Soliloquies and desaparecidos

There has of late been reasonable breathing space for Philippine cinema shortly before the annual madness known as the Metro Manila Film Festival runs the gamut of theaters during the holidays. Call it an alternative margin, a hiatus even, this welcome change of pace should keep local films and their audience well grounded if somewhat off the beaten track.

We might consider Armando Lao’s Biyaheng Lupa (Soliloquy) rather timely in the face of the carnage in Maguindanao, here dealing less with the political than with the metaphysical and existential. If the massacre in the south jolts us into realizing that such magnitude of evil is possible and thus makes us question the existence of God, Biyaheng Lupa in contrast is contemplative in tone and pace, such that the deus ex machina at the end may at first glance make the viewer feel cheated, until we realize many days later, that there is no other way to end the 90-minute film, Lao’s first after being known primarily as a scriptwriter, having written Kubrador.

Before the bus passengers on their way to Legazpi City meet their grisly fate when their bus falls into a ravine (oops, sorry for the spoiler), we are engaged in a stream-of-consciousness style narrative of the diverse passengers, and remember well those that got off en route for one reason or another and so save themselves. But save themselves from what?

Among those who get off: the Virgin miracle oil salesman unwittingly ensconced in a pyramiding scheme; the housewife reunited with an underachieving hubby near a pier with a sweeping view of sky; the deaf mute who visits the gravesite of his real mother; the truant son who at the last minute decides to switch buses at a station and gets on one headed back to Manila; the conductor who is taken by ambulance to hospital after suffering a head wound when a roadside prankster throws a rock at the bus.

Granted the motif of this journey through life is nothing new, and this conceit of passengers briefly touching each other’s lives hardly original, but Lao as director may have something different to say about an individual’s relation with the external world. The bus is like a cocoon, yes, but even in the relative safety of that moving vehicle on the way to whatever destination, we are in the long haul separate and distinct and terribly alone, thus the quite offbeat subtitle we associate most with Hamlet, whose immortal words of being or not being could be considered a subtext to the proceedings.

If the characters move in a kind of cinematic haze as the movie drives on, this could be attributed to Lao’s not too solid visualization. It’s actually a writer’s film if ever there was one, because Biyaheng Lupa might really read better on the page, with its lyric turns and rhapsodies and asides and multiple digressions. Not without faults this soliloquy, but a notable debut that makes us think of choices made and promises broken and faces seen once and never glimpsed again. Watching it made us wonder how it felt for the spared journalists in the outskirts of Ampatuan town who trailed the convoy because of a slow car, and turned back when they heard gunshots around the bend.

More political in orientation is Joel Lamangan’s Dukot (Desaparecidos), that has grating torture scenes and an ideology most thought had breathed its last with the Marcos years. But political disappearances and state repression still happen today, perhaps even worse, as in the cases of the still missing Burgos, Cadapan, Empeno, to name just three.

Such dirty political realism has its downside though, because characters are painted in black and white. The activists while not perfect are sterling examples of prime movers of the struggle, while the established dark side of torturers and agents has little redeeming traits, if any.

Maybe we were looking for a little caveat to the plot, not necessarily being reactionary about it, to make us think twice of the double bladed, doublespeak politics of our time. Of course Iza Calzado was more ravishing that ravished in the rape scene, through no fault of hers. And those one-dimensional villains could not help but be boring.

Still Lamangan is worth commending for his work, which is on a level with Mike de Leon’s Sister Stella L and Lino Brocka’s Kapit sa Patalim, two acknowledged classics of the cinema of resistance when we needed it most during martial law. Film then was like a pressure valve to let out steam building up in society, a means to vent our anger at the drunken powers that be. Dukot is not in any way an anachronism and serves us just as well, because regimes change but the enemy is still very much around.

On the far side of melancholy, Paolo Villaluna and Ellen Ramos have finished the latest installment of their brooding triptych, Walang Hanggang Paalam, if we may take the liberty to view this film alongside their earlier Ilusyon and Selda. It’s another thought provoking work from the pair.

Jackie Woo is a Japanese dying from a mystery disease who revisits the Baguio of his great love, and here encounters a young woman who is evading her stupid boyfriend. On the young woman’s trail is a homosexual detective who checks in at the same hotel as the aforementioned characters, and becomes simultaneously both foil and key to our understanding of this strange concoction of relationships entwined like morning becoming Elektra.

There are heart-rending shots of Baguio we thought possible only in our imagination with excellent composition accented by classical music, even as the characters smoke too much it is as if they strayed from a long running cigarette commercial. There’s a hair-raising twist in the story’s resolution that is the closest approximation of love and terror we can get, but very Villaluna and Ramos in its patient exposition of a moral but never judgmental tale.

Woo is asked in the final scene if he found what he was looking for after his trip back to Baguio, and this is left wisely for the audience to answer. The film’s opening epigraph quotes Proust, about how restraint is a more powerful force than passion, and which could shed more than enough light on the movie, whose title borrows from a Joey Ayala song. But it may well be U2 (Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For) or the book “How Proust can change your life” (Alain de Botton).

Walang Hanggang Paalam won’t change your life, but it can make you wonder about hello, goodbye, and the things left unsaid.