Perfumed Nightmare (1979)

Kidlat Tahimik is a charismatic Philipino jeepney driver who is obsessed with Wernher Von Braun - the former Nazi who was helping the American NASA get a rocket on Mars. It could hardly be more of a contrast between his small town existence where the only things not built of bamboo were the church and the ten metre long bridge that spanned the small river near their town. This character has a fairly torrid history: his father was killed by a GI and his open-minded mum lives a fairly hand-to-mouth existence, but that isn’t going to stop him dreaming - and dreaming big. Fortunately for him, his chewing gum machine owning boss decides that he is going to take him to Paris on business for at least a year and thereafter the promise of New York beckons. Can he make it there before man gets to the red planet? From a production perspective this is really very basic - much of it looks like home movie footage framed with varying degrees of success. What does work, though, are the clashes of not so much culture as of rampant industrialisation. Kidlat is dazzled by what he reads in magazines and hears on radio broadcasts, and that wonder only increases when he arrives in France to see a Paris beyond his wildest dreams. Quite quickly this friendly and convivial man starts to think a little more fondly of home and as he takes a trip to Germany to visit the home of his hero he becomes more and more disillusioned. These grand structures, the multi lane autobahns and the twenty-odd bridges that cross the Seine dwarf his own community but therein lies the dichotomy. It’s soulless, sterlile and he feels that he doesn’t quite belong. His prize possession is a wooden horse carved from the butt of the rifle that shot his dad - this is a man of simple pleasures who perhaps realises that his dreams were better as just that? There is also a slightly menacing narration occasionally peppering this docu-drama that adds to it’s ambitiousness and though it’s a little too long, it quite entertainingly showcases the stark differences between the west and the east through the eyes of a man it’s quite easy to like.