Red depicts a nearly lawless culture where cops are nowhere to be found, unless there’s corruption afoot. Every command to “SMILE,” every creepy colleague whose unwanted attention includes hosiery (“Try them on! Here!”), every time the roommate’s boyfriend demands sex, is an affront and an outrage.Ī pistol can seem like a quick fix to that, and often is in glib American films where consequences are ignored or at least conveniently delayed. We see the seemingly-routine abuse women are subjected to - on the street, on the job. “Babae at Baril” comes to an utter halt as we see the pistol assembled in a back-alley armory, a wheelman at a shootout take possession of the pistol, and take a bullet in that shootout, and so on.Įverything that works in this brief, gritty and lurid little parable of a thriller is in those opening acts. She’s got the means of revenge.īut Red then spends the entire second half of the film showing us how the gun got to our unnamed heroine. So when she’s raped by a creep at work, she’s not just ready to snap.
Not delivering what she promised is a pretty serious breach of cinematic trust.Ī downtrodden, working-poor department store clerk ( Janine Gutierrez), bullied by her boss, harassed by the Boys on the Corner on her way home every night, threatened by her slumlord, rudely dismissed by the convenience kiosk owner closest to her flat, overhears a shooting down the street.
Writer-director Rae Red (“Neomanila” was hers) sets us up for a female revenge fantasy. Netflix is calling the film “The Girl and the Gun.” But the Filipino title is “Babae at Baril,” which my translator says is “Women and Guns.”Įither way, you get the idea.