If it weren't for the French, meeting Filipino director Brijante Mendoza would hardly have gone beyond the narrow circle of festival regulars. Mendoza would probably be the next author of the Asian mainstream with a slant either in thrash, or in "soft porn", or in gay cinema. He might have been dubbed the Polynesian essayist, caught between socialism, exoticism, and melodrama.

But two years in a row, Mendoza's films participated in the Cannes competition. For two years in a row, the international press awarded them fat "failures", resisting the persistent attempts of the Cannes directorate to prove that the barbaric outrage hides values of a different order. The press and the festival went wall to wall. Reaction to Mendoza's first Cannes film "Serbis" (Serbis is often translated as both "Servant" and "Service") it was marked by a slight grimace of disgust. Variety magazine called the film raw, and the director ranked among the upstart one-dayers. When is Mendoza's new work "The Massacre" (Kinatay, which is often translated as "Massacre" or "Brutal Murder")next year? Once again, I was among the candidates for the Palme d'Or, and the wave of indignation reached its peak. Roger Ebert, perhaps the most respected critic in the United States, angrily declared "Massacre" the worst film in the history of the Cannes competition. In response, the Cannes jury decided to award Mendoza the prize for best director, as "Carnage" seemed "one of the most powerful and original films of the program."

All these debates can be mistaken for traditional clashes between "conservatives"and" innovators." Naturally, high-profile statements are only made under the following conditions:-

they add fuel to the fire and cause increased interest in the subject of the dispute. Mendoza's name is at the center of scandals, is elevated to a pedestal and plunged into hell, is included in the radical lists of" new directors " of the decade as the best, then the worst. And Mendoza himself, feeling such attention to his person, as if connects to the game. He always shoots a different movie, making unimaginable genre jumps from film to film, switching from shocking to pastoral, replacing the chaste poetics of everyday life with obscene voyeurism. The accelerated pace at which the director works only inflames his enemies. Mendoza began filming "Serbis" two months before the opening of the Cannes Film Festival. The creation of the "Massacre" took even less time. Mendoza's next film, Lola, was not long in coming. It was presented to the public at the Venice Film Festival hot on the heels of the Cannes triumph. Shooting with a digital camera and a negligibly low budget, not exceeding one hundred thousand dollars, become the decisive argument for the disputing parties. For Mendoza's opponents, such a "precocious product" represents the author's arrogance, profanation of art. A movie in on-line mode is like baking pancakes: the faster the cooking, the more unroasted the result. Mendoza's on-screen "semi-finished products" really need a hardy stomach.

The pro-choice camp, on the contrary, sees in the unfiltered rough edges a solemn glimpse of a new aesthetic and a new language. So the conquerors of the world admired the naive art of savages, seeing in their imperfect crafts the triumph of unprogrammed art.

Still, it's worth admitting that Mendoza's success has a slight taste of understatement. Something remains unclear. Unlike the" directors of the new century " in the person of Mexican Carlos Reygadas, Romanian Christy Puyu, Thai Aphichatphong Virasetakun - authors of extraordinary, original, mysterious - the barbaric invasion of the world cinema elite by Briyante Mendoza does not look so convincing.

The radicalism of the Mendoza language is intoxicating with freshness, but it is somehow elementary to decipher. The focus of the director's actions was seen even by his spiteful critics. Mendoza's eye-popping innovation in language and form is reduced to a depiction of the social decline of the world. The world is living in poverty. Poverty breeds corruption. Corruption devalues human life. Life is turning into hell. But they get used to hell, painfully adapt, and sometimes even extract quiet masochistic joys from it. Social engagement alone is still not enough to elevate yourself to a status close to cult status. If it were only about this, it is unlikely that with such frenzied stubbornness the Cannes "general" Thierry Fremaux would push Mendoza's films into the official competition - immediately into the "ladies", bypassing the parallel program "Special View", where novice authors are still being looked at and are not in a hurry to enroll in the master.

Mendoza is like a link from a dropped contextual bundle. Perhaps by looking back to the past of Filipino cinema, we will find the missing chain. In fact, the answer lies on the surface. Mendoza's arrival in the author's cinema was influenced by two iconic names: Ismael Bernal and Lino Broca. First, Bernal's" Affair " (Relasyon) opened the eyes of a young photographer, artist and advertiser to cinema. Before seeing the film" true as life", Mendoza was fond of Hollywood action movies. His favorite films included "Superman"and" Saturday Night Fever." Bernal, on the other hand, delighted Mendoza with his incorruptible honesty. The everyday history of marital quarrels was so masterfully similar to reality that it made a taste revolution in the mind of the future director. Then Mendoza discovered the films of Lino Broca, and they finally formed his creative credo. "If I become a director," Mendoza admitted in an interview, " I will shoot stories in his vein. It won't be a popcorn movie. Not because I don't love him. Not at all. It's just not the kind of movie I have a heart for."

So Lino Broca is the outstanding auteur of Philippine cinema, the missing link in a broken chain. One of the undisputed authorities of intellectual cinema of the third world. The figure is sacred, standing in the same row with the Brazilian Glauber Rocha, the Indian Mrinal Sen, the Senegalese Semben Ousman... Exposed to the world mainly by French intellectuals in an era of declining political activity in the West, it was hoisted on the shield of the leftist intelligentsia as the enfant terrible of the Marcos regime in the Philippines. Lino Broca became the first Filipino to represent the country at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Brockie's radicalism manifested itself in the fact that he did not disdain to work in the most common, popular genres. He drew inspiration from melodramas, detective stories, and pornographic films (locally called "bombs"), but charged them with the pathos of anger, despair, and protest. These were highly artistic educational paintings that consciously spoke the language of the oppressed. According to Gilles Deleuze, this was "a necessary step - when it is necessary to process this very matter in order to extract from it the elements of a people that does not exist."

Paradoxically, Soviet film studies were silent about the phenomenon of the Filipino revolutionary. At the height of the ideological campaigns of the late Brezhnev era, these paintings were fraught with a disappointing diagnosis. Their honesty was akin to vice. In them, everything happens "as if modern political cinema, unlike classical cinema, was no longer formed around the possibility of evolution and revolution, but around impossibilities, in the spirit of Kafka: the unbearable"¹.

In the eyes of Soviet ideology, this looked like total decadence, contrary to the canons of optimistic art, fighting for a just cause.

For this reason, the name of Lino Broca has not entered the everyday life of book cinephiles, who know the "forbidden" benefits of world cinema indirectly, not through the films themselves, but through their reviews. That is why the phenomenon of Philippine cinema did not conceal anything attractive in itself. For the time being, in our post-Soviet consciousness, this territory remained poorly studied, untouched, and almost unpromising.

In addition, the change of landmarks in world cinema on the crest of the 80s affected. Political cinema has come to naught. The era of postmodernism has arrived. In the Philippines, the Marcos regime fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and soon in the prime of life, Lino Broca was killed in a car accident.

If the second coming of Filipino cinema to the global stage is seen as a kind of generational continuity, then everything falls into place. It is as if Lino Broca has been resurrected in a new guise, revived in another artist and in other times. Already in her first film "The Masseur" Brijante Meng-

^Deleuze 1 J. Kino, Moscow, 2004, p. 539.

dosa infiltrates Lino Broca's territory. Borrows its themes, motives, and manias. In his field of vision are tender young men in the time of manhood, employees of the urban entertainment industry, call boys who are ready to satisfy the whims of lustful customers for false promises. Poverty drives inexperienced provincials to the slums of the city, subjugates their lives to the power of instinct, destroys the will, corrupts and turns them into "living goods". Mendoza doesn't shy away from provocation. As if mindful of Broca's precepts to shoot in the language of the rootless masses, he plays out the action in the spirit of low-grade cinema, smearing sentimental tears and savoring sexual details. The camera pseudo-artistically hovers over the massage partitions and demonstrates the mysteries of male caresses, giving rise to the illusion that the content of the film is limited to that. In contrast to this sexploitative "exoticism" of the urban bottom, Mendoza introduces scenes that capture the life of a real province. Shot with a hand-held camera, artlessly, "under the document", conveying life by surprise, these neorealistic shots reveal the general idea of the film. Better than any agitation, better than any metaphor, these natural episodes represent the absurdity and poetry of the third world, its undisguised poverty and what remains of a people lost in the depths of their misery.

Mendoza's position on this is already radically different from that of Lino Broca. For Broca, the province, as it appears in his famous film "Manila in the Arms of Night", is still an ideal, a tropical paradise with picturesque sunsets, love dates by the ocean, a real "Indian cinema". For Mendoza , this is essentially a documented "dogma": a cramped rural cemetery cluttered with crosses and flagstones, through which the funeral procession moves with difficulty, the tedious inactivity of the day, and improvised rural celebrations culminating in electric illumination.

Broca, though not calling for active action, but in his own way zombified the audience. Manila turned into a documentary platform and was easily likened to Moloch, while outside it reigned the archetype of a fairy tale, which-Broca made it clear-was shamelessly stolen from the public (the people). Despite the fact that Broca's characters were not Pavel Vlasov, their rebellion made the viewer clench their fists in a dark hall.

Mendoza, following in the footsteps of his iconic compatriot, can only state the subsequent degradation of those who never became a people. The hero of Brock's " Manila "was still working on a construction site and refused to sell himself. He still harbored the beginnings of a" class consciousness", albeit a very deep one. In his wanderings around the city, he kept running into workers-

picketers who quite actively inhabited the cinematic landscapes of the 70s. In Mendoza's paintings, the working theme will simply disappear. Only once - in the debut "Masseur" - will the occasional "petrel", a lone road worker, chiseling granite pavement-a homage to the Brock era-appear in the frame. A young hero who, like the vast majority of his contemporaries, will prefer a different evolution of development will pass by him indifferently.

Despite the fact that Brijante Mendoza's films are socially sharpened, they no longer tell about the corruption of power and popular impotence. To a greater extent, they speak about the desire of a person to cling to life at any cost. Mendoza makes stories about a degenerate society that is subject not to law, not to religion, not to moral criteria, but exclusively to the instinct of self-preservation.

To lose yourself is to survive. In the debut" Masseur", the heterosexual hero voluntarily changed his orientation and, according to a mocking happy ending, found his happiness with the perfect lover. In the later "Massacre" this thesis will be described as an existential nightmare, as a murderous dilemma, where the soul, not the body, is at stake. Here a person is on the threshold of absolute dehumanization. Here the hero is not a resigned masochist, but a passive accomplice in a sadistic "dismemberment": his rebellious mind is defeated in a battle with instinct.

Witness the moral collapse of urban landscapes, barely visible in the embrace of night, their unbearable sound symphony-the rumble of the freeway, the sound of rain, the news reports of autoradio. "Unbearable" takes over the frame, rapes the ear, sight, puts in a trance. It is absolutely impossible to avoid it. How impossible it is to resist, to rebel, to call for reason or the axe. The horror of the situation is numbing. Kinatay's social existence sounds like a verdict: the people are not yet there, but already there.

However, in" Serbis, " another metaphor for national decline, Mendoza gives Alan - Coco Martin's character - a chance to break out of the vicious circle. In the finale, the guy leaves his family, leaves his roost-a decaying porn theater, a family business. The hero rushes into the unknown, into the stench of the urban landscape. "Perhaps now he is just an ordinary rogue who can no longer stand the abominations of life and runs away in search of jelly shores. But who knows, maybe after visiting foreign lands, he will come back as a global hero? " - Mendoza interprets the act of his character and ends his film with a spectacular film break. Celluloid melts and leaves behind absolute nothingness. A very artistic commentary, which echoes the new, either incipient, or degenerating political cinematography of the third world countries.

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