Flight as Power
By Jose Wendell P. Capili

Angels
Directed by Ellen Ongkeko
Produced by Star Cinema
85 minutes

The University of the Philippines Film Center should be commended for resurrecting Ellen Ongkeko's Angels, a pioneering digital, but-not-yet-released masterpiece, produced by Star Cinema. Completed almost two years ago, Ongkeko's full-length debut fits perfectly into this year's celebration of the 14th International Women's Film Festival because the film constitutes the urgency that the imprecise boundaries of identities, both male and female, seem to provoke.

Ongkeko's film weaves poverty, blindness and social mismanagement by interrogating relationships encountered by physically-challenged identities. Torn between freedom and responsibility, Jonathan (Angelo Caangay) often dreams of an angel who takes him to fly with the latter. But sometimes, Jonathan and his angel plunge often into the ground because the angel is blind. Outside his dreamland, Jonathan has a bigger problem: his parents (Gina Alajar and Noni Buencamino) are blind. The ten-year old boy is compelled by circumstances to guide his parents through the streets of postcolonial Manila in search of a normal family life.

Ongkeko raises many questions as the plotless narrative unfolds: Is it Jonathan's duty to take care of his blind parents and mentally retarded sister (Wena Basco)? Should corruption-infested government agencies claim custody of Jonathan? Are blind parents capable of raising a family?

Ongkeko's efforts are pathbreaking. She retells the true-to-life story by doing away with a formula plot, cinema-verite style. Instead, Ongkeko allows her material to take its own form, based on scenes shared and encountered by different members of Jonathan's family, reenacted and framed within Manila's lightning rallies and uncollected garbage. Eventually, Ongkeko resolves Jonathan's dilemma by way of transcendence: the boy remains guided by an angel. The boy's unwavering faith, though initially aimed at achieving social assimilation, can lead to his strength and salvation.

Michael Angelo Caangay stands out as Jonathan. It is nearly unimaginable for a boy about Caangay's age to render a character both spiritually and materially orphaned with so much clarity. Caangay delivers and quite possibly, he has achieved one of the best lead performances in recent local cinematic history. Gina Alajar, Nonie Buencamino and Wena Basco gleamingly construct a family's ambiguous relationship to male privilege and power. When Buencamino's character inflicts both corporal and emotional punishment on Jonathan when the latter ran away from home, Ongkeko suggests that even in the most dysfunctional of Filipino families, women are mostly subordinated.

Fortunately, Alajar's character breaks away from the usual gender role system by consistently portraying how mothers are capable of reorganizing their family lives in a manner so predominant such that in the end, dysfunctional families may reconcile in spite of the individual members' basic distortions.

Likewise, the ensemble acting of Angel Aquino, Soxie Topacio, Jackie Castillejo, Giselle Sanchez, Sylvia Sanchez, Connie Lauigan Chua, Mel Kimura and PETA members bears witness to the primacy of struggle in Jonathan's situation. They led the focal character (Jonathan) and his family members into finding strength and power from sustained defiance of a society that has become so largely dehumanized and anguished.

Ricardo Lee's screenplay takes the audience to a wilderness where individuals from dysfunctional backgrounds engage in a treacherous system of cultural identities, institutions and representations. Eventually, Lee implicates not only Jonathan but everyone in these systems. The script clearly designates the necessary acceptance of distortion and rupture on the part of the film's focal character. And Ongkeko successfully translates this element of the powerful script, as well as the consequential harmonic resolution of Jonathan with his family, on the big screen.

Larry Matic's production design grasps simultaneously Manila's diversity and emerging uniformity. Tagalog hegemony appears degraded and self-destructing against shreds of other Philippine regional cultures and societies contained within Ongkeko's vision of a bourgeoning metropolis. Matic rescues a dysfunctional, multiethnic neighborhood as sublimated art reminiscent of Brocka's Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, Bernal's Manila by Night, O'Hara's Bagong Hari and Jeffrey Jeturian's Pila-Balde.

Vincent de Jesus' musical direction brings cultural analysis to the film. His choice of accompaniment pieces is neither too distracting nor too self-indulgent. By being subtle and subliminal, de Jesus truly enhanced the flow of the narrative.

It is certain that Regieben Romana (animation), Chito Almacen (sound), Alma de la Pena (director of photography) and Christine Valenciano (editor) worked very closely with Ongkeko. In spite of the film's shoe-string budget, all four artists communicate the director's certitude of vision and ceaseless advocacy. Their technical feat (especially in juxtaposing Jonathan's dream world through animation vis-à-vis the boy's lingering saga) supports Ongkeko's allegory about coming alive out of disintegration and near-decay.

From the SRO crowd at the UP Film Center last 11 March that enthusiastically welcomed the film, many wondered why Angels had been left out in cold, subsumed by Star Cinema's commodified, less enduring cinematic productions. Ongkeko's vision and incessant innovation to move away from formula should not be washed out in one vertiginous freezer. Was it because Star Cinema's bigwigs believed that the film was too ethnographic and therefore, too pedantic for mass audiences? Was it because the film had non-box office stars performing in it? Was it because the film was too feminist (both in style and perspective) and therefore, too ivory towerish to be released commercially? Or was it because the film director had moved to a thriving
career as an executive producer in a rival broadcasting network?

Whatever their reasons are, the film's producers should realize by now that the film is a major cinematic gem. More importantly, Ongkeko is Philippine cinema's bravest new find after Jeffrey Jeturian and Lav Diaz made their respective impressive debuts nearly five years ago. There seems to be a dearth of local film artists who are in clear possession of both technical dexterity and substantive advocacy. Nowadays, a gifted filmmaker must also be selective of his/her choice of a pathbreaking script. In addition, he/she must translate the script into a narrative with great emotional power. The film director must also transport his/her audience to a magical place and time. Finally, the film director must be a visionary: he/she should make an effort to state a metaphysical point hopefully in a manner no other film director has done before.

Angels deserves to be released commercially. With an additional cost of 800,000 pesos or even less, a digi-movie translates perfectly on any theater screen. In the movie, Ongkeko has elevated Ricky Lee's material to a new level rather than merely delineating the usually clumsy and mechanically melodramatic rendition to the world of the physically challenged. Ongkeko's masterstroke bears witness to the primacy of struggle against the backdrop of a harsh, largely unproductive universe that revolves around oppression or colonization.

***

This article first appeared in the Lifestyle Section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer on May 12, 2003.

Jose Wendell P. Capili graduated from UST, UP. The University of Tokyo (Japan) and the University of Cambridge (UK). He received Palanca, CCP and UP awards for his poems and essays as well as scholarships/fellowships from the Japan Ministry of Education, Korea Foundation, Cambridge Overseas Trust, Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) and the British Council. He is the author of A MADNESS OF BIRDS (poetry, UP Press, 1998), BLOOM AND MEMORY (essays, UST, 2002), MABUHAY TO BEAUTY! (pop culture, Miflores Publishing, 2003) and SAMPALOC BOYHOOD: PASSAGES AND PREDILECTIONS (creative nonfiction, forthcoming). He is currently Asst. Professor and Associate Dean for Administration at the UP College of Arts and Letters.