Nastiness is Serbis’ stock and trade, its action set in a decaying Filipino porn theater (named “Family”) where overflowing toilets flood bathroom floors, the peeling walls resemble flaking skin, and the rear end of one resident boasts a silver dollar-sized boil that – upon being harshly treated with an empty beer bottle – oozes a thin stream of puss down the gentleman’s ass cheek. Plus, the theater, earning its revenue from double bills of tattered X-rated gems with titles like “Seedling,” primarily stays afloat by functioning as a venue for gay cruising and the subsequent sex which takes place, explicitly, in the theater’s murky aisles. The film is not, to be sure, a tourist-board commercial for the Filipino city of Angeles. Nonetheless, there is method behind director Brillante Mendoza’s filthy madness, his goals at once sensory and thematic in nature. Guided by curiosity about his uniquely decrepit environment and its barely subsisting protagonists, the theater-operating Pineda clan, while at the same time subtly casting its portrait as indicative of the third-world condition, it’s a scraggly, messy, often aimless, and yet consistently amusing and engaging work of black comedy-cum-social-realism.
Translated as “Service,” the film’s title refers specifically to the male prostitutes plying their wares at the movie house. It also, however, refers to the toil of the Pineda family, led by Nayda (Jacklyn Jose), who manages the theater while trying to keep an eye on her children and her husband, the latter because she’s secretly carrying on an incestuous affair (or, at least, dreaming of doing so) with one of her younger relatives. Such dirty clandestine affairs are the norm in Serbis, from the hetero, homo and tranny Johns offering up carnal pleasures in the dark, to establishment owner Nana Flor (Gina Pareño), who’s suing her cheating husband for having fathered a second family, to Alan (Coco Martin), who’s accidentally knocked up girlfriend Meryl (Mercedes Cabral). Sex is the only thing these characters have control over, and if they wield it clumsily and irresponsibly, their salacious behavior remains an act of agency in a life defined by circuitousness, which Mendoza conveys via a raft of handheld tracking shots that follow Nayda and company up, down, through and around the dilapidated theater’s staircases, hallways and cramped quarters.
Mendoza’s cinematography has a herky-jerkiness that’s in tune with his rickety narrative, or at least what passes for one, as Serbis barely bothers with storytelling save for the drama surrounding Nana Flor’s court case. The mucky aesthetic and formless plot, though sometimes resulting in deadening torpor, aid the director’s underlying aim to fully situate viewers in a particular space, an endeavor that, admittedly, requires some acclimation. The more time one spends in the gross Family Theater, the more one gets an intimate feel for the joint’s sweaty and sticky, humid and soiled, desperate and funky, bizarre and scandalous, pungent and alive atmosphere. It’s not clear Mendoza has much to say about his subjects aside from the fact that their disreputable, skanky circumstances exemplify their social standing. Yet the thinness of his argument ultimately proves secondary to his success at evoking a palpable sense of time and place, one in which anxiety and longing, seen in the stern countenance of mother-boss Nayda and the sorrowful eyes of Nana Flor, freely commingle with the grime of open-market prostitution and the absurd humor of seeing said carnal enterprises rudely interrupted by the random theater appearance of a runaway goat.