Against the world. Contra mundum. The filmmakers behind the film Ang Larawan are, indeed, against the world of commerce and bad taste. They defy the season of films that were bandied as the season for all Filipinos to laugh together in a moviehouse, at a steep price.
Loy Arcenas, the director who has proven himself already abroad, ventures into filmmaking once more, this time tackling a play once considered to be unstageable. The option to film offers that great opportunity to expand the scenes that could only be hinted at dramatically and as theatrical devices would allow onstage. The filmmakers, therefore, had to face the great expectations of a contemporary cinematic version of Ang Larawan, which is based on the play of Nick Joanquin, titled Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.
Joaquin called this play an “elegy in three scenes,” capturing in drama the death of a period. The play might as well be called a memory play, recalling in structure a greater play, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.
If the filmmakers had to struggle against the vice of profit, marked by this newfound practice of pulling out from moviehouses films that do not make a killing at the box office, I was struggling with the burden of my own memories.
I watched Ang Larawan with the filter of my own remembrances about three inestimable performances done in the past of the play, not the musical. I was a young student about to leave for abroad when the organizers of the program asked us to watch Portrait of the Artist as Filipino with the majestic tandem of Daisy Hontiveros Javellana and Naty Crame Rogers, as directed by Lamberto Avellana himself. It was the mid-1970s and the venue was the Little Theatre of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, at the height of dictatorship. No matter, the Candida and Paula of Avellana and Rogers, respectively, bulldozed themselves into my brain and stayed there till this day. There would be no other Marasigan sisters in my heart. The play was in English and, I would find out later, further edited for that staging. In diction and inflection that could never be imagined with other native (a concept that is highly irrelevant now) English speakers, the actors that night brought me to the pathos of those golden years when people who were wealthy acted with gentility and spoke in the grammar of the educated. For some reason, the thought that there was indeed this Intramuros that appealed to me as it may have appealed to a generation taught to appreciate the colonial years.
The other two performances featured Rita Gomes and Lolita Rodriguez, and the latter with Charito Solis under the then-young Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta). The play of Nick Joaquin is set in 1941, in those few days before World War II exploded in the face of the elite who gloried in the might of the new colonizers, the Americans.
The Marasigan house is caught in between these two periods of colonization—the grandeur of Spanish occupation present in the language, faith and ideals of Europe, and the American with its jazz and forward-looking technology.
In one of those huge houses, now crumbling, lives the painter, Don Lorenzo. He has painted a self-portrait, which has touched the curiosity of many. He would not sell the painting, which is described as depicting Aeneas bearing on his back his father Anchises, as they flee the burning city of Troy. The scene is based on Vergil’s Aeneid and has been painted by several artists in Europe. In so many ways, there’s nothing glorious or immortal or original or relevant about the subject matter. If one stretches the discourse of art, then perhaps we can say that the painters in the prewar and back were into neoclassicism, borrowing from tales of ancient Greece and Rome.
This brings us to the problem of the film, the musical and the subject matter of the play itself. A yawning social distance is what occurs between the audiences of today and a piece called Ang Larawan.
What is the story of this two unmarried women and their father who keeps himself inside his room and refuses to sell a painting, and why should we care about them?
It’s a difficult problem that, perhaps, could have been solved if we were treated to a sumptuous treat of the cultures of that age. As it is, the bathos and pathos on which can be located the drama and fate of Candida and Paula are sorely missing. This is no fault of the filmmakers, as it is the fact that times have changed, and the thinking about the past has severely shifted. The history of this nation, with much misfortune, has always been built on the memory of the elite—those glorious balls, the tertulias, the manners of the landed even when their acquisition of properties was the reason for the structured inequalities present in postwar, the songs that did not speak to the identities of the Filipinos.
To Nick Joaquin’s selective memory (because we don’t share it) can be attributed the weakness of the musical. We are missing as well the eloquence of the architecture—the house that is about to be sold. The camera opted for tight shots of the Marasigan house, which could have made the film more engaging. We want to see the curlicues on the wall, the portraits, the sweep of space that is worth our middle-class admiration. In the Peta adaptations, the house is turned into the Fort Santiago ruins. A striking if not odd deconstruction, the Peta productions advanced the metaphors of the play—you know, the ruins of the past, the evocation of years gone by in the shards and skeletons of pillars and posts.
The Peta productions yielded memorable and magisterial performances from Rita Gomez, Lolita Rodriguez and Charito Solis. Gomez was Candida to Rodriguez’s Paula in the very first Peta mounting of the play. Years later, Lolita Rodriguez, in one of her many comebacks, decided to play Candida to Charito Solis’s Paula. In my memory, Lolita Rodriguez was the quintessential Candida and Paula, a rare feat. Lino Brocka directed the Rodriguez/Solis tandem onstage and in the film Ina, Kapatid, Anak.
Paula and Candida had always been performed by towering figures, in the physical and poetic sense of it. Unfortunately, Joanna Ampil and Rachel Alejandro lacked the physicality I feel should be in the characters. Candida and Paula were elite, genteel souls of the past. They were like those old Spanish language teachers who were deathly strict and refined, but go home to dilapidated homes, and eat dried fish with “servilleta” or napkin.
In the cast, Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo, as Pepang, calls to mind those highly mannered individuals. Yulo seated, speaks with the quiver of one who gets embarrassed at the forthrightness of another person.
As the singing Candida, there is no question that Ampil rises to heights never been seen in a filmed Filipino musical. This despite the lack of memorable songs in the movie. The long stretches of recitatives can be boring. There are even single lines sung in between dialogues.
As Paula, Rachel Alejandro looks too young onscreen. Age is not the matter in films, but how the camera catches the face. Age is also an artifice that worked well with Avellana and Rogers, who were playing the roles when they were well beyond the purported age of the spinsters. In our social history, women are old maids when they are not married at the age of 30. As Tony Javier, Paulo Avelino lacks the scheming charm. We can’t hate his Tony Javier, as we can’t also admire or envy him.
Robert Arevalo, despite the lack of a good voice, pulls it off as a man who gives up his poetry for a life as a politician. He deserves those close-ups. In this regard also, the cinematography has the disconcerting habit of doing shots up close whenever the leads are about to reach the high notes, or when the music is on a crescendo. The lessons of documented opera teach the opposite: The camera moves away to allow the music to rise and focus on the character gripped by the setting or situation.
There are more illustrious characters and performances in this movie musical.
The entrances of Celeste Legaspi and Zsa Zsa Padilla demonstrate what presence is all about. The contralto of Dulce tells us we have other musical actors in our midst. Jaime Fabregas is spot-on with his character, so much so that his caramba doesn’t come across as a pretend expression.
Leo Rialp as Don Lorenzo is almost divine in that brief exposure.
There is one character in the play and in the musical that introduces the story. He is Bitoy Camacho. Like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, Bitoy is our link to this age, to this period that oddly will not come back again. Like Tom who bids Laura good-bye, the film also ends with a farewll to Candida and Paula,
As Bitoy, Sandino Martin has the least flamboyant role. Martin understands his role well and plays it with a refreshing understatement because he is, like Tom, the only real character in the piece.
Everyone is just memory.
Still, it made me comfortable when Candida refers to the painting and the house as the “conscience” of the land. That the audience at the screening didn’t react to that statement is because it doesn’t make sense at all. Written by a national artist, it’s good to think how difficult it is to choose an artist that could stand for the nation.