HOW does one pitch a film about love to a producer, one that has lovers not ending with each other? But here is that film with the most cryptic and least romantic title, Ulan, and it dares us to listen to the stories of Maya, a young woman in whose life any kind of rain brings unhappiness.
The stories of Maya are all about love, all kinds of loves. And many films have been made about these narratives. Enough already, we may tell ourselves. But Maya is one unusual person, an unusual woman. She grew up with her grandmother who has explanations about the many things happening around us, in nature, in the night, about the stars and the universe.
As a child, Maya listens to the stories of her grandmother and believes in them. She sees elementals but is not afraid of them. One rainy day, she walks to an orchard and there sees three tikbalangs—the mythical figures that are half-human, half-horse—with the two getting married and one presiding the ritual. Maya has known them in her heart and proceeds to ask them how come they are doing the ritual when they are not, according to the tale, allowed to be in love. The creatures tell the young girl how no force can ever be stronger than love, not even the rain.
But the rains are not good to Maya. It is a rainy day when she walks up to the house of Mark, her “first love,” and discovers that all her days of waiting are in vain.
It is a rainy day when Mark asks her to come out into the rain and she gets sick.
Heartbroken, Maya runs to her confidant, Topi, and vows never to fall in love again. But she meets a handsome man who calls her his princess. But this man has an associate whose name is “Princess.” There cannot be two princesses in the life of a prince. Maya thinks she is not that pretty princess and finds out sooner that, indeed, her prince has another woman in mind. The wonder of this part of Ulan is how the filmmakers utilize the motifs of those ancient fairy tales: the love that saves the lonely, poor, young girl; the magic shoes that fit; the love that will last forever—and subvert all these elements. It is as if the storyteller is using enchantment to disenchant us. Terrific technique but there is a problem: Where do these love stories lead us to?
In the many insipid movies about love and loss, lurking in between trite conversations, is the promise that the film will end happily ever after. As with all fairy tales.
But Ulan, and this is where the film compels us to consider it as significant, is not a fairy tale. There are sensing of unnatural objects, of tiny things that have remained of stars and the expanding universe, of elementals in the rains, but they tell us about something else beyond folk tales. Ulan talks about love and the distressing and puzzling forms it assumes, but the film is not necessarily a love story. Ulan is a forest of accounts, a hallway of memories, a report on childhood and adulthood trying to make sense of happenings when every occurrence can be reduced to the coincidental and accidental.
Making these attempts to make us believe in love—and life—once more, and rendering those aims believable and beautiful is the story and screenplay written by Irene Emma Villamor and Neil Daza, respectively. Where flashbacks are the regular bane to the flow of story, in this film, the juncture between the world of Maya, the little girl, and Maya, the young woman, is blurred. It is a difficult act to conduct but therein lies the captivating poetry of Ulan in the fluidity between the worlds that are in our memories and those that are yet to be remembered.
Mention must be made also about how the story and screenplay present the world of the “unseen” as not separate from the “seen.” In Maya (the young girl and the woman), the world of enchantment is as palpable and real as the world of the real. In the end, when Maya, amid the raging storm, rushes outside to confront the tikbalang, we believe her as we believe the presence of the tikbalang.
This brings the many images in the film heretofore unseen and not confronted by any filmmaker. There is, of course, the tikbalang, profoundly and with such charming fancy depicted as masked figures. There is the terrifying woman in a bed who tells us she is Storm, a woman whose response to infidelity is the destruction of the environment. Given that these images are closer to sorcery and spell, we find them alluring. And yet, what makes the many scenes in Ulan unforgettable are those ordinary days in the rain and the extraordinary days they will bring to a woman and a man.
Ulan runs on these series of tales and myths as the storytelling, unabashedly and with ease, moves from the present to the past and back to the present again, from the real to the enchanted, from the gripping pictures of poverty in children to the facts of death and loss when rains and storms cease to be mascots of magic and memories. Maya herself grows up to be a writer, and works in a press that churns out romantic and sexy tales, with a boss who is forever taunting her and sexually harassing her.
Two very good actors are in Ulan. One has proven himself many times in the past and this is Carlo Aquino. As Peter, the person who teaches Maya and us that true love does exist, Carlo Aquino reminds us about the much quoted line from Alec Guinness, who said that when he finally decided to act before the camera, he would not do anything at all. Aquino is a wondrous face from one scene to another. The camera tilts and catches him, nuance after nuance with the uncertainty of a love that could not be there. When his Peter decides to kiss Maya, the camera moves afar for there is no need for a close-up; Aquino has prepared us already for this great scene with the many small, enthralling, quiet gestures in the previous scenes.
As for Nadine Lustre, halfway through the film, I muttered to myself: Where was I when this young woman had begun acting? Nadine Lustre has proven to be the best actress in her generation in this role of a person whose life seems to be ruled not by the stars but by the rains. Even when her confidant makes fun of her personal tragedies, she shows us that her pains are real. The role is not heavy, if we go by the measure of the local film industry; Lustre has made the light character believable—and heavily important. It has been such a long time when the camera of a local film has ever been in love with an actress. Nadine Lustre, with the face that can act, deserves that love.
Carlo Aquino and Nadine Lustre are not the usual loveteam but Ulan shows them with such compelling chemistry.
Neil Daza’s cinematography and Renald Torres’s editing contribute keenly to the narrative of the film.
Ulan comes at this time when the great metropolis is suffering from a water crisis. Its director, Irene Emma Villamor, is daring enough to shake from its roots the genre of romance and love stories to remind its practitioners that, digging deep and with truthful imagination, one can find true and new ways of talking about love. Ulan does not, however, bring real rains; what the film does bring is the hope for new, fertile ideas to a genre that has all but dried up. n
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