The 19th-century culture critic Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music. With Khavn de la Cruz’s feature Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal & a Whore, cinema, an art born in the previous century, aspires to the condition of a mixtape.
Set in Manila’s seedy underworld, Ruined Heart has no real plot and almost no dialogue. What it presents instead are sequences (often violent, often erotic, always impressionistic) set to different kinds of tunes. Sometimes it’s neo new wave, or classic roots reggae, or Asian opera, or Filipino pop, or American rock, and so on. Each track is in one way or another concerned with love. The film is indeed a great mixtape…
