After she is set up by her boyfriend Rudy (Charlie Davao), Jeff (Jennifer Gan) is sent to prison. Fearing that she will reveal his criminal activities (drug and sex trafficking), Rudy decides to have her killed.
Will Jeff survive her ordeal?
Directed by Gerardo De Leon, Women In Cages is a very different beast than The Big Doll House. It is also better directed - the photography is more striking, with a better sense of composition, chiaroscuro and use of depth of field.
De Leon was one of the luminaries of Filipino cinema, and he brings a noir-ish, almost gothic sense of style to the picture. The difference in production value is obvious, but more so is the tone - this is a much darker movie than The Big Doll House.
Take a hint from the movie’s title - there is no innuendo to Women In Cages. This is a bleak drama, a cynical movie about men in power and the way that women are exploited both by the state and the underworld.
All the familiar character types and conventions are present, but they are filtered through the same lens.
Take Pam Grier. She returns as another LGBT character, Alabama, but this time she fulfills the familiar role of the evil prison matron.
Whereas the villainesses of The Big Doll House were purely evil sadists, Women in Cages uses Grier’s casting to make a point. Alabama’s brutality is rooted in her experiences living in the United States. Now in a position of power, she replicates the horrors she faced upon the women of the prison.
And rather than the petty grievances of the previous movie, here the other prisoners are pitted against Jeff because they have to - Stokes (Roberta Collins) is a drug addict who tries to murder the newbie in exchange for another fix; Sandy (Judy Brown) wants to reduce her sentence. The acting might lack nuance, but there is an essentialism and focus to the performances that aligns with the film's brutal ethos. Jeff is naive, ignorant of her boyfriend's dealings and completely unprepared for both his betrayal and the realities of her new situation. This world is dog eat dog, and the movie puts each of its characters through the meat grinder.
It is hard to see how this movie could be marketed as entertainment - while Jack Hill’s movies leaven their harsher qualities with humour, Women In Cages strips away any niceties that could make the film’s brutality entertaining. There is no pretence of a ‘social message’ here - this is a drama about women in prison in a dictatorship.
This is an incredibly cynical movie about the evils of the world - while Hill’s movies are designed to entertain, Leon’s approach is more concerned with tackling the effects of oppression. Was this the filmmaker’s way of sneaking out a message about the Marcos regime (which declared martial law in the Philippines the year after this movie came out)?
There is no resolution to the brutality - Alabama is murdered by her own people, women are enslaved by gangsters, and while one of the prisoners escapes, the movie ends with the equivalent of a shrug. So one escaped? Nothing will change.
Women In Cages may fail as an exploitation movie, but succeeds at stripping the genre of its gratification, giving those elements a context that forces the viewer to confront the subject matter. In that sense, Women In Cages feels like a refutation of its genre.
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour.
You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.
No comments:
Post a Comment