film, eyeballs, brain

I missed Geo’s presentation on The Resistance of Philippine Cinema when he swung through town last month (I didn’t know one had to RSVP!), but here, I guess, is the next best thing: a free screening each of Auraeus Solito’s The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros), from 2006, Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (Miracle) from 1982, and Raymond Red’s Sakay (1993). Not sure if you have to contact the Kalayaan School for Equity folks and RSVP, but it only seats 45 people, so be there early, and bring a sweater because it’s Daly City in the summer! Details here, or click the picture above.

I haven’t seen Red’s movie, so I can’t comment on it. Solito’s Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, with a sharply literate screenplay by Michiko Yamamoto, is a particularly fine debut film. (I suspect that it’s one of the “digital squatter prostitute gay films” that director Romeo Candido takes a swipe at in this interview, and I see his point, but…). Readers of this blog will know that I’ve begun developing an increasing distaste for Pinoy slum-porn, yet Solito’s film is both utterly charming in its depiction of a first crush and gripping in its inner-city rawness.

The movie has a winning lead character in Maxi (played by a very good Nathan Lopez) — a 12-year old gay boy who effortlessly assumes the maternal role in his family of petty thieves — and during much of the film I found myself marveling, with both joy and trepidation, at the rough-edged but expansive affection between them. There’s no question that it springs forth from the Lino Brocka school of social realism, except that there’s (to pull out two characteristics) both an intelligent ambiguousness and a heartwarming buoyancy in Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros that lifts the film above most other Philippine fare, and I can’t say the same for Brocka.

Ishmael Bernal’s Himala is the kind of film that, when the word “Himala” is uttered or written, is inevitably followed by “The Greatest Filipino Film Of All-Time, Forever and Ever”, or other superlative words to that effect, and it’s unlikely that it would be deposed from its canonical perch any time soon. How anyone could pick just one movie, I have no idea, and my knowledge of Philippine cinema is relatively sparse at best, so I can’t necessarily agree or disagree, but good lord, what an amazing movie Himala is. Its most famous lines, uttered by the incredible Nora Aunor in a performance mainlined straight from Maria Falconetti and delivered to a cast of thousands (okay, hundreds), are total spoilers, so I won’t repeat them here. Suffice it to say that they’re seared into the brain of every Filipino moviegoer who saw this in the ’80s and the decades since, and yours, if you come to the screening. Just thinking about that scene makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.

But even with its incisive critique of religious / political belief and its implications, Himala isn’t necessarily a perfect film. (There is, for instance, a nauseating and gratuitous turn of events two-thirds of the way in that’s never sat well with me, because it seems melodramatically calculated to merely set up a sub-theme on voyeurism and the media.) Ricky Lee isn’t always the most subtle of screenwriters either, and his characters tend to communicate in stiff, obvious declamations. But the speeches do kind of work in Himala, precisely because it’s a medieval parable at heart.

The compelling power of Himala and its images hasn’t diminished through the years — I literally saw it three times just last year — but I’ve found myself paying less attention to Aunor’s Elsa and being drawn more and more to Gigi Dueñas’ performance as the world-weary homecoming harlot, who surveys the rowdy carnival before her and decides, wisely, that money can be made. Her character seems more complex than Elsa’s, one of many reasons to see Bernal’s outstanding film. Himala‘s juxtaposition of bleak desert solitude and the swooning pilgrims that set up camp at Elsa’s house serves as a visual corollary to the tension at the center of the movie: not the tension around “Is she, or isn’t she?”, but the one between chaos and order, spirituality and sin. Himala‘s crowd scenes, justifiedly famous, embody that tension: a riotous, seething mass of humanity, howling and keening as one, terrifying in its ecstatic beauty.

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Possibly related posts:

1. Auraeus Solito, “Tuli” (2005).
2. On Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn’s “Life As We Show It: Writing on Film” (2009).