Four years after “Town in a Lake”, Jet Leyco returned with two movies (the present one and “Second Coming”), with “My Alien Friend” being produced by Qcinema. Billed as a documentary, the film is actually an experimental hybrid that shares many similarities with the cinematic style of Khavn.
The narrative unfolds through the effort of someone, essentially the narrator of the film who emerges as the protagonist, to communicate with an alien friend, by sending him a kind of time capsule about all that is Earth and more specifically, the Philippines. In that fashion, the movie unfolds as a series of vignettes, juxtaposed with live sound footage from the Americans that first landed on the moon and a narration that focuses on a number of topics revolving around the protagonist (Jet Leyco?) including his family and friends, his overall life in the Philippines.
Apart from personal topics however, the film also deals with political issues, through a demonstration against Duterte and in favor of socialism, in one of the most impressive parts of the “documentary”, religion, relationships, bullying, even food. The approach to all these lingers somewhere between the serious, the absurd, the comic and the personal, as the scenes include proposals and marriages, a pig succeeded by sausages, the life of a nephew, and intense close ups to an eye. Most of the aforementioned present some kind of philosophical and social comment Leyco wanted to make, while others seem to be there just for fun, while the segment with the traumatized girl who is revealed to be part of a movie shooting, connects the narrative with cinema.
The music and the sound in general emerge as two of the most appealing aspects of the film, through the combination of narration, actual talking of the people appearing on screen, much laughter, hip-hop and a rendition of “Donde Estas, Yolanda” by Pink Martini, which is bound to bring smiles to anyone who recognizes the song. As a comment on how the digital world is intruding on “real life” Leyco also uses the sound of computer notifications and pop up messages on screen, which do become annoying after a fashion, although I felt that that was the actual purpose of the director.
Visually, the film also exhibits a rather interesting approach, with a number of rather different images, usually juxtaposing high definition ones of setting like the desert (in a way that makes it look like the moon) or the sea, with low quality home-video like ones or blurred ones of bad quality, in a tactic that results in an intriguing antithesis. And talking about the sea, the images revolving around it are the ones that most recur in the movie, in a comment that seems to imply that all life started from there, if connected with the whole concept of a man explaining human history to an alien.
Lastly, there are moments where the narrator seems to ask questions to the viewer, in a concept that breaks the fourth wall in an unusual, but again intriguing way.
Trying to explain, or even worse, reviewing a film like “My Alien Friend” is a rather difficult task, both for its experimental approach and for the number of different kind of audiovisual elements that appear on the movie. And while the truth is that it is a bit too long for its style, the artistry and the rather interesting experimentation are more than evident, and result in a film that is appealing as it is intriguing, and which definitely find resonance with the viewers who appreciate Khavn's style.
