Re-viewing "Tatarin"

Watched Tatarin on PBO yesterday evening and waited patiently for my attention to flag--it didn't, and I saw it all the way through the end. I saw it on the big screen many Christmases ago. This time around I felt that I was more appreciative of it. I enjoyed the Fitzgeraldesque attempt to tell a fantasy story in a period setting. I saw absolutely no pretensions in the making of the movie; if there was any pretension at all, it was in the third-generation Spanish posturing that regularly peppered the dialogue, which was the shortcoming not of the screenplay writer but of the original author, National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin, whose work the movie was based on.

I recall that Tatarin was a critical flop in its time, and no one could tell exactly why. No one was willing to articulate that: 1) a movie like that should never be pushed into a festival that caters mainly to non-intellectuals; 2) the production chose, unfortunately, the most immature work of Nick Joaquin as material, a Tennessee Williams hodgepodge of characters and situations from The Glass Menagerie, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Period of Adjustment. When I was a sophomore college student, my drama mentor Rolando S. Tinio frequently advised me after I wrote my one-act play "K-31," "Tony, never write a play about sex, about characters who are preoccupied with sex and sexuality, or who have sexual hang-ups. It will always be an embarrassing work." Indeed, I thought that the movie's director was remiss in having his bacchantes fully clothed and writhing at the peak of their orgasms; he might have been better off showing them in the act of tearing off their robes, panning the camera to locate them off-screen, and simply filming their shadows. The choreography, after all, was too mannered for my comfort. And, in "normal" scenes, the performers were compelled to spout dialogue that was more appropriately kept within their minds, and express in acting what should have remained within their inner selves.

Poetic realism works onstage with colored and unusual sources of lighting, but it is very alienating when transferred to the screen.

The only other non-sequiturs I noted are:

--The use of John the Baptist as a principal figure in the fictional ritual, which is theologically wrong. It is speculated that John the Baptist was an Essene, that he kept the company mainly of males, and would have been averse to being surrounded with women giving vent to their primal urges.

--Every period director's Waterloo: shooting a period story in an actual, period house and thereby restricting camera movement within the limited space of that house. Frankly, one has to construct a "period" house in order to shoot a movie in it, i.e., all of the walls should be capable of being disassembled for proper camera movement; otherwise the shots will be composed merely for convenience and from the most unconvincing angles. Such a movie would also become a mere visual derivative of a typical and predictable Noli me tangere.

--Showcasing other people's antiques that look like they were begged for, stolen, or borrowed, and mixing them with fake pieces. Those biombos, for example, look like they were salvaged from a Rustan's clearance sale of non-moving items; the only time I ever see such unenlightened eclecticism is inside Opus Dei parlors--which might suggest that there is no salvation for decorators with very bad taste, no matter what their religion happens to be.

--Giving in to the temptation to show unnecessary architectural details (painted ceilings, winding staircases, archways). I saw none of that, for instance, of Tara in Gone With the Wind; the camera showed only what it had to show. Fifty years from now, would any director make a movie set in a condominium in the 2000s and bother to focus on architectural details?

All in all, though, I loved watching the movie once again. I hope it has occurred to the producer that it is possible to take the final cut as is and revamp the story, using a totally different plot and dialogue, to come up with a stunning new movie.