7 lessons from books made into movie adaptations

7 lessons from books made into movie adaptations

CINEMALAYA

While I really wanted to see all the films during the Cinemalaya festival, I was able to buy the only remaining available tickets for "Dagsin", "Kusina," "Hiblang Abo", "Shorts A", "Shorts B", two Asian Films, plus Lav Diaz's "Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis." Quite expensive if you ask me, but this was the only time I could really watch a lot of Cinemalaya films so I endured the pocket drain. However, I wasn't so satisfied, that is, as a simple movie goer.

Dagsin is supposed to be heavy and yet, I felt something was lacking in the gravitas. If not for the ever brilliant Tommy Abuel Dagsin would have suffered more. Judy Ann was exemplary in Kusina, but Kusina itself failed to give me that moviegoer high. I didn't like the Kusina template of stage and film fusion. There is too much going on that deserved great cinematography. I guess, I simply was looking for the Film-ic quality. Kusina's textuality bored me. The kitchen/cooking/food motif occupied too much space in the narrative that its symbolic quality just got lost in the monotony and the repetitions. (I was told that Mercury is Mine handled the same motif more cleverly, so I regret that I didn't see it). And of course, because of the fusion thing, the mis-en-scene is obviously so staged and although I can understand the studio effect, I have long favored exterior and interior spaces interspersing and giving a much needed exposition of characterizations of interior and exterior selves. But maybe that's the point of the film, that there is agonizing interiority that the character in Kusina is unable to exteriorize, and thus, her space doesn't expand and she dies without ever going beyond the boundaries of her safely defined space.

The other characters in Kusina could have been better cast. All of them are stereotypes, with strained albeit contrived dialogue, formula types of formula friends, with their wardrobe amplifying them as formulaic constructs.

In the past, I didn't see Rene Villanueva's Hiblang Abo as play, so I treated the film as play, and did not go look for anything other than the nuance of the text as would be delivered in a play. This is a mistake of course, because film is a visual medium and the nuances that are supposed to be read in the subtexts of a play, the supposed mystery of each personal struggle, ceased as nuanced puzzles and became apparent in the visual montage. I also wondered about the film's casting of one and the same actor for the younger versions of the three old men in the story. I offer myself the answer that there is no symbolic meaning in that casting after all, it was just Indie budgeting constraints which led to that decision. But I hope I'm wrong and just plain stupid in not seeing the reason/meaning behind this choice.

I found the shorts entertaining, but predictable too in the Filipino-indie-shorts tradition (The good ones had a twist of course, like in an O' Henry story). However, I saw great promise in Direk Quesada's film Pektus. For me, Pektus was excellent for a low budget Indie. The pace, the editing, the mis-en-scene and the acting are all well deliberated. But mostly, I like the idea of found chances as opposed to missed opportunities. For me, that was a very ethical point that isn't submerged but also isn't preached. I had an aha! moment in this film, like an epiphany of sorts.

The Asian film from Kazakstan, The Stranger is superb. The cinematography is awesome and the visual footage succeeded immensely in projecting the isolation, the strangeness, the utter difference of one man from the rest of the population. Then as usual, the film from Afghanistan is terribly depressing, but the acting is superb. This film will ever remind me that there is much more that needs to be done for women. A film can only expose. How long will this situation of female subjugation last in other parts of the world such as Afghanistan? What can people do? How can a film make people responsible? The face of that woman in Afghanistan, who is with skill, but whose skill doesn't count; who's only value is in the dowry she gets from marriage; who's recourse against such arranged marriage is begging on the streets for survival -- that face needs a response.

Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (Lullaby in Sorrowful Mystery) turned out to be easier to watch (eight hours)  than Norte Sa Dulo ng Kasaysayan (four hours). The film has a linear narrative that focused on the days of Gregoria De Jesus's search for the body of Andres Bonifacio. The almost mythical telling involving three creatures of the forest, all Tikbalangs, problematizes the still unsolved mystery of Bonifacio's un-recovered body. Considering Gregoria De Jesus's youth at the time of that event in Philippine history, and the circumstances around her capture and her husband's arrest by the Filipino soldiers, the film succeeds in projecting an ancient, almost forgotten, quite anachronistic, and not even a footnote of a question in our national memory. The issue resonates however given that we still have "the disappeared" in our midst, and most of them are rumored heroes as well.

Lav Diaz shoots the entire film in black and white, but the story is not black and white at all. References to the Japanese film classics in the visual narration style is Diaz homage to filmmaking at its core, an exposition of soul and conscience using scarcely edited and prolonged real time photography. (The only downside in watching this film is when somebody, lulled by the scarcely edited footage and getting impatient, started to munch that crispy chips or popcorn and this moviegoer was distracted from certain deep ruminations.)

El Filibusterismo's Isagani and Basilio interpellate Diaz's interior monologue about history. In the end, Basilio, the hero of the novel, lives with all his unanswered questions and lost idealism, while Bonifacio, the hero of the revolution dies in the hands of the men he supposedly led. And the Gregoria De Jesus's of our nation's story? They will simply have to live through the mysteries, endure the superstitions, cast off the demons and tikbalangs of their desperate expectations and lull themselves to dreamless sleep.

Jennylyn's RomComs

So to relieve my stress, I went to the movies and saw them all - English Only, Walang Forever, and Just the Three of Us. Jennylyn rules the romcom genre at the moment! In the first movie, she is so lovely that I contemplated dressing myself up in a certain translator's stylish country flare for an un-intimidating dating. But not necessarily to meet a Derek (although that won't be a minus), but to get and finalize high paying translation/editing/writing job contracts!

In the second film, Jen was impossibly successful as a romance novelist, getting all her "hugot" premises from real love-life. The romantic course of her life precludes a self-destructive streak but, thank you very much, the self-destruction is worth it because the cause of the ultimately desired self-devastation is Jericho Rosales! I was thinking that precisely the reason for my lack of romantic story arches was my passion for placid wholeness. No wonder, I can't really write anything happy or tragic in a passionate sense. My life has been sooooo nice.

And finally, in Just the Three of Us, Jen's problematic and losyang demeanor, her already devastated self seeking escape, sexes the unromantic, prim and proper John Lloyd Cruz - and bam! They beget a child! Catastrophe in the beginning, but everybody is happy in the end. There's no way this cliched love story will end tragically. But well, Jen's character is one for feminists to grind their teeth into.

I have my own Hollywood RomCom favorites; On top of them all , Nottinghill. The best scene there is the last scene with "When You Say Nothing At All" playing in its loveliness in the background while a pregnant Julia Roberts reclines on Hugh Grant's lap (she's a superstar), as the latter reads a book (he's a book-lover), and both are quiet and comfortable in each other's company.

In Jennylyn's movies however, I can't recall a single scene that leaves an impact. All three movies showcase Jen's comedic flare, but she is the same Jennylyn Mercado, the GMA actress, in all three movies: the same delivery of the dialogues, the same quirky movements, the same laugh when happy, the same cry when sad, the same facial mannerisms. Even her hair style is the same in all three movies, since in all, she looks like she has forgotten to comb her hair, but she looks pretty nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the male characters are mere romantic interests, and to add dimension, they all came from problematic family backgrounds, and they eventually meet Jen's big and happy family (always). There are always those loyal friends of course for both woman and man and the usual complications of friends giving wisdom but philos never wins in an eros charged story.

But I was entertained nevertheless. Would I recommend them? Yes, but just remember that they aren't for the morally upright.

I am still waiting for Jen's definitive romcom. I hope she won't stay on in this stereo-casting.