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BEFORE I
even got to watch it, there were so many things going
against this film, Still Life. Intertextual
realities. Things that are not of the film but outside
the film, artifacts that are buried in sites away from
where we are supposed to excavate the tale of this
painter, James Magsino, traveling all the way to an
isolated island to paint his last.
There’s
the synopsis: a life-threatening disease threatening the
life of a leading character, as well as the shelf life
of the film itself. The antenna goes up: cliché. When
the plot arrived at my mental doorstep, I cautioned
myself not to not like the film. There was the title,
believe me, that spelled touchy-feely to my taste.
Personally, and this is mighty unfair altogether, I have
misgivings about the leading man, Ron Capinding,
appearing in a film. I have written about him a lot in
his theatrical outings, marveling at his Friar Lawrence
in Ricky Abad’s take-no-prisoner deconstruction of
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and seeing
demented magnificence in his portrayal of the
investigator in Dario Fo’s The Death of the Anarchist.
For those who know Capinding, he is quite a visual feast
onstage, facial and shoulder tics and nervousness
summoned like convoluted syntax necessary to flesh out
complex characterizations. Onstage, it is a flamboyance
worth the attention.
I wonder
how he would make the transition to film. This was my
question.
Watching
the film in its commercial run, I realized there were
other things countering what could have been a surge of
cinematic power. I call them distractions. Capinding’s
real power is in that voice—velvet and harsh at the same
time and given to lilt that allows long, almost
oratorical perorations candid and charming—but when
names were dropped like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf
in a conversation, the moment became an opportunity for
smirks that did not sustain scenes, bewildering rather
than bewitching.
Enervating to a degree was the musical score. It came in
a pattern and as patterns go was dull in its
predictability. If it was meant to be a guide, then it
waylaid. It was literal and distracting, to say the
least.
In the
film, there were other scenes, important ones, where the
dialogues bordered on the didactic, as if the filmmaker
wanted to cram numerous and varied advocacies in every
exchange. Still Life also did not seem to know when to
go still, as when to end. Instead of summing up, the
scenes after the “revelation” were expository,
altogether unnecessary.
Was the
filmmaker anxious the audience might not get it? And
yet, at the end of the film, I remember texting a niece
to tell her to catch this film, Still Life. I
told her: Magayon! (Beautiful in Bikolnon.)
Magayon.
I say it again, because the film has all the supple and
soft tone of that word.
The
film, for all its flaws and misplaced ambitions, has the
silent power of memory. And it is not just any
individual memory but one that summons our old familial
remembrance of life, that we live it, that it has power
over us.
You see,
I always believe a film does not teach by allowing its
characters to mouth charades or enunciate principled
standing. The lessons, if you may call them that, come
from the thud or the calm or the silence or the
stressed-out slouch at the end of the film. It is really
that overall impact of the whole narrative that
separates the good filmmaker from one who merely crams
his or her ego in almost two or even one hour of
self-satisfying visual aerobics because an opportunity
is given to do that. The film medium, even in
experimental mode, is not meant for accidents. The film
shares a story, and the audience will then share that
story. You know that scenario where all of you—four or
five—are huddled around telling each other scenes that
you all saw. You repeat the scenes, you tell someone
what that someone has also seen but in your retelling
you add your feelings now, hoping that the listener will
recognize those feelings.
I see
this in Still Life.
I also
believe in losing something in a movie, or in the
moviehouse where a film is shown. Allow me to be like
Polanski, who said cinema should make you forget you are
sitting in a theater. Still Life, as a film and a
story, does this to you—to a degree.
You are
on that island, in that house with many rooms. Despite
the distractions, you teeter on believing and not
believing. Who are these two characters? They are too
real, and their realness is on the verge of being
ordinary, but it is their being unreal that holds you
down there. You wait for the falsehoods of the man and
the woman to be disclosed at the end. They do not come.
You wonder why? The answer comes long and easy: you have
built your outlook and presumptions on the discourse of
melodrama and the genre that has become Filipino
mainstream cinema. You expect the woman intruding on the
man’s lair as demanding punishment in the form of love
or hate. Closeness between the two characters is marked
as sexual, and when the coupling does not materialize,
you conclude there is an error in this tale. A gross
error.
And the
film does have a twist. Flores, this young, young
filmmaker, rides on the vehicle of a romantic tale with
all its conventions to present a different kind of story
about love. She could have stopped there really, in that
domain of the cute, sprayed in with some sophisticated
banter. But she sees the cosmos wide and crazy: she
alters our perception of plots about men and arts and
women and past with this free and easy origin tale about
love leaping over time and logic.
Then I
write this, and feel good about these small films,
indies as we call them, being made by young filmmakers
with the maturity that should put to shame the
mainstream producers who have remained all these years
charlatans wearing with aplomb the cape of commerce.
With gusto.
Be
afraid, be very afraid, dear producers, as you just
might see your cape stepped upon by these young minds,
with imaginations ready to challenge frames and slash
down formulae for cinemas. And actors coming from
nowhere with performances for the book.
Glaiza
de Castro as Emma, the woman who tells James her past by
installment, is one reason the short life on that island
becomes very real. She is vulnerable but not whiny. Even
in tears she conjures an image of a woman whose only way
out of life is finding life in anything. It is a
difficult role, for it asks for a character whose
complexity must be crafted so simply that it does not
appear complex. In the end, when the ties that truly
bind her to James are unraveled, it is easy to look back
and recover her image now magnified many times as the
true image of love. A line that she says at the
beginning of the film becomes now doubly poignant, the
ultimate vow.
As for
Ron Capinding, well, some actors are just born actors.
His character burdened by a disease that can cripple any
actor, he creates a persona able to mix humor with
pathos as he explains the name of that syndrome that
afflicts him. Along the way, he manages to throw a pun
about indie movies (indie-indiehan). All
throughout, he surrenders those exuberant gestures I was
wary about for a rhythm and quiet strength that respect
the power of camera. I believe, with sincerity, that
Ateneo de Manila High School is about to lose a good
teacher to film.
John
Lloyd Cruz does an engaging cameo as an actor
interviewing a painter in preparation for his role as a
painter in a film. The scenes alone between Cruz and
Capinding show early signs of the maturity of Katrina
Flores, who wrote, produced and directed this moving
piece called Still Life. |
