LUKAS THE STRANGE (John Torres, 2013)

Lukas The Strange bears an alias that's hard to live down -- the odd one, the solitary one, the alienated one -- as inscrutable as the circumstances surrounding his life. Even as the luster of tinsel -- in the form of a film shoot -- comes to his village, partway a source of hurtful jouissance, part bittersweet pleasure, the shy, withdrawn Lukas grapples not just with adolescence but with his strange knowledge and conception of his father. The-Name-of-the-Father, it seems, preoccupies him as a source of bewilderment, of troubling resonance. In an opening sequence of this new, beguiling film by John Torres, the father intones to his 13-year-old son, as in a dream, a father finessing his son into the acceptance of a stigma, a confession of a cardinal sin: he is half-horse, half-human.

"A tikbalang." Well-understood. Well, almost. The tikbalang, after all, is the indigenous, folkloric, centaur-like trickster that leads travelers astray. Through this dream-like admission made by the father, Lukas is made to learn what it all signifies, not just the negative tenor behind his father's voice: is the symbolic confession a shorthand for a serious crime (say, of causing people to disappear as tikbalangs do, a euphemism for doing away with the era's desaparecidos, the enemies of the state, as Torres intimates in an interview?) or is it just as much a shorthand for the father's indiscretions having to do with women (another Torres motif) ? Lukas thus begins to parse adult language to enter the symbolic terrain – and how the sobriquet starts to become him! On closer reflection, is the father's condition an inheritance to be passed down to his son who will duplicate it in his adulthood? In this realm of the boy's growing psyche, there is seemingly, as yet, no law, society, or a grasp of adult language: indexes which the psychoanalyst Lacan sees as necessities to confirm the boy's place in proper society.

The father, someone once said, is often a source of centrifugal power. He is often the disruptive presence within a dysfunctional family and breaks up Oedipal bliss. Torres' film may be viewed for its mythopoesis or its historicity but it lends itself well to a psychoanalytic cartography of the unconscious. The film, in essence, is auto-psychoanalysis, as it tries to triangulate what Lacan conceives to be the human psyche and its attendant tensions (1) The Imaginary Order, the narcissistic side, sees Lukas participating in auditions to land a role in a film being shot in his village. (2) The Symbolic Order – the assimilation of language and the rest of what he needs in order to assume what "The-Name-of-the-Father" stands for -- sustains the threat of disruption (possibly, in Lacanian terms, a psychosis) borne out of a father's damaged example. (3) The Real Order, the locus of anxiety, the antithesis to fantasy that is ultimately beyond symbolization, is interwoven with the imaginary: Torres, an artfully deceptive analysand projects it onto a social turmoil (e.g. the film's dark historico-political aspects) but not without the bittersweet overlap of the imaginary of the pastoral myth, the ethos of a celluloid-hungry psyche. If one pursues this to its conclusion, Torres proves to be his own Lacanian theorist, and Lukas The Strange is his impossible attempt at the Real.

The crux, in the artificial realm of tinsel and make-believe, remains how the father’s virility overshadows the growth and upbringing of Lukas. The father, as the movie and the movie-being-shot-within-the-movie wear on, becomes an object of rumor, that of being intimate with Melanie Moran, the actress, a figure of fantasy, the object of desire, for Lukas. While a pining voice on the soundtrack, Lorena, the confidante who uniquely understands Lukas, is full of longing for her strange, bosom friend. The film is fraught with the object of unattainable desire, what Lacan calls the "objet petit a" -- a lack in a person's life that mostly remains unfulfilled.

Circumspectly choosing the predominant gauge of 35 mm intercut with sparing digital video, the better to bear the cicatrices and artifacts of his visuals, Torres interweaves this psychoanalytic fable – about absent, wayward fathers, that dieu obscur -- against the backdrop of a time of authoritarian monstrosity in the person of the tyrant Marcos. Such diegetic aspects add to the pathos of longing, yearning, desire, loss, pain and a kind of orphanhood.

Despite the dolorous themes and undertones, however, Lukas The Strange is not strictly a clinical study at all, if one shuns its subcutaneous significance: it is grounded in true cinematic and artistic finesse and dexterity in the way it weaves in and out of its narrative tenses; it has a wealth of low-key but diverting dedramatized sequences that straddle the modes of narrative and documentary; it is simply an enchanting faux-naif film to experience, almost like a companion piece to Shireen Seno's feature debut Big Boy. The story of a colorful if beleaguered youth is assuaged with eidetic imagery -- from bucolic shots of the North, to a natural occurrence of a tornado, to the auditions happening in the village of Lukas: children being cued to tumble and roll downhill, men firing away with imaginary guns, a row of pretty village lasses filing in and out of the frame. There is also a formidable river that must be swam and crossed as in a trial by ordeal, its tributaries flowing the same way downstream, bearing a box of pornographic videotapes, the father's legacy -- like an ominous pattern floating away, to be salvaged or to be let go, like a bloodline, like a message in a bottle inscribed with the deepest sense of loneliness and void.

Title in Tagalog: Lukas Nino

REFRAINS HAPPEN LIKE REVOLUTIONS IN A SONG (John Torres, 2010)

The films of John Torres are forever striving and aspiring for intimacy, it seems. They are not unlike an ongoing series of cinematic billets-doux meant for a secret addressee, defying the impersonality of communal viewing spaces. All of Torres’s films, so far, prompt such an impression, confirmed by the position of privilege given to his speaking voice. In an era of stylized aesthetics, depersonalized poetics and large-scale logistics in filmmaking, the gesture of this speaking voice is a rare virtue that should not be altered, tempered or faulted. It is a meditative and reflective presence that contributes to a cinema of confession, of a persona laid bare, of sincerity. To quote the late Alexis Tioseco: (Torres’s voice)… is deliberate in its cadence but always sincere—and that sincerity is the key. It unlocks the secret to the beauty of John as a filmmaker, but also John as a person. It's a sincerity so tangible, so real, that it's disarming. 

Hardly surprising then that Torres has chosen to valorize a voice, a shibboleth of sorts, that fabled and mellifluously singsong timbre of the Ilongo language, in his latest film. At the outset, the director makes it clear, however, that everything is grist for the creative mill, that even speech and language are sheer premise in the filmmaker’s modus operandi of playing with cinematic forms. Refrains Happen like Revolutions in a Song is not simply meant to uphold the orality and epistolarity of his chosen tongue (s) but to put a premium on the many cultures that underpin it. It is the director’s most ambitious work so far, as it also attempts to transcend the confessional material of his previous films (though he has been quoted that certain aspects of this latest film struck a very personal chord with him) and explores, instinctively, matters as hefty as the study of native signs, and the vitality and utility of culture in the face of acculturation and other threats.

His point of departure is the mythical island of Panay. Torres essays the role of a poetic sort of benshi who makes an epistolary dedication at the start to a complicit other – perhaps a twin, a lover or an alter ego? – with whom he inhabits the liminal, interstitial spaces within myth, history, folklore and the pertinent arenas of the abstract. Intertitles soon inform us about the oral tradition of the Sulanon tribe of the island: how certain female children are made to learn the Hinilawod epic by rote and by heart, essentially a love story between two elementals who meet only in dreams. This commitment to memory takes many years to master and the child is kept away from society, and is hence called a binakod. Her consecration to her calling somehow idealizes her in the eyes of common folk and is hence mythicized as much as the elementals.

In present-day Panay, the focus is on a beauteous lass named Sarah, who uses her charms to perform the ruthless job of a debt collector. But her job entails much waiting and frustration, so that she and her assistant while away the tedious time by telling stories – with Sarah assuming the role of a binakod, and later on, a tamawo, the elemental in search of her love. This role-playing, these make-believe moments are not too-far-fetched owing to the nature of insularity. Panay islanders remain steeped in and attuned to a mythic/folkloric collective imaginary that permeates everyday idiom and vocabulary.

History then weaves another thread into the film's story. We read about anecdotes of two factions of revolutionaries fighting for leadership of Panay Island at the start of the 20^th century, while American colonizers try to crush or pacify them. These accounts feed the imagination of Sarah, a welcome distraction as she goes from one job to the next. The intertitles soon inform us that Sarah becomes intertwined with history and saves the lives of revolutionaries. Toward's film's end, she disentangles herself from work, and heads to the cane fields of La Carlota, looking for the man she has never met except only in her dreams. Much like the myth she enacts in make-believe.

Much of the film translates as a conundrum, starting with its title in Filipino. Ang Ninanais may be translated as “the desire” or “the intended,” an adjectival noun whose very intention is left a question mark. In semiotic terms, this film can also be entitled "the signified," whose cognitive or concrete identity, again, proves elusive. This titular referent could be a variety of things: an elusive other as much as an elusive gesture or an elusive abstract. As in much of the film, one is continually kept guessing – the temporal collapse connects the past and the present, the world of abstraction and the world of the concrete are commingled as the ontological and epistemological boundaries are erased – to the dangerous edge of losing the point and the plot completely.

Skeptical minds could be tempted to dismiss this filmmaker’s methodology as verging perilously on free association. To wit: he takes two disparate narrative or ideational elements, and weaves an arbitrary connection between them, and repeats the process all over again. Valid, perhaps. What is undeniable is the difficulty of pulling off this improvisatory propensity with conviction, and somehow there is enough sleight of mind and heart from Torres to eke out a worthy film.

If Todo Todo Teros and Years When I Was a Child Outside focus on overtly personal hurts and human failings, Refrains Happen Like can be said to be more inclusive, more multifocal: It explores dualistic conflations (past and present, myth and reality, history and contemporary) and parallels of ontological and epistemic phenomena (the tracing of contours of the collective ethnic imaginary/unconscious and how it threatens to obsess Sarah's own life), which give a glimpse into the difficult but rich, inner lives of multicultural and multilingual Filipinos. There is a wealth of phenomena at work here, the collapse of the past and the present, the mirroring of the historic and the contemporary, the mythical and the folkloric, the make-believe and the real – all illustrating the complexity of establishing human identity – and perhaps illustrating the difficulty, if not the improbability, of human connection and intimacy.

Refrains Happen Like Revolutions is a film of ever-changing, protean forms and guises. One is never too sure where he or she stands as realities interpenetrate. Torres just manages to weave together an ontological and epistemic quilt that reveals the complexity of Filipino identity and psyche, while remaining true to his experimental nature. The balancing and juggling act of this film is a difficult task -- a fact that, in turn, may confound viewers -- but even as a transitional film for the filmmaker, it is a much more layered and much richer work than any analogous film ever attempted -- even, say, that well-regarded Thai film, Mysterious Object at Noon, by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul.

Title in Filipino: Ang Ninanais
reviewed: August 5, 2010 

TODO TODO TEROS (John Torres, 2006)

John Torres’s Todo Todo Teros is a film that will outlive us. That much this writer will boldly predict for this instant classic. Eros and terror, its twin concerns, will be relevant for the indefinite future, long after we're gone. (Terrorism for Torres is more universally quotidian, and not so much about suicide airplanes or car bombs.). But to repeat and acknowledge this film for what it is: it’s a classic. Not many of today’s films – perhaps the works of Lav Diaz and Raya Martin – will ever attain such a rarefied ontological status, but this one has it: the quality of the classic. Serendipitously shot, few films will approach the surprising and unexpected moments of Todo Todo Teros again. Not by Torres, not by anyone else.

If Lav Diaz is the moral conscience and borderline ideologue, and Raya Martin the postmodern historian among the ranks of Filipino independent filmmakers, John Torres may be christened as the confessional poet. We say that half in jest, of course: he is far from the self-destructive kind – on the contrary, he can be romantically celebratory amidst adversity – but his confessions are sublimated in literally inventive and lyrical ways. These confessions stake out a territory all their own – the intimate and the poetic – and Todo Todo Teros, a work that is prefigured by four early shorts, is the film that brings this aesthetic to a culmination.

Todo Todo Teros defies easy filmic categories and deploys many styles and forms of expression. It’s a collage of creative affinities that have shaped the director, weaving together not just home movies, film diary and other found footage but also a penchant for musical performances and felicitous poetry authored by Palanca Awardee Joel Toledo. There is wizardry in much of its editing that reveals a certain do-it-yourself ethos and a nod to latter-day aesthetics. These double-edged tonalities are far-ranging, for instance, contrasting a militarized city under surveillance with the romantic longings and inner conflicts of a pensive protagonist. Much of the first half of the film happens in the dark and restless nights of Manila, while much of the second happens in the daytime outdoors of Berlin.

To see Todo Todo Teros with traditional conceptions of what a film should be can be a trying experience. There is little to no plot to follow here: a filmmaker who leads a double life as a terrorist is torn between women and allegiances. We see him traipsing through an almost hushed cityscape as though through the stealthy cameras of state police. As a performance artist visiting Berlin, he falls for his Russian guide named Olga. There should be no trouble except that the filmmaker is a married man. Artists can be such bastards, and that is almost certainly the film’s more primal statement of terrorism, the bombed-out relationships.

What is sweet and poignant are not the mechanics of Todo Todo Teros’s plot, but the fact that it features very intimate footages from Torres’s personal archives: his romantic interlude with the real-life Olga. Constantly framed and kept on her toes by Torres’s attentive lens, she is an endearing and mesmeric presence. Everything has been reverse-engineered to feature Torres’s moments with her, and still this reality-within-a-film all works magically. No seams show at all. As the courtship unfolds, we marvel and gasp at the intimacy Torres affords us. Tantalizing is the moment when Torres tries to trick Olga into saying “Mahal Kita” (I love you) to the camera.

Todo Todo Teros has few precedents in recent memory. Torres’s tactics and thematics can perhaps be likened to those of Ross McElwee, an American independent documentarian who played out his romantic efforts before the camera in films like Sherman’s March (1986) and Time Indefinite (1993). The young Filipino filmmaker, however, stylizes the passages of documentary, his results more fictional and more artifice-laden than McElwee’s efforts. With his non-conventional aesthetic and the non-reliance on traditional narrative, Torres’s film is consciously avoiding the methods of commercial filmmaking. His fascination with found footage seems to point towards a conscientious study of film history, not dissimilar to the immersions of the Cinematheque Francaise habitues of the 1960s (better known as the French New Wavers). Torres shares this diachronic learning of film history with Raya Martin, who often references structural and underground films in his works.

Still memorable moments are rife in Todo Todo Teros. The home movies of the streets of the metropolis during New Year’s Eve exploding with the thunder of firecrackers find consonance with the specter of terrorism. The car ride where Lav Diaz, as himself, talks about passages in Pigafetta’s chronicles (in particular, those about the sexual precocities of the natives in the 15^th century) is priceless and fits in well with the notion of the filmmaker-terrorist’s hold on women. Poignant and haunting is the moment when the filmmaker-terrorist’s wife, in utter despair, projects his husband’s indiscretions, the footages of Olga, onto walls and all manner of surface. And of course, there is Olga. More haunting. Beguiling. Todo Todo Teros, in the end, is a valentine of sorts, a valentine to the other, East to West, West to East, in these bigoted and belligerent times. 

reviewed: February 11, 2010

MAPANG-AKIT (John Torres, 2011)

As a child, John Torres was a shy and timid figure. Rather than play and mix with kids his age, he kept himself at a respectful distance. Rather than join and converse with them, he would remain just close enough to read their speaking lips. This way, Torres would listen in, and from the few words and phrases picked up, he would reconstruct conversations and devise his own stories. That's how, Torres reveals, his instinct for narrative got an early start and has been honed ever since. From his first feature film, Todo Todo Teros, onwards, this affinity for spinning tales has served the filmmaker in good stead.  

In his fourth feature to date, "a long short film” that runs at roughly 40 minutes, Torres again regales us with his lip-reading abilities. Mapang-akit puts words in the mouths of villagers in Laruja, Antique, as it were, and delivers a story populated by aswangs and elementals. The result is a hauntingly arresting work, mysterious in its resonances of folklore, and often idyllic in its portrait of the ways of life in a sleepy village.

The story, in the fictive matrix of Torres, is spare, but ingenious. It concerns an unassimilated settler named Anita, an elderly woman from Negros suspected of being an aswang. Her otherworldly beauty, her dispassion in men, and her seemingly uncanny good fortune are all taken against her. The death of a villager named Milo, the suitor of a certain Elena from Negros, a supposed relative of Anita, only serves to fuel the rumors. Though it is simplicity itself, such a story has remained strong for a long, long time, a residue of regionalism once encouraged to serve colonial rule.   

The beguiling beauty of Mapang-akit lies in its almost ethnographic regard for the sleepy village the filmmakers used as location and how it is dreamily shot. Because Torres’s co-cinematographer, Che Villanueva, happened to be shooting in familiar territory – the village of her relatives – the camerawork radiates a presence akin to that of a villager: total and unobtrusive. There are few, if any, self-conscious stares at the camera. In turn, the camera takes in everything and follows around the villagers in their laidback chores and activities: un-husking coconuts, partaking of afternoon popsicles, conversing about the dead.       

A little bit of controversy now hounds Torres after the revelation of his aesthetic style of inventing dialogue, how anthropologically and even legally it may violate the moral rights of his unwitting cast, how his methods might verge on exploitation, more so in the light of his admission that consent of his subjects was not obtained as to how the filmed material would be put to use. It must be said, however, that Mapang-akit is fiction, and although it had its origins in documentary, it is now beyond actuality. Even documentaries, it bears noting, are not immune to artistic latitude: they are, not uncommonly, staged and fictionalized. Nanook never took exception to recreations of bygone practices like seal and walrus fishing. In documentaries like Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), it is well-known how Werner Herzog made up lines for his willing, smiling subjects. Cinema, it bears repeating, is a dream factory, a fiction factory.

***

John Torres writes to clarify an ambiguous portion in my review, regarding where consent of his subjects was obtained, and not obtained: 

"I had their (the villagers) consent to shoot from up close and at a distance for a film that we were making. They weren't made to act so maybe for them and for others, this would mean it's a straight-up documentary based on process.

It ends up another creature, with them speaking different lines. I don't have their consent when I heard things beyond the words they spoke, but I'm excited to go back and show them the film."

My response:  

I have revised the unclarity. When I said "consent of the subjects was never obtained" I did intend to mean how it is worded now: that the villagers were not informed of the fictive treatment the filmed footages would undergo. I was writing from the point of view of someone who might find this problematic. But that is not my own position: I refute the issue subsequently from my own perspective as someone who thinks it is verging on the preposterous to criminalize authorial freedom. It simply goes against the whole idea of art as a whole.     

John is by no means a fly-by-night artist: He has expressed willingness to return to Antique and show his film to the village where he shot Mapang-akit.    

It is intriguing how the village will react to the finished film, but I have a feeling their response will be one of happy amusement. Gone are the days when cameras stole souls.