Love and squalor in a Philippine movie theater

If you've always wanted to see a Philippine movie, well, then I guess you could add "Service" to your queue, because there aren't that many that have made it to the U.S., but other than that I don't know why you'd watch it. For the first 20 minutes or so, Brillante Mendoza's film seems to have a lot of promise - in its grim, dark way. We are placed right within the world of a large and complex matriarchal family that runs a rather large porno-movie complex (called Family, oddly), and we begin to focus on a few of the main characters in the family, especially a pretty young sister (teenage) and a cut schoolboy, also the strong mother and grandmother. Mendoza films with a documentary style, hand-held camera for the most part, grainy, poorly framed - giving the film a distinct realistic look that's very effective. Except for a moment toward the end, there's no musical soundtrack, just the ambient sounds of the theater and the ever-present noise from the street. All promising stuff. But to be honest the whole movie is one scene of squalor after another - cheap sex, pickups, wounded bodies, a horrible scene of cleaning up a flooded bathroom, and so on. Despite all the realistic setup and the promising intro of characters and even a few plot elements (there's a family lawsuit going on, for example), the film does nothing to bring these strands together. I'm sure it's a realistic portrait of a certain kind of life and place that most of us are (thankfully) not familiar with - but for all its realism, its intensity, its honest look at the lives of the alienated and marginalized, its squalid exoticism, in the end it was painful to watch and the film as a whole amounted to much less than the sum of its parts.