ALMANAC OF FALL (Bela Tarr, 1985)

 

This household barely stands. The walls are creaking, ready to burst from the weight of unsavory secrets. In the throes of demise, it cradles - or, perhaps, corrals together - some of the most grotesque specimens to be found in any menagerie. With a virtuoso command of his directorial powers, Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr constructs a leery portrait of a feral group of characters in dire need of domestication, held together by the accident of blood and mercenary need.

Hedi is the matriarch of this house who rules precariously, an aging widow who must contend with a rebellious son, Janos, who has lost all filial piety and looks at her as a cash cow. Janos, unbeknownst to his mother, is carrying on an affair  with her live-in nurse, Anna. Anna, for her part, is involved with not one, not two, but three men.Miklos, her original lover, after fits of rage and violence seems to take a more cerebral tack. Tibor, an aging school teacher, is the third lover, who is also never far from the lonely matriarch’s orbit. These deeply flawed and fragmented characters are not above losing their scruples: they lie, cheat, steal, inflict violence on one another, form tenuous alliances, and plot each other’s demise.

Almanac of Fall represents a watershed between Tarr’s earlier films which were mostly social realist depictions and the current cycle of films culminating in Werckmeister Harmonies. It is neither of those two styles. After helming The Prefab People three years earlier, a story of another household threatened by bitter strife, Tarr takes the kernel of that story and couches it in pseudo-melodrama. Yes, it contains certain elements of melodrama, but emotionalism and sentimentality are reined in: rage – of sex, of violence – is what is most visible here, witnessed in medias res, so that the audience is caught off-guard, more surprised than steeped in emotions. Tarr further turns this genre on its head with an absurdist twist: the characters, as though growing philosophical or suddenly wise or perhaps momentarily touched, suddenly burst into song in the middle of a scene, as though singing lullabyes, the lyrics containing the metaphors of  the moment.

Tarr also brings the mannerisms of other well-known melodramatists to this film’s mise en scene. The unnaturalistic lighting is redolent of Douglas Sirk (as in All That Heaven Allows) and Fassbinder's BRD Trilogy. The stylization does not end there, but we witness it, too, in how the figures are shot: flat, two-dimensional, from oblique angles, often in claustrophobic close-ups, often framed in close proximity.

When the dust settles, Tarr executes a last plot pirouette: something has happened offscreen, an ellipsis that overturns much of what came before. Rapprochements are in the offing, a scapegoat emerges, and the house restores itself from entropy. Or so it seems. As though to provide a counterpoint to the outbursts of harangues and histrionics that came before, it all ends with a dance. Life should be about grace and tenderness, Tarr seems to say, smiling like a Cheshire cat. Yet we suspect we see through it all -- the lull before the storm, this most untenable impasse.

reviewed: October 3, 2006

ANG TURKEY MAN AY PABO RIN (Randolph Longjas, 2013)

Don't laugh, don't gag, or maybe you should, but I sat through Ang Turkey Man Ay Pabo Rin with my prejudicial notions of a lowbrow film, and came away with a serviceable smile at the end. The film's got the surface of comedy all right, but the trajectory is one of both fantasy and reality, the better to keep us on tenterhooks. Yet what comes to the fore, in the final reckoning, are the ricochets of all its spoken details -- the whole seemingly made to subordinate to its parts (its paroles) -- teased out with a fine-toothed comb for what they are comically worth and how they finally cohere into a repeatable picture of a not-so-uncommon reality: our unique relationship and transaction with the American White through language and logos.

Ang Turkey Man Ay Pabo Rin begins with a frantic search for a turkey, to be cooked and made ready for an American-style Thanksgiving Day on Filipino soil. The searcher is a twenty-something Filipina (named Cookie Bigoy) who, along with her trusty best friends, crisscrosses the city to purchase this relatively uncommon variety of poultry in order to surprise her new American husband (named Matthew Adams). The couple are depicted as a success story: poster children for an online site revealingly called KanoLovesPinay. com. It’s not, however, what one might cynically think. While a lot gets lost in the cultural and linguistic translation, this is no one-way street, not a marriage of convenience for either side: the couple seem to genuinely take pains to meet halfway as they adjust to one another’s cultural idiosyncracies and language barriers. 

But will it all be enough? Will the marriage of miscegenation work out? Many an utterance here lays, piece by piece, a brick on the wall of sound dividing the couple. Every instance of verbal communication between them represents an everyday (mis)adventure: transliterations, homonyms and multifarious puns, idiomatic malapropisms, even twang and diction, among other linguistic pitfalls, become an occasion to confound the couple, and translate to comical recognition for us with a dramatic -- or rather, comic -- irony that we so cherish. Even when the American seems to be catching on to the quirks of the Tagalog tongue: his wife unwittingly springs the trilingual trap on him (the average local is uniquely trilingual, of course). The Filipino, it bears observing, switches signs and codes almost unconsciously to the consternation of the foreigner.

That's what's at the tip of the tongue. Ang Turkey Man Ay Pabo Rin sustains a steady stream of consciousness, a laugh-a-minute pace for much of its duration. The Filipina at the center is not glibly alone: she has an equally uproarious set of friends and an equally uproarious set of parents, who among other things, display their inability to memorize the foreigner’s name, while spouting their supernatural superstitions.The Filipina's brother, meanwhile, has traded his jeepney for a career in rapping while curiously resenting the American and his sincere overtures of friendship.

Longjas' film, however, can sometimes be a mixed bag of new and hackeneyed hilarities, all too ready with its scatter-shot approach to comedy, so that even the lisp, that hoary old trope of comicality, gets another insufferable ventilation here. (Didn’t we just suffer through another stuttering character in Purok 7?) But side by side with another comedy watched on the same day, Bingoleras, Ang Turkey Man Ay Pabo Rin seemingly has few comedic pauses. That might be a dubious sign – its over-eagerness  to please -- but in hindsight the crude mixture is the kind of chatter one encounters day after day. Just as one says that, the film mixes tones, switches gears and takes on the touch of the serious -- when the Filipina presents herself at the American Embassy to get a much-coveted visa, a passport to Pennsylvania and a much-cherished anticipation of snow. 

With a scenario negotiating interpersonal and interracial relationships, the onus is on enunciation and acting, and both its leads, Tuesday Vargas and Travis Kraft, come up aces. Vargas, for one, has expressive diction which, coupled with rubbery facial expressions honed on tv and in stand-up routines, seems all but second nature. Kraft is no slouch either, he may have the seeming package of a Superman but he has the comic prerequisite, the much-mocked and much-imitated, iconic twang. Both come across with upstanding personalities for roles that entail wholesomeness (squeaky-clean, albeit already conditioned by American-ness by the time the film opens). Together, they pull off a genuine couple, despite their disparate backgrounds: the American, a white-collar professional, and the Filipina, a deboner of milkfish, with a son by another man. Somehow, key to bridging the linguistic chasm remains, paradoxically, true understanding. Watch, and yes, listen, to see and hear why.

     

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

ANG KWENTO NI MABUTI (Mes de Guzman, 2013)

Money connotes evil. Not just that, money has come to denote evil. Entirely evil. Lopsidedly that is how Robert Bresson coldly dissects the figure and presence of money in L'Argent: a manipulative demon with its accompanying materialist ideology, a trail of murder and crime lying in its wake. Nothing good can come out of it: money reeks. Enter Ang Kwento ni Mabuti, a film that reimagines this signifier of sin, repurposing money for yet another intention. The old aura of money seems to invert and shift colors in this new and commendable film by Mes de Guzman: foregrounding the question of what is virtuous in a world where nothing is unalloyed, where ethical and moral absolutes are a pipe dream even for utopians among us. Here many of the dependent characters are deeply flawed and face an unpromising earthly future, their sins wearing out their originality and mortality, by the time the virtuous Mabuti is placed in the hot seat, tested by poverty's ineluctable problem and a bagful of money.

In its searching of worldly deliverance, Ang Kuwento ni Mabuti is not unlike an old morality play, where its title character has an agon with her sense of right and wrong, whether it will serve an individual or a social good (at least her own society), but the stakes are less otherworldly and sublime, more immediate and mundane: terrestrial salvation. Forget the world to come, it seems to imply. Pragmaticism and consequentialism are not untenable, it whispers. Mabuti must read the fine print that comes with the money and the semaphores of circumstance: isn't it value neutral?

All but a truism to say that everything Nora Aunor touches turns, even from dross, into gold: the alchemy of Mabuti is no exception. Nora lends tremendous cachet to it by her stellar thespian presence, reaffirmed here with understated perfomance in the Ilocano idiom. But what must be equally recognized is how Mes de Guzman’s authorial achievement lays equal claim to this movie, based on a story he wrote some time ago without an explicit wish of making it into a medium for a Nora Aunor. Everyone around de Guzman, however, simply couldn’t help discerning the bright adumbration of the great actress in the role of Mabuti. De Guzman kept his fingers crossed and one day, with a connection made and consummated, she simply showed up on the set.

Ang Kuwento ni Mabuti may present a scenario so well-trodden as to be negligible -- how to transform the matter of money, the crux of conscience? -- but de Guzman handles it in such a way that we simultaneously shake and nod our heads by the time his film concludes. Chances are, most will agree with its signals of predestiny, but not without a sneaking question left hanging silently somewhere within. But it is all part and parcel of Mabuti’s own passion. Along the way, she, like a pilgrim in progress, is tested and tempted, and when we suspect coming on an obligatory Christian ending, de Guzman inverts the influence of religion: Mabuti’s own definition of virtue comes to the fore. Remember how the devilish son gets thwarted time and again in de Guzman’s earlier film, Diablo? This time the progress of Mabuti’s journeys gets often interrupted, but all is stoically shouldered. That is Mabuti’s deceptive grace. Mabuti, like a ministering saint, fields and keeps the needy under her wings: the daughters of her errant daughter, the equally cavalier and wayward son, and the many neighbors who need her faith and shamanic succor.

But in greater moral terms, if Bresson fingers money as filthy lucre, passed around as a gun in a genuine Russian roulette, de Guzman elevates the matter of money beyond something like a Kantian category, although we might be convinced we are trapped in one with all the crookedness and immorality surrounding Mabuti. Perhaps when, in the hardscrabble, poverty-stricken life that must be waged in the mountains of Nueva Vizcaya – where Communist insurgency remains; bankrobbers, too -- Mabuti’s countenance seems to change at the sight of money, hinting at the vortex it represents, money that's not rightfully hers, the dangers of fate she thinks are playing tricks on her prove to be self-perpetuating and self-terminating. Fate seems here to tempt and ultimately withhold its own dangers and risks. That is perhaps, the one of two knocks on the film - along with its raft of piggybacking characters. -- Or is it simply the nature of fate?

Mabuti, in this sense, is the incarnation of sainthood made pragmatically attuned to the times. Far from a daughter who has children by many different men, a son who adds another, Nora's Mabuti remains resilient and earnest reminiscent of a Giulietta Massina through it all: she has a shy smile behind a dusky and weathered exterior. When not minding her many granddaughters, she has always enough time – the patience of a saint -- to dispel the incessant threat of rabies and venom with some spit and her magical poison-sucking stones.

Local color proves both bane and boon for the film: the mostly non-professional characters, Novo Vizcayanos, come off as mostly wooden if you speak their language, but they also have the unique presence, the sui generis, to enchant you by their strangeness – even as de Guzman makes no secret of his enthusiasm for his home province, his intent to democratize filmmaking in those parts. Sometimes, however, the movie's stab at equal opportunity threatens to spin off to many loose ends and subplots that divert with their seeming function of dedramatized anthropology. On the other hand, indigenous details may divert in a good way -- e.g. the playthings of the forest, the sumpak, the proliferation of shops for secondhand clothes or wag-wag stores, the corruption of local officials with jueteng, the many military checkpoints, the superstitions around faith healers. Somehow, it all works -- all accretes to texture. Forget how de Guzman passes off the town of Aritao as a city, because these are the ramifications of a journey of fate where, from de Guzman’s perspective, nothing is simply as it seems. Even as Nora has expressed an earnest interest in a film about villainy, the seeds of evil have been subtly planted here, only justified with a benevolent end, deep within Mabuti's bosom. Think about it. Light, after all, may never occur without its underside of shadow.  

  

THE GUERILLA IS A POET (Kiri/Sari Dalena, 2013)

Hitler, however, was a painter too. 

What I regret most about this documentary is how it sanctifies Jose Maria Sison as a trans-historical hero, and how it attempts to foist this on us with selective memory. Reenacting the anecdotes of an interview conducted recently by the Dalenas, The Guerilla is A Poet is the apparent meandering of memory, hither and thither, without dramatic structure and logic, only with a view towards glorious apotheosis. Never in doubt a hero, as wide-eyed reverence goes, it shows Sison from an early age already made aware of his feudalistic family's land grabbing and as a young man already fully formed laying the groundwork for the New People’s Army, to his becoming monument to the Communist Party of the Philippines. 

What is regrettable is the man of marble, a portrait that verges on the cult of personality, warts and all simply omitted, along with the thick accretion of crimes barnacled around him. What is regrettable is how throughout its duration of 2 and a half hours, this itinerant documentary fails to meet head-on much of the supposed apocrypha, but generously allocates time for Sison's height of popularity and heroics, his martyred coevals, even his famous contemporaries like Ninoy Aquino, as if to gloat over his own iconic status, while remaining silent on the more urgent issues raised against his past.

It is most exigent that this film wax enthusiastic not just about Amado Guerrero (Sison's pseudonym) and his poetic side, but about the negation of his perceived dark side, his putative ruthlessness, as a revolutionary leader. In recent decades, his image has undergone an all but total eclipse and this film, an overlong non-sequitur, strains to be his rejoinder. Sometime in 2006, snapshots of him exposed him dancing cheek-by-jowl with actress Ara Mina in a Christmas shindig in the Netherlands, as if captioned to question his lifestyle while in exile, whether his vow of solidarity with those still fighting in the hills of his country is an earnest one. But that is the least of his worries. For one he has been charged with the indiscriminate purging of the New People's Army in the 1980s, to root out deep penetration agents, but at the expense of thousands of innocents. He has disavowed any role in it, but there remains the allegation, too, of his having a hand in the assassinations of former NPA commanders in the early 2000s like Arturo Tabara and Romulo Kintanar, who were his vocal enemies and dissenters.

The Dalenas seem to tiptoe around the Sisons here, careful to ask sanitized questions and teasing out romantic displays of heroism and comradeship, poetry and song. Was this a documentary ever meant to be an objective one? Doubtful,  given that some of its collaborators -- a couple of actors here, a script writer there -- are recognizable partisans from the Left. If the crimes alleged against Sison are all part of black propaganda – perhaps by the state or by Sison’s enemies within the movement -- The Guerilla is A Poet is tantamount to an instance of revisionism and vanity press. Here there is an attempt at an iconic rehabilitation and restoration. His only crime, the movie deigns, is how he would obliviously forget his children and leave them unattended, all the while typing away committed literature and poetry. A slap on the wrist, while foregrounding the romantic zealousness of his passion as a man of letters. All venial sins, if at all, as opposed to the alleged mortal sins the movie should be investigating. The one imputation against Sison that he deigns to confront here is his widely believed responsibility in the Plaza Miranda Bombing, an accusation shared even by the irreproachable Senator Jovito Salonga. Sison deflects it and fingers the  convenient suspect: then-President Marcos. Easy out, of course. End of story.  

Interminable at a full 2 ½ hours, a time that should have been more than enough to answer all the rumors swirling around the man, what we get is digression and detour. Amorphous, there is no rhyme or reason, no dramatic arc to be gleaned, just anecdotes stitched together in an incoherent skein, with an occasional, intermittent line from Sison that makes us wonder about the veracity or fictiveness of what is being portrayed. What we get are relatively unimportant subplots and figures like Major Aure, the fearsome military torturer accompanied with portentous music, and Ka Teresa, the beautiful revolutionary and her equally doomed revolutionary husband. We are never certain about their facticity: most probably enthusiastic evocations of legends known in Communist lore. Simply, none of the hard questions get asked, not even a great deal of the man and his wife’s life in the Hague is touched upon.

What we are made to appreciate is a heroic man of commitment, the firebrand of the revolution, the writer of the supposed “bible of the Communist Party”. How he has risked his rights as an enemy of the state, how he has risked his freedom as a fugitive, how he has risked his life crossing treacherous terrain, mountains and rivers, while finding time by the flickering light of a kerosene lamp to create poetry in the middle of the night in the middle of the woods. All romantic, superlative stuff. There are several moments about the nature of life in the hills and in the armed struggle -- in particular the parity between female and male revolutionaries when it comes to love -- that sometimes prove interesting, but they come few and far between, amid the obligatory portrayals of fist pumping, intoning of committed slogans, revolutionary/Communist rhetoric and the singing of the Internationale and songs of protest.

Even as this movie plays in major theaters across the capital to the enthusiastic slumming of bourgeois audiences, the mysterious deaths of Sison's opponents remain unsolved. It is said that a series of fatwas still remains in force against the man’s enemies within the movement. If you saw this movie without knowledge of his alleged past, you would never suspect the man of any evil and wrongdoing. You might even swoon over this idealized man who can wield the armalite as well as the writing pen. There is a scene here that encapsulates the thrust of the film: Jose Ma. Sison waxing eloquent with revolutionary tirade as he, even under military custody, confronts the buffoonish figure of President Marcos. Did this dialogue ever really happen? The film – Sison himself in voice-over -- claims it did. But perhaps all too late, even the man may be uncertain about his recuperation now -- never to be embalmed for worship, never to lie in state like Uncle Ho, or his idol, Chairman Mao. Ever.

TRANSIT (Hannah, Espia, 2013)

 
The need for roots, writes philosopher Simone Weil, underlies the most vital and essential of necessities which constitute "the needs of  the soul." Few people take this perspective more to heart than the Filipino diaspora, several millions strong, trapped in transit, scattered around the world in uncertain provisional chronotopes. As dramatized by Hannah Espia’s feature debut, Transit, the striving wish to reterritorialize in their place of exile is of uncertain liminality. 

Filipino expatriates and their families are precariously subject to the ever-shifting domestic configurations of their adopted countries. In Israel, after the passage of an immigration law in 2009 that aimed to curtail the rights of children born out of foreign workers (primarily those under five years old), there is a sense that they are deemed "hyphenated" and forced back to their supposedly foreign country of origin. In Transit, its Filipino-Israeli subjects must learn to live and hide -- like the film's elapsed migrants -- in the inconspicuous margins of the country they have grown – and grown up -- to call home. 

Espia’s deeply affecting first film dramatizes the lives of these Filipinos and part-Filipinos who are in the process of once again being displaced, deterritorialized and broken apart. Set in Tel Aviv, the film is framed as five perspectives of five primary characters: Moises, a caregiver to a sympathetic old man, and his son named Joshua, not yet 5 years old and subject to the new immigration law; Janet, a domestic helper who must contend with her teenage daughter Yael, who is undergoing adolescence and a crisis of identity that favors her Israeli upbringing; and their niece, Tina, who must go into hiding after her visa has expired. Their stories all imbricate, and thus amplify, the bigger picture of a sense of home and identity under threat of forfeiture.

In Transit, the fate of 4-year-old Joshua bookends this film, his impending repatriation means a harsh fate, a destiny of displacement that might be beyond his comprehension, one which will take the deportee to an irregular future of familial separation, an unfamiliar country he will be forced to inhabit and adapt to. Repatriation seems even a misnomer -- Joshua's young worldview is instinctively Hebrew, adopting few Filipino attributes, tendencies and loyalties -- the place of one's birth and childhood is most certainly the place of one’s home and culture, familiarities and customs.

Rootlessness characterizes the fate of Joshua's kind. An absence of freedom -- an instinctive agoraphobia -- in Joshua's known birthplace, is a strong undercurrent within the film. Nurturing spaces across Tel Aviv and the rest of Israel are not meant for children of immigrants anymore – playgrounds have turned desolate and barren. Children subject to the new immigrant legislation must learn to keep indoors, out of sight, and fear the approach of law enforcers. The first things they learn to do is to lie about their identities, to even wear disguises and hide. They must learn to become “invisible.” Such is Transit's indirect indictment of a homeland that cannot provide and sustain, so that it is preferable to hide, fugitive-like, in another country.

If Espia focuses on the Filipino immigrant and his uncertain transit, his efforts at reterritorialization in their adopted country, which they have served with earnest labor and loyalty, face a complicated reality: none of the children here, for one, seem to identify with their parents' ethnicity. What the film calls into question, in the main, is the severity of the new immigration law – protestations against which are made by Moises and Janet and the presence of Israeli advocacy groups seeking the law’s repeal -- which seems blind to its harsh repercussions of dispersing and fracturing families.

As an exilic and diasporic film, Transit is a deceptive example that does not show the usual artisanal aesthetics, but it certainly qualifies as what Hamid Naficy calls "accented cinema" -- not the least for  its multi-linguality (not unlike those true-to-life characters they portray, even the cast literally acculturate by learning Hebrew and internalizing "a double consciousness") -- that foregrounds the spirit of uncertainty and liminality at the mercy of countries of migrancy. 

While the film depicts the common Israeli as a compassionate human who takes in the Filipino, the law proves to be another matter: a merciless institution to be feared and, helplessly, to reckon with. Espia, however, does not demonize Israeli immigration with draconian cruelty, but they are no less strict, uncompromising enforcers of their domestic and immigration policies. Against this background of unsparing enforcement of laws, Espia weaves human stories of silent dignity and struggle, doing so with mature dexterity and emotions, although momentary, impressionistic narrative gaps in one or two episodes appear (e.g. the episode involving Tina seems muddled and elliptical), seemingly glossed over, presumably owing to logistical constraints. But maybe it's just as well, Transit is better off understated than bogged down in sentimental overload.

Never, it must be said, has a Filipino production on foreign soil demonstrated such a mature and elegant assurance -- never with such controlled drama, with such a familiarity of time and place, with such a marshaling of resources, with such scope and detail, with such texture and tone -- that easily outpaces preconceptions of what the world has come to dismiss as the conventional Filipino film. Espia is a director to watch out for and Transit stands head and shoulders above the field at Cinemalaya 2013. 

DEBOSYON (Alvin Yapan, 2013)

 

Henceforth, a compact between him and us -- both sides sustaining, in each other, a mutual faith. 

Keeping faith, pledging belief in the praxis of this writer-director as a creator of cinematic art, as a storyteller, as a purveyor of native knowledge. In return, he vows not to shortchange us in an effort to keep us in the thrall of "enchantment." I’ve never met Alvin Yapan, nor have ever heard any anecdotes about him, but this appears to me is Debosyon’s secret thesis. Yapan is in search of his twin – the poet in search of his steadfast reader, a kindred audience. Yapan has proven to be an enchanter, a thoughtful fabulist, literally the interpreter of our native fantasies and folklore amid our backtracking stance from the phenomena of the mythic and the supernatural. Yapan embodies the dwindling breed who can still shift shapes with the times, even in monstrous ways, in the hopes of exhorting his viewer to keep faith and not abandon him.

The director of Ang Panggagahasa Kay Fe is very much the director of Debosyon. Both films convincingly transport us to Yapan’s realm of fantasy and unreality that we are gradually relinquishing and crowding out, metaphysically and spatially. If Ang Panggagahasa shows a kapre's earthly incursion as an act born out of territorial marginalization and encroachment, Debosyon is likewise that -- where forests once lay untouched, they are now crawling with flower gatherers and rebels -- installing the legend of Daragang Magayon and the Virgin of Penafrancia as the last bastion of our spiritual and mythical culture.

Myth and religion, and their final stand. We must stay the course and keep faith in it. Yapan seems to say this in ways that never sound too desperate, but always with a modicum of grace and artistry. Debosyon may one day be no more than a relic of a forgotten time, an anachronism in the age of shifting cultures and ideologies, but the artfully heroic and tenacious holding onto a fast receding epoch is where Yapan commits and casts his lot.

Devotion, to tease out the connotations of this word, is a heroic, even mystical, attribute, after all. Yapan, by the way he has reconstituted our narrative heritage and returned to something that exerts lesser and lesser influence on us, is a heroic, perhaps quixotic, yet nonetheless dedicated director. Thus he hopes nothing less from us: that we, his audience, will reciprocate his own devotional and votive efforts. Yapan, after all, is a university professor whose intrinsic tendency is to impart knowledge. Devotion should be a two-way avenue: the teacher instilling knowledge, as the student processes his every word and converts it to usable wisdom.

Yapan’s Debosyon proves no less as a shorthand for a leap of faith, no matter how the fantastic half-human, half-mythical chimera takes form. No matter what shape and shift Oryol, Daragang Magayon, the Virgin of Penafrancia assume, the viewer must stand firmly by and not lose ground. Debosyon, if anything, is almost certainly a repudiation of the literalism of verifiable science, in contradistinction to the way Yapan has come to end his films with double or multiple meanings. That is the realm of poetry, not cut-and-dried certainty always reduced to a unitary resolution. But even as Yapan exhorts us to pay heed and keep faith, he will endeavor to show all his cards, his own human nature perhaps, out of his own good faith as a steadfast educator. Debosyon is his confession of not being infallible, that he can be a monstrous entity, but his monstrosity is not ill motive but simply a rigorous eagerness to profess and be learned from.

As Debosyon culminates in the intertwining of man and myth, both in metaphorical and literal ways, a more intense confession takes place. Why man has kept faith in his supernatural beloved is the result of a devotee’s instinctual epiphany through intuition – again a reproach of the growing scientificity of civilized and modernized life. Debosyon, by contrast, stands as an earthy, all but bestial reproach of the strict morality that science props up -- the monism of science dovetailing with the monotheism of religion -- a science which finds no virtue nor value in the union of man and myth, man with anyone. (What might be the most chimerical sex, the most chimerical union, the film seems to rhetorically ask.) As with Yapan’s Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa where the prospective male lovers face each other eye to eye in a meaningful way, Debosyon does confess how the transcendent glint in the eyes tells the whole story. Cinema, it bears repeating after all, is the kindred medium for the eye, and this is Yapan’s newfound medium to instruct us, never too literally, but with a creatively sinuous and shape-shifting dexterity.