BAHAY BATA
AT THIS POINT in our movie-going life, one crucial gauge for us if a movie is good or not is if it succeeds in holding our interest. If our mind loses focus and starts wandering to other thoughts, and worse, if we get bored and can’t prevent ourself from falling asleep, then there’s something wrong in the film we’re watching. In the Cinemalaya, these are the sleep-inducing films that took us to Slumberland: “Bahay Bata”, “Cuchera”, “Amok”, “Isda”, “Busong”, “Bisperas” and “Teoriya”.
“Bahay Bata” by Director Ed Roy has a good premise. Shot at the government maternity hospital, Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial at Lope de Vega in Sta. Cruz, it shows the hazards of giving birth for free at an overcrowded charity hospital where two patients share narrow beds with their babies. Set on Christmas eve (just like “Bisperas”), there is an attempt to introduce some characters we can relate to, like Diana Zubiri as a nurse impregnated by her married boyfriend (Yul Zervo in one scene) and and older nurse who slaps an oppressive doctor, but they’re so underwritten we really can’t sympathize with them. What this movie prominently features is what we call the Lakad School of Acting so very common in indie films where characters are shown walking endlessly through alleys and corridors while the shaky camera follows them. Here, Diana also walks endlessly with a “nagugulumihanan” look on her face etched vividly, the most demanding task required from her. If the director simply wanted us to see the deplorable conditions in the hospital, then he should just have made a documentary. We’re told the Lakad School of Acting is needed to indicate real time in indie films. But this makes film watching so boring. If filmmakers would resort to them all the time, then we prefer to just have fake time in the movies we see. In “Bahay Bata”, the pacing is so funereally slow they could have just shot it in a funeral parlor and not in a hospital.
