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Wanting a financially better life, Dodong and wife Lolit (Yul Servo and Lolita de Leon) come to Manila, and
stay with Dodong's friend Omar. Omar gets Dodong a job at the lechon shop owned by Nipsie (Elizabeth Oropesa), wife of a wealthy and old Japanese guy.
Soon, the couple are immersed in the worldliness of the big city, and what used to be an innocent marriage is now entangled into an adulterous web. Omar is Nipsie's lover but begins an affair with Lolit as well. Dodong loves Lolit, but Nipsie wants him. Out of an appetite for things material, Omar tries to convince Dodong to accept Nipsie's advances so that all three of them may feast upon her money. Will Omar prevail?
Laman got an "X" rating twice from the MTRCB. When its public showing was also twice postponed due to the "X" rating, we began to wonder what was in it that it couldn't make it through the Board. To save the picture, it was allegedly sanitized and the offending portions were replaced with "reshot" ones. It was finally approved for public showing. When we saw
Laman
on its first day of showing, we did notice that the movie seemed hastily put together. It has editing snags; words and sounds are heard where they shouldn't be; there are scratch marks in some parts which are normally evident only in worn out footage; and while the music is mostly appropriate, it sometimes jars by its volume. The cinematography is also inconsistent—there are some artistically shot (erotic) scenes but there are also many which seem to have been shot with the camera strapped to a jackhammer. The casting is good, and so is the acting, making the characters real and believable, especially Dodong, the only character in
Laman who resists the lure of the flesh.
Laman should be seen not only as a movie but as a symptom of an ailing movie industry. Before we argue over
Laman's
"dirt" or whatever, or whether it may or should be seen at all, we'd like to focus on this question: Is the Philippine movie industry already so impoverished that it can not come up anymore with movies with healthy themes? Notice the proliferation of "R" movies, all for adults and containing sex. Like
Laman—it's about a craving for worldly things, and about two sex-starved wives who find no satisfaction in bed with their own husbands. Naturally, the movie will
reek with sex. And with a sex-starved gay character thrown in, expect the language to be vulgar and the values aired from an aberrant point of view. A movie is
not just entertainment or art—it is a tool for spreading information, wisdom and values, a tool which shapes the mind of the viewer. Thus, in judging the worth of
Laman, CINEMA not only counts the minutes devoted to bed scenes, not only looks out for breast and pubic hair exposure. Rather, CINEMA measures the worth of the
movie both as entertainment art and as an instrument towards enlightening moviegoers. Laman
tries to prove that it has substance, which indeed it has—for there is a lesson therein, that lust for the world and the flesh won't do anyone any good—but perhaps this good message would be clearer if it is not obscured by the gratuitous fornication scenes.
(Date reviewed: September 13, 2002)
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