Two tales, two views of country at Cinemalaya 2011

The 7th year of Cinemalaya at the CCP continues a thriving indie tradition with more off-the-wall explorations of the totally other country a new Filipino generation inhabits. Closing up on two of its many faces gives an idea of a many-sided reality growing and deepening with time. Niño First we zoom into “Niño" by the U.S.-based theater director Loy Arcenas of “The Romance of Magno Rubio" fame. It’s a rich chocolate cake of a movie with a gripping tale, pinpoint casting, punctilious set design by Laida Lim, and Arcenas’s keen-eyed direction. Rody Vera’s screenplay unfolds a sensitive palette with the downward slide to genteel decay of the once-prominent Lopez-Aranda family. The bedridden padre de familia, former congressman Gaspar (Tony Mabesa), shares a grand old home with his sister Celia (Fides Cuyugan-Asencio), once the darling of Filipino opera. Her failed marriage, vanishing career, and mounting debts have forced Celia to sell her share of the house to Gaspar. She lives on his generosity with her daughter Merced (Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino) who runs the household while she functions as his caregiver. Here is the film’s greatest charm - Fides Cuyugan-Asencio as Celia, soothing Gaspar’s pains and singing him to sleep with the operatic arias they both love. Alas, musical spells are powerless to arrest the downward slide of time. Enter Mombic (Arthur Acuña), Celia’s rogue of a son, back from his latest failed business venture in Davao. Now he’s leaving for a job in Dubai and is home only to process his travel papers and leave his son Antony to the care of his mother and sister. Their world begins to shatter as Gaspar slips into a coma and his daughter Raquel (Raquel Villavicencio) comes home from the US with her son, ready to sell the house to save her from her own economic woes abroad. Celia has only a few heirlooms left to sell as she faces impending homelessness with her family. With nowhere left to turn, she resorts to faith in the Sto. Niño. Dressing her grandson Antony in Sto. Niño robes, she desperately hopes for a miracle to wake Gaspar from his coma and stop Raquel from selling the house. An escalating series of confrontations reveals everyone’s weakness like open wounds. Harking back to his youthful incestuous relationship with his cousin Raquel, Mombic attempts to strike a deal without his mother’s knowledge. Raquel is only too glad to sell when he finds a buyer for the property but in the end refuses her cousin his promised commission. Mombic leaves. Merced rises in sad dignity, the only family member who quietly accepts her fate. A defiant Celia invites her aging opera singer friends to a musical tertulia in the mansion’s grand tradition. In the middle of an aria by an aging chorus, each a reminder of a glorious irretrievable past, Gaspar dies quietly. Fates are sealed in Villa Los Reyes Magos as Celia looks out to her once beautiful garden and sees her grandson playing in his Sto. Niño robes in a poignant last illusion of hope. This is a shapely tale with fine performances and outstanding musical moments, but it’s a tad too rich in parts. Some tertulia numbers are overlong. There are also too many leitmotifs, like the incest angle and the last-minute revelation of Raquel’s son’s homosexuality, as the film runs out of room to flesh them out more credibly. Fine-tuning on the editing table would do wonders for this film. Busong “Busong," the first Filipino film in the Palawan language, is at the opposite end of the storytelling spectrum - an impressionistic weaving of filmmaker Auraeus Solito’s metaphors of homeland tied together by the theme of fate: “busong" in his native Palawan dialect. It follows the journey of Angkarang (Rodrigo Santikan), who carries his sister Punay (Alessandra de Rossi) in a hammock, searching for a cure for running sores all over her body. To the constant roar of the ocean, they wend their way through the island’s white sand beaches, giant trees and mountains, meeting different people who lend them a hand as they themselves struggle in the grip of “busong." Ninita (Bonivie Budao) has vowed never to cut down an Amugis tree as she seeks a cure for her sprained ankle, but her husband Tony (Walter Arenio) cuts the tree with a chainsaw and dies from a fallen log. A fisherman (Dax Alejandro) invokes the power of his amulet to cause stonefish stings to a white man claiming their fishing waters, but loses his son to the ocean. Aris (Clifford Banagale) comes from the capital in search of his Palawan roots, and discovers his fate as Punay’s healer. For all that, “Busong" is more of an extended film poem than a linear tale, often leaving its audience struggling with lapses of storytelling logic. Even its fascinating shamanistic rituals lose their edge in prolonged monotony. As one foreign reviewer commented, this film “will certainly leave any audience nonplussed even in arthouse cliques." The Cannes Film Festival board’s selection of “Busong" for showing at its Directors Fortnight last April, however, argued for its “higher aesthetic sensibility" and raised it to a level higher “than a cultural curio." Its scenes of pristine beauty underwater and on land are indeed powerful arguments for describing “Busong" as “political, ecological and magical" in Cannes. It peaks in the final scene as butterflies fly from Punay’s healed wounds in the best magical realist tradition. Solito calls this intensely personal film the latest of his intended decalogue on his native Palawan - the “Philippines’ last frontier," as Filipino environmentalists have it. (The first was his documentary “Basar Banal," The Search for Truth.) He has indeed steadily earned the right to fresh global attention on his homeland. His first feature film “Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros" (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros) won 15 international awards, including three at the Berlinale. It was also the first Philippine film nominated for Best Foreign film at the Independents’ Spirit Awards in the US and has been shown in more than 50 film festivals around the world. His second feature film, “Tuli" (Circumcision), won 
both Best Picture and Best Director at the Digital Competition of the 2005 CineManila Film Festival; the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema Jury Prize at the Berlinale, the International Forum for New Cinema, and the Best International feature Film at Outfest in Los Angeles. Solito is also the first Filipino to make it to the premiere independent film festival in the world, the SUNDANCE Film Festival in Utah, not once but two years in a row for “The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros" and “Tuli." Besides Berlin and Sundance, his films have been screened in major festivals around the world including Montreal, Pusan, Toronto and Rotterdam. Recently chosen for “Take 100, The Future of Film," a book published by Phaidon Press, New York, Solito is now part of an emerging generation of filmmakers worldwide deemed the most talented by ten prominent film festival directors. Perhaps “Busong" like “Niño," could use a reedit, as Solito’s filmography continues to sprout prizewinners beyond Philippine shores. - YA, GMA News