The power of loneliness

It’s one of the most sensitive and insightful films about the Filipino migrant worker yet, and it also happens to be a big-budget event film made by the country’s most powerful media corporation.

Olivia Lamasan’s Milan, the P30-M romance shot mostly in Italy with Piolo Pascual and Claudine Barretto, is a shining example of popular cinema’s capacity to produce great films that also make a lot of commercial sense.

Like Lamasan’s earlier San Francisco-set Sana’y Maulit Muli (1995), released shortly after ABS-CBN set up shop in North America, Milan also functions as a drumbeater for the media corporation’s European presence. In fact, one may well consider the female protagonist’s sideline of selling phone cards to her fellow domestic helpers as an emblem of the film’s place in the scheme of the corporation’s global marketing strategy (it also sells phone cards abroad).

That said, like many great films produced by Hollywood and Philippine studios, Milan’s saturation in the logic of capitalist enterprise enables rather than precludes its success. The technical polish, the majestic foreign vistas, the first rate actors, the literate screenplay and the publicity machinery that creates excitement about the work – these important elements are secured by studio funding rather than being loaned and begged for by independent filmmakers. It is routine, then – not an exception, as some art film-devoted critics would argue – for studios to strike gold every so often. Milan is one such case.

The film’s refreshingly nuanced moral perspective is best captured in one particular scene. On the sidewalk outside the shabby apartment where nearly a dozen Filipinos live, Jomar (At Maculangan), a wearied migrant worker gives his young, newly-arrived friend Lino (Mr. Pascual) the lowdown on the Pinoy condition: "Ang buhay ng mga Pilipino dito sa Milan, ma-L_ _ _." Pascual, who has just learned that his female roommate is fooling around with her Italian boyfriend rather than taking language lessons as she earlier told him, asks if his friend means "malibog." The oldtimer chuckles: "Hindi, malungkot."

And this is what the film is truly about. On the surface, it’s the story of a man who searches high and low for the young wife who migrated to Europe and has not been heared from eversince. But, at its core, it’s about the trauma of violating your own dreams and values to ward off the biting loneliness of being displaced in a faraway land.

All the film’s characters are lonely and compromised. Lino gives up on his quest prematurely when sadness and financial need grips him. Jenny (Ms. Barretto), a former GRO, succumbed to loneliness far earlier in her life. The same goes for their flatmates, most of whom are undocumented, underpaid, transient and terribly isolated at work and from their families in the Philippines. So sad, needy and broken are these characters that, when the romantic leads inevitably fall in love, the question that haunts them is whether they were brought together by love or by necessity.

It is fitting, then, that the film’s images of beautiful Italy are all tinged with melancholy rather than wonderment. There are no gratuitous travel film sequences here to show off the Trevi fountain, the Spanish steps, or the Venetian. Instead, the characters move aimlessly around or past them, zipping through famous landmarks as if beholding them was the last thing on their minds, inhabiting lavishly decorated villas like unsettled ghosts, stopping in their tracks to massage their aching legs while shuttling from one place to another in their painful journey to nowhere. Even more unsettling are the documentary images – shot on grainy, desaturated video – of real migrant workers giving vivid testimonies of their pain. (The great Soviet filmmakers used this technique – called typage – of casting real people in the belief that their lived experience endows the performance with a unique aura of truth.)

It’s depressing stuff. And quite fittingly so, for unlike white collar Filipino migrants in the US, many of our countrymen in Europe hold humbler jobs, are more vulnerable to culture shock, and have less to show for their work because of the higher cost of living in the old world. It is a tribute to Lamasan’s maturity as a director that this appropriate sense of gloom pervades her film – from the bone-chilling opening sequence at the Swiss border filmed almost in pitch black, to the deglamorized leads; from the cynical humor of the dialogue all the way to the understated musical score. It’s all delicately balanced with a somber sense of hope that is the hallmark of the Filipino survivor.

This film bravely goes against a national culture that shamelessly promotes migrant labor without honestly counting its costs. Unlike Sana’y Maulit Muli, it offers no images of prosperity. Even the pasalubongs about to be sent by the OFWs, wrapped in plastic and neatly labeled with masking tape, seen more like body bags than presents. In confronting the fact that the Filipino odyssey in Europe is characterized by the indignities of labor, the film offers sound politics, especially when we consider that its audience belongs primarily to those social classes that are most vulnerable to the temptations of migrant labor. It is thus easy to overlook the fact that the film symbolically offers itself (and ABS-CBN’s global presence) as a solution to the loneliness which it so powerfully describes.