CAPTIVE

Stars: Isabelle Huppert, Kathy Mulville, Mark Zanetta, Maria Isabel Lopez, Rustica Carpio, Joel Torre, Mercedes Cabral, Madeleine Nicolas and Timothy Mabalot.
Writers: Brillante Mendoza, Patrick Bancarel, Boots Agbayani Pastor and Arlyn dela Cruz.
Director: Brillante Mendoza
Running time: 120 minutes.

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL Screenings - Sun 10 Jun 6.30pm; Mon 11 Jun 4.15pm.

Rating: 3.5/5

The Sydney Film Festival’s love affair with the works of Brilliante Mendoza continues under the new regime with their selection of his (mostly) compelling true-story, Captive. The Phillipino-born director, who was programmed in 2008 (Foster Child) and twice in 2010 (Kinatay, Lola), presents a dramatically potent, psychologically complex staging of the year-long hostage crisis that began with the kidnapping of several internationals from an island resort in Palawan in 2001.

The film begins with the frantic, terrifying seizure of the hostages from the South-East Asian island resort. A ruthless band of Islamic separatists called The Abu Sayyaf Group, fighting for the liberation of Mindanao Island, steal away a large group of mixed nationals, amongst them social worker Theresa Bourgoine (Isabelle Huppert). It is largely through her experience that the drama of the story unfolds; increasingly pragmatic about the denied access to her life and family back home in France, Bourgoine becomes a wily intermediary between the captors and her fellow prisoners.

Captive is very much a film of two distinct halves. From the opening night-time raid to a fierce gun battle between the kidnappers and police and army (staged in a hospital and intercut with a real-time, graphic birthing drama), Mendoza first-hour is viscerally charged; he captures the dizzying confusion and growing sense of desperation that the initial weeks of the crisis represented to both captor and captive.

As the weeks merge into months, the film begins to reflect the accepted reality of the hostages – personalities emerge; relationships are formed (one hostage marries her captor; Therese all but adopts a teenage radical); random acts of violence occur that reinforce the horror of their situation (wounded hostages or those whose financial means will not cover ransom demands are considered worthless and disposed of). A stagnating resignation as to their plight sets in that the film all too convincingly portrays; after the pulsating opening hour, the film winds down considerably with perhaps too much ‘trudging through the rainforest’ footage.

It is a story of strangers in a strange land, of those whose nationalities and faiths are questioned by ruthless men possessed of a violent passion in an environment that is foreign and dangerous. Mendoza adds some lyrical flourishes as the film draws to an end, suggesting that after a year in the wilderness and feeling largely forgotten by western officials, Theresa is on the verge of becoming one with the land. Mendoza’s riff on ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ psychology indicates he is a filmmaker continually developing his filmic take on humanity.

But Captive takes a frustratingly inert stance on the politics it portrays; audiences may have appreciated knowing where the film-maker stood on the issue of island-state independence in his homeland. The film is an engaging, technically ambitious but intellectually underserved addition to Mendoza’s SFF-represented body of work.     

Comments

[vg]

nice review