Slingshot

Directed by Brillante Mendoza

It’s tempting to deem Slingshot’s petty crimes on sweltering shantytown backdrops a Pilipino version of City of God. But where Fernando Meirelles charted the power dynamics within Rio’s favela-bound community of drug dealers and thieves, Brillante Mendoza devotes equal time to the larger forces keeping the populace on the run. These second class citizens of Manila aren’t suppressed so much as pulled and prodded by their ostensible civil and political guardians.

Slingshot opens with Mendoza’s shaky digital camera weaving through dim shantytown alleys while an aspiring local politician warns residents of an imminent police raid. This play for the all-powerful slum vote – the first of many throughout the film – shows that for Manila’s most cash-strapped populations, police and politicians are two sides of the same coin.

The raid also provides swift introductions to Slingshot’s characters, settings and style. Mendoza films his hustlers and thieves’ misfortunes in a jittery mode equally prone to ponderous long takes and flurries of percussive jump cuts. The French New Wave’s influence lurks somewhere in these congested alleys. Though while the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd were re-working film noir, Mendoza is playing with documentary aesthetics and rhetoric.

Color-drained and chopped up as Slingshot is, it preserves a frenetic pace and raw style whereby fiction repeatedly seems overrun by the all-too-real lived conditions of Manila’s poor. Between being chased by cops, harassed by lenders, nagged by relatives and hustled by friends, the few moments of calm in these characters’ lives come as welcome relief for viewers too. However, these interludes also tend to be sponsored by politicians looking to ingratiate themselves with poor young voters.

The insidious tactics used by Slingshot’s public office hopefuls – posting bail, handing out cash, sponsoring religious celebrations – recall the improvised Replacement Party campaigning in Robert Altman’s Nashville. The methods are more exploitative, but the sense of being followed by an unshakable force is similar. In Slingshot’s immersive urban geography, blind alley corners are equally liable to harbor a waiting thief, a raiding cop or a pandering politician. Even more impressive, by the film’s end, distinctions between the three come down to nothing more than different wardrobes.

In the interminable run-up to our own election, Slingshot’s extreme campaign measures have the added value of casting American voting season behaviors in a critical light. Where’s the line between responsible politicking and prodding paternalism, and are our candidates as clearly on one side of it as Manila’s hustler-politicians are on the other?

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.