bad news: the film is an unfocused anti-globalization tract. Actually, maybe it's just an anti-technological tract, I'm not sure. What I do know is that the movie does a brilliant job of portraying life - its sights, music, sounds, and small rituals - in a quiet Philippines village. This first act alone would make one of the greatest short films ever made. But as the second half rolls around and Tahimik moves to France, becoming appalled by Western technological prowess (a set of very large garbage incinerators being erected particularly irks him), the simplistic message of the movie began to irritate me. Are we as the audience supposed to view Tahimik's village as an unsullied Garden of Eden and the modern west as the First Circle of Hell? Because that is what he seems to be saying. Not only is Tahimik (correctly) against the Western colonial expansionism which made his country the property of both France and then the U.S., but he also dislikes the progressive technology of the West. Why?

What is most ironic is that Tahimik himself (his real name is Eric De Guia) had an advanced degree from the Wharton School of Business and worked as a research consultant to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - an organization committed to spreading Western technology to lesser-developed countries - in Paris for 4 years before making this movie. This makes me think that the movie is less a prophetic statement about the dangers of all forms of colonialism than a personal statement against the West made by a particularly disgruntled individual. The movie is all sound and fury, in the end signifying nothing. Why is globalization a target of derision the world over? It is such a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon that protesters are forced to make small, insignificant gestures against it (smashing the windows of a McDonalds) in order to make any kind of statement against it. It is similar to railing against the underground geological forces causing earthquakes - what is the point?

Great film-making skill is rare, and it is on display here in great splendor (Oliver Stone must have been inspired in his use of mixed-film stocks for "JFK" after watching this film), but it is only effective when its message is sound. If one discounted the hollowness of the message, this would be an unheralded masterpiece of independent world cinema, but one cannot separate the message from the messenger.