SERBIS
Directed by Brillante Mendoza
Produced by Ferdinand Lapuz
Written by Armando Lao, based on a story by Lao & Boots Agbayani Pastor
Released by Regent Releasing
Tagalog with English subtitles
Philippines/France. 93 min. Rated R
With Gina Pareño, Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz, Coco Martin, Kristofer King, Dan Alvaro, Mercedes Cabral & Roxanne Jordan 
 

What received the most praise in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn was its subtlety—Ming-liang opted for illicit rather than explicit, without any graphic displays or dialogue. The audience understood that the movie’s family-owned theater was used as a gay meat market and that the film was a discussion of sex, film, and culture. Filipino director Brillante Mendoza goes for the reverse in his latest film.

Serbis (slang for hustlers) opens with an extended take of full-on nudity, and the train of raunch keeps rolling for the next 93 minutes. We’re talking wet sex, violent transsexual prostitution, and a porn theater filled with isolated orgy islands of flesh. “Raunchy fun” is a less accurate description than “Filipino family drama as seen through the pornographic eyes of Vincent Gallo.”

A respected business crumbling with time and owned by one of Angeles City’s more respected families, Family is the name of matriarch Nanay Flor’s last remaining theater—once part of a chain that screened campy heterosexual porn to regular homosexual revelers and hustlers. Facilitating sex is the theater’s main function, but it’s also a place where most of its patrons hang out and spend their leisure time, like flies on a piece of old fruit.

The theater is also a home to Nanay Flor’s family. Nanay Flor (Gina Pareño) is a regal post-imperial matriarch—Catholic, proud, and as much of a Spaniard matriarch as any of Pedro Almodovar’s Catalan empresses. Having spent most of her money—and most of her time in the film—in litigation with her husband over his support of another family, the porn theater is now a dingy den of desperation and sin.

Oh, the sins. Her tough daughter, Nadya (Jacklyn Jose), has given up her future as a nurse to run the business after her husband died. (Nadya constantly asks her adolescent son to bathe, since he frequently rides his tricycle through some of the theater’s grimiest corners.) One of her sons is paid to receive oral sex from one of the theater’s regular teenage transsexuals. Another recently impregnated his longtime girlfriend, and it appears as though he has either an STD or a really nasty boil (neither of which stops him from having still more sex with his girlfriend). Nadya’s uncle is gay and openly cheats on his wife, who appears to be fine with this, and Nadya’s teenage niece takes lessons from the hustlers on how to strut, flirt, and party.

Still, Flor’s family is proud, and their flaws are mostly overlooked. Wonderfully acted by an enormous ensemble cast, Serbis is rooted in its tangled relationships. The film would be great enough as just a family drama. But it also takes a good look at post-colonial Filipino culture and the remnants of Catholic morality, upheld and inverted, using the Asian sex industry as a guide. Self-referentially, the film ends with a shot of an unknown older man sitting next to a teenage boy on the curb, asking whether he or his brother has the larger penis. The man’s cigarette starts to sear and burn the film, as though Serbis is being screened by a careless projectionist in a porn theater. With as much sex as this film contains, it might as well be. Zachary Jones
January 30, 2009