Kids
grow up fast in Manila’s gated communities.
Instead of waiting for college to haze their juniors and slip girls
roofies, they start in high school. The
law of the jungle applies in full force to the hard partying youths in Gino
Santos’s The Animals (trailer here), which screens
today during the 2013 New York Asian Film Festival.
Entitled
as entitled gets, Jake is already a full-fledged exploiter, charging
bait-and-switch prices for his raves.
His girlfriend Trina is somewhat middle-class, but her hotness still
provides her some social status. Her
introverted younger brother Alex is not so fortunate. He is pledging a gang-like fraternity out of
a need for a sense of belonging. They
will all end up at Jake’s latest party, where things quickly get ugly as sex,
booze, drugs, and violence will become tragically intertwined for several of Animals’ major characters.
These
sort of things never happened while Old Man Marcos was around—that doesn’t make
him right, but just saying. For weak
parents, the good thing about martial law is it comes with a curfew. From what we see of them in Animals, Jake and Trina’s parental units
are clueless to the point of negligence.
Likewise, the male characters are almost exclusively cads on the make, most
definitely starting with Jake. In contrast,
Trina and her friends are certainly shallow (and her kleptomania is a bit
problematic), but they are far from irredeemable.
Unfortunately,
Animals is more like Larry Clark’s Kids than Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day. Santos revels in the dissolute youths’
hedonism and the tragic repercussions, but he never really gets inside anyone’s
head. As a result, viewers will feel a
little gross taking in the enormity of his teenage wasteland.
Still,
there are some remarkable performances, starting first and foremost with Dawn
Balagot as the insecure, borderline anorexic Trina. Although a small supporting role, Micah
Cabral shows plenty of “it-factor” as Trina’s flirty friend Leslie. However, it is hard to get what they see in
any of the guys, including Albie Casino’s blandly amoral Jake.