The President's Scissors

Once a week, the Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo likes to kick back and unwind with a movie. Last Monday, the lights dimmed in the screening room at the MalacaNang Palace, and the diminutive, 53- year-old president settled back uneasily to watch Live Show, a raunchy, local sex film. Rated "R" (18 and above), the film explores the sad and desperate lives of several impoverished boys and girls who put on sex shows. Live Show had generated a Babel of commentary, and the president wanted to judge for herself: was it social realism, or porn?

After the film, Macapagal-Arroyo emerged smiling—with relief. Earlier, she had withdrawn Live Show from Manila's cinemas and leaned on the liberal chairman of the censor board to resign. Then she began having misgivings. The Catholic church and ultra-conservative groups lauded her decision, but her two-month old presidency found itself assailed by powerful former friends, the media and the intelligentsia. She was lambasted for succumbing to "moral terrorism," as one newspaper columnist put it. So, on Monday afternoon, Macapagal-Arroyo cleared her schedule and watched Live Show, alone. "Well, I finally saw it," she told an aide, beaming. "And there's something really lewd about it."

Not all of her countrymen agree. And the debate goes beyond whether the film is art or trash; for many Filipinos, it raises doubts over whether Macapagal-Arroyo remains in debt to the Catholic church which helped her rise to the presidency on Jan. 20, after Joseph Estrada was swept from office in a popular uprising. Filipinos definitely wanted Estrada out, on corruption charges, but they were less sure they wanted Macapagal-Arroyo to replace him. It was only after the military and Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin, head of the country's Catholic church, threw their support behind Macapagal-Arroyo, then vice-president, that she vaulted to power. Even today, according to one poll, Filipinos only give her a 34% approval rating.

Backed by Catholic and evangelical church groups, the President is crusading for a "moral recovery" after the two-year regime of Estrada, 63, an ex-film star who bragged about his fondness for women and booze. Live Show is the first victim in this crusade, and many newspapers are calling it censorship. And worries of a nationwide bowdlerization campaign were exacerbated by Macapagal-Arroyo's banning of a film she hadn't even seen. One columnist, the Manila Standard's Alex Magno, wrote: "We cannot allow that noble vision of a 'moral society' to be taken hostage by those who use the same phrase to mean denial of artistic freedom." Nonsense, says anti-pornography activist, Cecile Alvarez: "There's a huge difference between obscenity and freedom of expression." The furor peaked last Thursday when a security guard sexually molested a six-year-old girl, allegedly after seeing Live Show.

But is this dispiriting little film about sexual gymnasts worth all the fuss? In the Philippines, yes. For most Filipinos, it's impossible to have a conversation without quoting a line from a Hollywood hit or a show tune, as if cinema were the grand sum of all the world's philosophy. Movies and politics are also melded together. Even with Estrada gone, movie stars still want to be politicians, and politicians yearn for their close up. The President copied her look and her camera poses from a doll-sized Filipina actress, Nora Aunor, whom she resembles.

To its credit, Live Show knows better than to be pretentious. In fast, documentary-style, the camera jostles through the dank alleys of Manila's slums and into the queasy, crowded rooms where the performers copulate on lumpy mattresses. There are flashes of flesh, but the camera focuses on the audience's eerie, dead stare. When one of the women, Gigi, starts grunting loudly during sex, her partner wonders if its the onset of an asthma attack. It turns out she was trying to catch the eye of a Korean pornographer in the crowd. For most of the characters, anything that can go wrong, does. Money for Gigi's plane ticket to Japan is stolen; another girl, Rose, tries to poison herself after she tracks her son down to a foster home and the kid spits in her face, and one couple who attempt to go straight find themselves back on the mattress to earn money for their dying daughter's medicine. "If anyone gets titillated by this film, he must be sick," said Nicanor Tiongson, former head of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board.

What alarms many intellectuals is how the church was involved in the dismissal of Tiongson as chief censor. He is a respected film critic and media professor. Archbishop Sin harangued Tiongson, a onetime seminarian, for being "ineffectual and lacking backbone" when he refused to ban the film. Tiongson's only conduit to the presidential office was through one of the archbishop's aides. "Morality is the church's business, fine," says Tiongson. "But this was meddling in the state." He resigned last Tuesday and was replaced by Alejandro Roces, 76, a former education secretary, who told TIME that the last decent movie he saw was Gandhi. He added, "The ones done before the war (that's WWII), now they were really good."

The Philippines may well need a moral revival. Though illegal, live sex acts still grind away in Manila's sleazy bar districts. Video porn is easily available, and far cheaper than a movie ticket. The President's men recently banned pornographic videos on long-haul buses, but nothing has been done to halt the practice of provincial theaters to creatively splice a few minutes of hard-core porn into their main features. Films such as Live Show, which tries to explore the poverty behind sexual degradation, may actually serve to diminish the audience for pornography.

Roces argues that directors ought to be licensed and then fined if they make films deemed pornographic. This scares the movie crowd. "We're going back to a Jurassic period," says Joey Reyes, director of Live Show. Tight censorship may help kill off the Filipino movie industry, whose production slumped from 144 films in 1999 to only 84 last year. Local films are losing out against foreign blockbusters and video pirates. A case in point is Live Show: with all the buzz over its banning, many more Filipinos—including underage kids—are catching it on pirated videos than ever saw it in the cinemas.