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The Kingmaker review: a surreal, revelatory look at the brutality and vulgarity of Imelda Marcos

Imelda Marcos in The Kingmaker
Imelda Marcos in The Kingmaker

Dir: Lauren Greenfield. 15 cert, 101 mins

At the beginning of The Kingmaker, Lauren Greenfield’s by-turns entertaining and bone-chilling Imelda Marcos documentary, we watch the former Philippine First Lady handing out money from her chauffeur-driven car. Lamenting the poverty outside as her vehicle crawls through the Manila traffic, Marcos produces a clump of bank notes, winds down her window, and passes them one by one into the crowd of children that quickly gathers outside.

Marcos does this a number of times throughout the film – perhaps most memorably in a juvenile cancer ward, where once again a phone-book-sized wad is fished from a designer handbag, then distributed to the children present, while Marcos mewls about “candy for the kids”.

It’s a crass and pitiful spectacle – phoney generosity, given the likely source of her fortune was the Philippine state coffers. And the way it happens repeatedly – almost reflexively – suggests the act scratches an itch in the giver, rather than salving a wound in the world.

Now 90 years old and still immaculately dressed, Marcos remains famous primarily as a spender: the dictator’s bride who blew billions of her own country’s capital on gowns, jewels and shoes during her late husband’s 21-year reign, more than a third of which was conducted under martial law.

As both a director and photographer, Greenfield has long been fascinated by the trappings and dynamics of mega-wealth, and that makes Marcos something of an ideal subject. Yet while the film starts in wry fly-on-the-wall mode, it morphs into something weightier and surreally unsettling – Louis Theroux to Luis Buñuel in 60 minutes flat.

When we join Marcos in 2014, she is trying to crowbar her family back into Filipino politics, via her seemingly hapless son Bongbong’s vice-presidential run (the family returned from exile in 1991). Against our expectations, though, the campaign gathers steam. Just like Imelda, voters talk about the Marcos regime as if it had been a golden age, even though they don’t have the Picassos to show for it.

Its remnants give Greenfield metaphors to spare. She travels to the island of Calauit, where the Marcoses set loose herds of Kenyan big game in the 1970s: a crazed kleptocratic indulgence passed off as an act of national beautification. Today, the creatures’ poor inbred descendants still shamble around the landscape: the communities displaced by their arrival, now returned to the area, regularly have their crops devoured by mangy zebras.

Then there is the San Juanico Bridge, or ‘Bridge of Love’, which we learn was built by Ferdinand Marcos as a birthday gift for his wife, and later lent its name to a torture technique during the martial law years.

The brutal specifics of this period only come to light relatively late in the film, as a kind of snap into sobriety amid the dazzle of the Marcos myth. But the testimony Greenfield has drawn out from dissidents is shattering in its directness and detail. Brutality, vulgarity: it’s all revealed to be much of a muchness, as Marcos piously peels notes off her personal stash for evermore, and never counts the cost.